As quoted from the linked post.
It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
This is separate from the API issue. This will actually BLOCK you from even viewing reddit on your phone without using the official app.
Archive.org link in case the post is removed.
It’s one thing to test a new idea or a UX tweak or similar on a small portion of users - but just turning off a key way to access your service is so just so weird to me. How many of Reddit’s decisions at this point are some version of, “hey, how angry do they get? What can we get away with?”
People need to understand that this is about tracking your eyeballs. Reddit viewed on a webpage does not provide the metadata they want. What metadata does the app provide? Things you wouldn’t think about wanting as a human, but the aggregate is very valuable.
Stuff like how long did you watch that video Ad? Where did you click on screen and at what time? What content were you viewing and what course of action did you take to get there? Web viewing only shows the landing page you arrived on reddit from and the exit page that took you away from reddit. Performing these actions in the app provides metadata cookie crumbs like a trail of roach shit to every single thing you’ve done on reddit in micro activities.
I’m not sure. I’ve worked at companies using amplitude and hotjar that can record all click event and sessions on web
Users can block those with extensions so the data isn’t as reliable
That’s probably a big part. Web browsers can do ad blocking. Within the official Reddit app that’s way more difficult.
It is not super difficult to do the same type of blocking with a router on software like OpenWRT. This can easily block all of the 3rd party ads type junk. The thing I can’t quite figure out is what they are able to do on their server connection. It seems like they are able to setup their own proxy and impact other traffic on the same network when they should be far more sandboxed, but I can’t prove that.
Someone REALLY needs to make fully open source and transparent mobile hardware and put Qualcomm under the bus… on a high speed looping track. We have no idea what is really possible under the hood on any existing mobile device. Both the processor and the modem are mostly black boxes. Even with the best custom ROMs like Graphene OS, the whole premise is based on developing a verifiable chain of trust on top of untrusted hardware we don’t control.
The thing people fail to put together is that this is an issue of ownership; theft of ownership. Now we are seeing the first layers of neo digital feudalism emerging as a result of the theft.
It is not super difficult to do the same type of blocking with a router on software like OpenWRT.
that is not something average people even know about, or would have the skills to attempt. not even close.
Funneling the herd into the slaughterhouse.
Users can block those on desktop without issue. On mobile it’s a bit harder so most people I know don’t even if they use ublock or something on their PCs/laptops (though that is of course only anecdotal).
So if anything if that was the issue they should’ve shut off support for the desktop version LOL
It’s not as common to push users to apps on desktop, but its a tried-and-true practice on mobile. I’m sure companies would do it if they could, but app stores and app lockin aren’t as strong on desktop as on mobile
Sorry that that wasn’t obvious, but the desktop bit was mostly a joke!
But yeah; on desktop extra applications you have to download are definitely a hard sell.
I would assume a good amount of the reason has less to do with tracking [though I’m not denying it’s a factor], and more with other stuff such as it being an icon on your phone etc, apps just have a different “feel” than websites ultimately imho
It’s a bizzare move though, given that basically every other social media in the world doesn’t block mobile browsers.
Not blocking but LinkedIn pushes mobile browsers towards their app.
Facebook infamously does for Messenger. But yes, I think it’s a sign of their desperation.
It’s so completely wild and backwards. Imagine your not a reddit user, but a search leads you to a reddit link, and you’re on your phone. You see all this stuff about downloading the app instead, and you’re just going to bail, never reading the post. If there was no friction, they may have converted a new user.
They act like everyone already uses reddit and the users are so addicted they’ll put up with anything.
Mean there were times when I was logged out of Reddit and was trying looking up something on mobile and the constant badgering to install the app just had me tell it to flip off and I looked elsewhere instead. Lot of people tend to do things based on how convenient it is for them and if they go ahead with this, sure maybe some will download the app but a lot of other people will just get fed up and stop, particularly if they were using the browser version so they didn’t have to deal with the app in the first place.
It’s funny because this is a huge issue with Pinterest and googling images, so many people automatically add -pinterest to their search terms so it’s completely blocked from the search results. Wonder if someday that’ll be reddit too.
They act like everyone already uses reddit and the users are so addicted they’ll put up with anything.
It seems like a lot of users are. I deleted my Reddit account (for whatever good that does) but have gone back to peek a few times - very few people seem to care. The black out, the app shenanigans, the power-mad mods; it’s just a minor inconvenience. API, IPO, VC, what’s that? Just gimme my crude humor and canned outrage!!
