Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they’ve been doing.
Spoofing user agents go brrrrrr
Seriously, the data mining is going to put so much load on their servers, this is whole thing screams “management considered the technology teams assessment, but decided to go forward with [dumb project codename for fucking the platform over]”
Project Forgeddit
I miss-cropped, OP for context:
This content is better in the app! Log in to Twitter/TikTok/Reddit to view it!
Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website
To force people to use their app, of course. Facebook did that several years ago with Messenger. There’s no real reason to not have mobile browser access to it other than to try to make people use the app so it can spy on you in various ways.
To sell ads
My guess is this is only for mobile users which would explain why when the OP request a desk top version of the site he can still log in. That way they can push more mobile users to the app and shove all sorts of ads down their throat and there’s nothing they can do about it. You can block ads on a browser, you can’t in the official Reddit app.
Shut down all the 3P apps. Prevent mobile users from being able to use their browser on mobile, forcing them to grab the official app. Load it to high hell with ads… Profit.
You can not block in the official app “yet” Wouldnt surprise me if we get some form of Revanced reddit app at some point. Same thing which youtube vanced. For me killing off the infinity for reddit app is my call to not use reddit on mobile anymore but a full switch to lemmy instead.
It actually already exists. The ReVanced project, which has continued to update YouTube Vanced after it shut down, has also expanded to other apps. I’ve only used their YouTube and YouTube Music apps, but I can’t imagine the experience on their apps would be any worse than reddit’s current app, given that it’s essentially the same plus their patches to it.
deleted by creator
They have been doing a form of this for a long time. On the mobile browser, I can find individual posts, but if I try to click on the comments or anything, it just redirects me to the appstore to download the official garbage.
Heaven forbid they make their mobile app, you know… good.
It’s designed to shove ads and bot posts in your face and steal your information, everything else is secondary. This is the true reason why the app is so fucking shitty and unusable for what reddit is supposed to be for.
It already did since 2 years ago, random “unverified content” bullshit login walls on popular/valuable advice, tens of megabytes of Javascript that took long to load on intermittent/unstable connections and terrible UI in general.
Don’t forget killing of .compact
I wrote .compact to run on a Motorola Droid, which was a 533MHz device with 512Mb of total ram, and a kernel which was very aggressive about freeing up this ram.
My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people’s time, their money and the planet.
Its not even hard to do. People just always reach for the most complex, overengineered things, instead of stepping back and seeing what you need.
I love component based systems. I love real time and custom user interfaces. That doesn’t mean every site needs to be a big SPA. If you’re a primarily read-only site (blog, wiki, etc), then you shouldn’t be sending huge blobs of JS just for your users to read content. As you add interactivity, you can add more JS, but think about what you’re going to do.
And there are ways around all that. Phoenix LiveView gives you an amazing system for building real time apps that are extremely thin and fast, and SurfaceUI lets you embrace Vue style components, easily
Getting rid of .compact was the first step.
Reddit’s fucked
This is the Reddit. com front page on a mobile browser and has been for well over a year now
The writing has been on the wall for along time.
btw clear you cookies on exit, use a password manager, stay safe.
I tried reddit with revanced, but even without ads the app is still garbage. Scrolling is laggy, simple gestures are non existent, I can’t even copy a text by pressing on it.
They’ve been planning this for a long time. I noticed a while ago that the “stop asking me about the app” preference went away, which was about the time I stopped going to reddit on mobile. My account is deleted now so I hope they got some good results to ignore and do what they wanted anyway.
Hey Reddit, There’s a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.
Some of them predate the official app.
I can’t think of any other website that has that many alternative apps, much less at that popularity level
I don’t think there are any other for profit sites that would allow third-party apps. They data is currency to them.
Now they’re conducting experiments on us without our consent? Is there no low they won’t stoop to?
Testing limited roll outs is actually really really common in large internet sites/apps. Done right, you’d never know.
