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Comment by camdenreslink | Hacker News Reader

Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc.

I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mobile app doesn't have all these issues.

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Thankfully, old.reddit.com as a default option still works.

The kicker is that the text is so small and to make the site usable (and readable) you need to rotate your phone to landscape mode.

This works well enough that I haven't downloaded the reddit mobile app or used their mobile site ever since they killed Apollo.

But i.reddit.com does not. That was the original mobile experience.

And worse: neither would propagate to on-site links. That is, if someone had explicitly linked "www" rather than "old" or "i" at reddit, then regardless of which interface you'd arrived at it from, requiring you to constantly re-specify the actual interface you want. Particularly when not logged in to the site.

I'd begun using Reddit nearly 15 years ago, my last comment is now two years old, and my subs private (and inactive). Site's dead to me.

It used to be that you could set old.reddit.com as the default interface for www.reddit.com URLs, with the new interface still being available at new.reddit.com - is that no longer the case?

You can specify the interface as preferred, if you are logged in to your Reddit account.

However *if you're visiting the site via a specified hostname ("www" or "old", previously "i"), following any arbitrary link from a post, comment, or Wiki page to Reddit will not respect the hostname you'd arrived at that link from.

This to me is absolutely maddening behaviour, as it's now necessary to edit the URL within the browser nav bar. Tedious on desktop, painful on a touchscreen device.

I no longer read Reddit.

I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.

reddit browser behavior got me into using frontends for various sites, such as redlib dot privacyredirect dot com

there are surprisingly many of them for pretty much every social media website.

Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.

you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it

I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.

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