Most active users though are lurking voters only, or not logged in at all, and don’t comment/post. When they leave, it won’t be as obvious. And the more contributing users leave, the more the only ones left and talking will be the ones who don’t care.
I think a lot of people are riding the sinking ship all the way down and planning to bail on the 30th, when the apps are actually banned, too. Probably enjoying the drama of it and not realizing they could be enjoying the drama of it from, like, over here on dry land instead.
But yeah. There’ll be people who put up with it for now, or who join after and missed the whole controversy, or who straight up don’t care at all.
I think there’ll be these initial waves of people who can see the writing on the wall leaving, then after that there’ll be a steady trickle of people abandoning ship over time, with spikes whenever the next outrageous thing happens, and the whole thing will collapse gradually, perhaps over years.
Although, people have been saying that since Ellen Pao and Voat… 😅
I think you’re right to a point, but also, the whole fragmented fediverse thing is going to have to… at least be simplified if the “lurking voter” mainstream are going to end up here.
Me (enthusiastically):
“It’s federated, so you have to choose an instance! They’re all different, but they can all talk to each other! Some of them have different rules. Oh, and they can all have their own ‘videos’ community, so you have to decide which ones you want to follow. Also some of the instances are kbin and some are Lemmy, but most likely the website you log into won’t be called either of those things. And if you don’t curate your own frontpage (which doesn’t even show your subs by default) you’ll just see everything at once!”Average Internet user (starting a new Facebook account because they forgot their password):
“reddit dot com has funny gifs on it”
Yeah. There are a ridiculous amount of users that just use the official app and don’t really care about 3PAs or the whole API situation.
It’s a shame. I remember the old Reddit before all the redesign and other crap they added.
They act like everyone already uses reddit and the users are so addicted they’ll put up with anything.
To be honest, this may actually be true for a significant portion of the userbase.
I would have thought so of myself, but yet, here we are
These federated let me things really really remind me of the way Reddit used to be about a decade ago. And frankly, now that I found the Jerboa app, I really don’t miss Reddit at all.
I just wanted to find a place where I could scroll around and chat with other nerds. And that’s basically what Lemmy is.
Quora, basically.
I don’t think I’ve ever successfully read one of those, because Google brings me to the site and then it demands I log in. They even go so far as to blur all the content. It’s really really stupid.
They’re going to do the Instagram thing where you can view a teaser but then it forces you to the app.
This is why I never got into instagram. So often I just couldn’t view the image. I’m like, imgur is better than this.
The more I look at this mess, the more I see elements of speedrunning. Reddit is really trying very hard to loose as many users as possible as fast as possible. It’s as if there’s a competition between Reddit and Twitter.
It seems to me that they are telling the investors that they might shrink but what is left will be on a much more profitable basis moving forward.
Bruh, I agree. I’m super interested to see the fallout of the community from this. I know it’s super easy to say “fuck /u/spez”, but how many people will truly pull through to delete their accounts and/or stop using reddit?
The whole blackout thing is super interesting, and to my knowledge it’s the biggest protest of it’s kind since Reddit hit the mainstream. I can’t imagine it kills Reddit soon though. It’s just the start of a brain-drain that will make Reddit lose relevancy over the next 5 to 10 years, and they’ll wonder where they went wrong. Even I’ll probably keep my alt account there, but the days of actually contributing will end for many.
But also fuck spez ;)
There’s some communities on Reddit that don’t yet exist in other places; so I’m going to continue browsing those rarely; but once they move somewhere else I’m moving with them.
I thought I’d be making a long-tail exit as well, but I’ve been looking at my feed of mostly niche subs with an especially critical eye this week and concluded that even there, the signal-to-noise ratio had hit the point the web did as a whole that initially drove me to Reddit.
I’ll still use it to declutter Google results, but I expect that utility to decline as helpful, detailed posts become fewer and fewer. There’s still some distance to Facebook-level network lockdown.
Spez must have seen that “reverse funnel” episode of IASIP and thought it was an idea worth stealing. “We’ll just funnel everyone into our broken app and then endless profit!”
I wonder if some of it is fluffing the metrics too, like “Since we announced that third party apps are going away, we’ve had X thousand downloads of the official Reddit app” (meanwhile not mentioning that they’re forcing a majority of mobile users away from the mobile website)
This is both informative and unfortunate.
I, for one, welcome my Louis Rossmann overlord.
old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere
– a spez lie
I honestly don’t think theyll remove it, since reddit relies on mods and mods really prefer old reddit than new reddit
But I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something stupid like limiting it to only mods
“here’s your new mobile mod tools, peasants!”
– spez, probably
Stop blackmailing him.
He deserves it for everything he did to the reddit community.
Well, mods also relied on 3PAs so…
sorry off-topic but what’s up my username buddy 💙
My mobile is experimenting with not visiting reddit.
Reddit has amazing SEO, and it looks like Spez is now hell bent on destroying that as well.
What a fucking incompetent moron. Google hates when people put roadblocks over mobile web experiences. Over the past 5-ish years they’ve down ranking sites that obstruct m.web.
Something like 12 years I used Reddit, but they really nailed the coffin lid shut now.
Everyone: uh, that’s a lot of nails
Reddit: WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THIS HAMMERING
nail gun noises
I hate when people use passive voice in these things. It’s such a slimy way to try and avoid responsibility.
“We have blocked you from using a mobile browser.” is the active voice. It includes a subject (“we”) and a verb (“blocked”). It says that someone made a decision, executed that decision, and is responsible.
"It looks like … “, " … is currently unavailable” is so fucking weaselly and irresponsible. You are 100% a complete piece of shit if you ever say something like that. You are not responsible enough to handle a Wendy’s drive-through order, let alone a large organization.
I didn’t know there was a word for it. I always just called it “corperate talk”
I think many people only know what it is because MS Word would (does?) suggest rewriting passive voice into active.
It’s getting worse by the minute. I really really hope Lemmy usage picks up.
It seriously is. I’ve been on the site for all of 30 mins now and I am loving it so much more than reddit
Why? It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content. I get the idea of it being attractive but it’s like Mastadon without the content you’ve got an uphill climb.
It’s a less mature platform with less features
That’s why I like it. It’s literally has every feature I used or wanted on reddit already.
The main reason is that although the concessions we make may seem ever so insignificant, they pile up and dettach you from what you were looking for in the first place. You barely see your acquaintances posts on instagram or facebook anymore. Twitter is on it’s way to become a cesspool. Every new Reddit “feature” jist makes the experience worse. It won’t be long for those platforms to all converge into a big mind grinder for propaganda.
In fediverse there is no valuation seeking to ruin things, and there won’t be for the foreseeable future, so it’s good ground to build upon, it’s just good sense.
Take the content problem for example. You can think of that as an opportunity to be the content you want to see.
It feels a lot more snappy, clean, and modern. I think most of that is because it hasn’t accumulated a lot of the bloat and feature creep that Reddit has over the years. The biggest downside, though, is that the community is much smaller and there isn’t a lot of the niche content that Reddit is so good for.
As soon as more of those niche communities start to pop up, there won’t be much reason not to use it over Reddit. It’s like a back-to-basics version of Reddit.
I hope so, I just hope that it actually gets some traction in the wake of all this instead of getting a modest bump and then mostly dying out again, which is what seems like the most likely direction. I have faith though
Exactly. Every advantage I hear that Reddit has over Lemmy comes from the community, not the platform. Add or move those communities to Lemmy and I don’t think people will see much reason to use Reddit.
I should say that Reddit without RES would probably be much closer to what I’m seeing on Lemmy now.
that’s fair, I exclusively used old reddit but I never touched RES for whatever reason
And there was a time when the same could be said for Reddit. Is Lemmy perfect? Of course not, but at least we have the ability to build something better instead of making the hippo dance to our beat, as it were.
Not to mention there’s a lot of those features that have been added over the years that we could do without. Nobody’s clamoring for an RPAN clone over here (I hope), or for three different ways to DM/chat with people.
Because it doesn’t actively try to make your experience worse
The problems with lemmy are actively trying to be solved, the problems with reddit are artificially created in order to make the user miserable.
Less mature and much less far along (and susceptible to) the enshittification curve.
What sort of content do you want? I’m fine with what’s her right now, but I’m more about discussion and knowledge.
I’m loving it, there isn’t half as much karma farming bs and pointless arguing in any of the subs I’ve joined. The content will come if folks don’t give in and go back.
It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content.
Well… that’s kinda why I like it lol
This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.
Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?
The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.
This will cause search engines to deprioritize reddit threads in search results due to the ‘bounce factor’.
They want to force more people to download the app so that they can show potential investors how many people are using the app, and so they can mine data off of phones with the app. I fucking guarantee that’s what this is.
They are gambling that the people who incidentally land on reddit using their phones to search for things will be more likely to download the app than stop using reddit when it comes up in a search.
To give them their due (little as that may be), this only seems to prevent users from logging in to the mobile web interface, not from viewing content as a random user from Google.
Which means users will log out if they want to use reddit that way, and they’ll get even less traffic and data from them then before. The user-generated content they want to sell to AI training models or advertisers will just be less and less and less…
This just further incentivises my intend to delete my accounts and leave Reddit entirely if literally no account is more useable than having one.
Unbelievable. Are they actively trying to get as many people as possible to leave their platform all together?
Seems like it’s a race to become the most hated platform. Twitter started a bit earlier, but Reddit is catching up really well.
In a weird way, they probably are - I guess they figure that users who don’t see any/many ads are not contributing to Reddit’s finances, while still causing Reddit costs in terms of bandwidth, etc. In which case it makes sense to get rid of them (a bit like having an email database with 100000 people on it, but only 5000 of them ever open the emails - if you have to pay more to store those 95000 who don’t, then it makes some sense to rid of them.)
Problem is, how many of those who view on old or on 3PAs are the ones making/sharing the content that brings eyes to their ads in the first place - maybe they’ve analysed it and decided that the loss of goodwill and incoming content from those people is more than offset by the savings to be made in having a smaller but more captive audience?
They might be right - but I hope not, because they’ve acted like dicks.
This happening in the middle of the API gate seems like a pretty dumb move, even for Reddit.
Blocking all mobile access except for the official client is the whole point of “API gate”. Don’t want people to just fall back on something with equally poor monetization, gotta show them all the ads.
Right, but I’ve seen tons of comments that say “I’ll at least use the mobile site instead of your app”. If they do this now, then those people will just leave. Plus, blocking mobile site is a dumb move.
It’s a dumb move but it’s in line with their goals. Giving third party Apps the “Fuck you quote.” price is also dumb when they could have offered a reasonable price and got some cash out of it.
Regardless, this interaction is from a month ago, so if anything it’s not reacting to the current situation but was a clue as to what they were and already are planning.
Pretty disappointing to see something I’ve spent so much time with go down the tubes like this. I know that for a lot of people, Reddit has been dying for years, but I’ve stuck to old.reddit and my Android apps, and haven’t looked at /r/all in a long, long time. I unsubscribed from all of the big/default subreddits, and just hang out in my happy subs where people (mostly) are people and aren’t lunatics, and it’s still been a nice place.
Killing the mobile apps is pretty much the last straw for me. I’m sure I’ll still click on search results from Reddit sometimes, but I won’t be logged in anymore and it will only be on a browser with ad-blocking and privacy features. There is no way I’m downloading their app.
If they were to go this route for all users, I would simply never use Reddit again on my phone. And yes, I’m in the minority, and yes, I know they don’t care about losing me, but man, what a bummer.
The small videogame dedicated subs are the reason I’m still hesitant about leaving Reddit completely, but on the other hand, it would be entertaining to watch
another big site burnlemmy grow, and it’s not like I contributed much besides occasional comments. I might browse by top every few months or so to see what I missed.niche hobby subs are absolutely why i suspect i’ll not truly be able to leave, unless they were to migrate to lemmy or somewhere else. though hopefully i’ll be able to move my general browsing here instead, it can be hard to find those same like minded people on a whole new platform :/
Yeah, I have put in a lot of time in some of the communities over there and would be sad to leave, but I refuse to continue to drive conversation and generate the content for a site that has such low regard for their users.
We’ll see how it develops, but I am sad to say that it looks like the writing is on the wall.
Their approach here seems inherently broken. People aren’t going to use the app they don’t want to use.
15-year reddit veteran here. Spez thinks us old-timers are freeloaders for continuing to prefer old.reddit and the third-party apps. The truth is, that site is dead and what Lemmy offers now is closer to that original vision than current reddit ever will be. Reddit is Dead. Long live Lemmy.
The harder they push their official app, the more sketched out by it I am.
It’s seriously disturbing from a mental health perspective. They’re doing exactly the same things Facebook did that made it most damaging
The app always gives you something, it will add filler (in the form of front-page content) to your feed, changing the reward schedule and (very literally) training you to doom scroll longer with fewer posts you actually care about. It also gives the opportunity to shove something controversial in your face, which drives outrage based engagement
It also always gives you messages - if you didn’t get actual replies, it gives you sub suggestions or puts random posts in your notifications to try to get you back in the app
They also been doing A/B testing to try to maximize in-app time
It’s a literal recipe for addiction
What were they thinking doing this experiment in the heat of the third-party app protest?? Are they trying to aim for their foot?
They are trying to force users into their app is what they were thinking.
Jokes on them. Their app is unusable so even if I wanted to switch, I couldn’t do it. It’s so bloated and the layout and formatting make it impossible for me to read with my vision problems.
Yeah I know. Just the worst execution I’ve seen. The protest is literally on the news, supposed to send the message to others of how horrifically bad their app is. So they really couldn’t pick a worse time to run this experiment. Even from a business standpoint - completely void of ethics - they screwed up. I feel like they have no clue what they’re doing and they know it, but run with it anyways cause ¯_(ツ)_/¯
We’ll have to see whether the average user pays attention to any of this, or not.
Either way, pushing away the hardcore crowd will hurt them long term.
I wouldn’t say user, since there’s a good chunk of people who rely on reddit for the answers of their google search questions. But yeah, you have a point.
Also why did the post get removed?
Google is pretty useless now. I do the same really, search reddit, and duckduckgo.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
You, uh… dropped a backslash there. Here’s an extra one for you: \
The post is a month old. While discussions about the API were ramping up a month ago, this was before the protest started to fully get organized.
Given how long ago this experiment was, it really recontextualizes their current stance. They are moving to eliminate all access to their site that isn’t the official app.
Steve saw Elon’s work at twitter and thought, “Watch me. I can ruin a company faster.”
deleted by creator
The amount of projecting going on in some subreddits the past days is telling.
People are quite afraid that in fact the “leavers” won’t come back.
Tbf, there are a ton of comments that I think are genuine, not projection, about the API changes and blackouts, along the lines of “who cares” and “neckbeards!”. And those are the people who haven’t moderated a subreddit, weren’t there when old. was the default, and that I’m fine with leaving behind- the commenters who might as well be spambots.
The reality is that a LOT of reddit users are casuals who probably visit a couple of subs regularly using the official app or a web browser and are perfectly content with that. The issue, I think/hope, is that they aren’t the ones generating a lot of the content and discussion and they will lose interest in reddit when the big contributors have moved on.
I could be completely wrong and this may be a blip in the history of reddit, but I hope that it impacts them in a meaningful way. Reddit is 100% dependent on third parties generating content for them, so the leg they’re standing on is pretty fucking wobbly.
Basically, public perception of Reddit was already warped by these people, with the current exodus it’s seriously just going to become memes and conspiracy theory nutjobs.
Basically, public perception of Reddit was already warped by these people, with the current exodus it’s seriously just going to become memes and conspiracy theory nutjobs.
You can say that again
I agree. I never moderated a subreddit because I have seen what vitrol people spew at moderators.
I actually thought that moderators were getting compensated and I was extremely baffled when I heard they weren’t. I cannot understand why someone would take that role to just get piled on day by day.
The projection part is more focused on the people who scream (1 of my favorites); “What is gonna happen is that after 48 hours people come back, suck it up and install the new app”
I can understand the sentiment and alot of people will probably do that, that is a choice one makes.
I do think that the power users and/or people who contribute to the community are looking elsewhere at some point.
I also don’t have an illusion that Reddit implodes overnight and I will be suprised if people will leave en masse after 48 hours.
But I do know and that is a sentiment that I keep saying; Reddit will rail it’s userbase one way or the other. They already made it clear that they keep monetizing until they are profitable but companies always want more and more. So you are effectively getting railed eventually and continuously.
Many leavers indeed won’t come back. And it sounds like a lot of the leavers are mods and actives who were really relying on the better UX and functionality of outside apps and old Reddit etc. They won’t take being forced to a paid app or Reddits 's vision of UX and they probably will remember how the service treated them after all their essentially volunteer effort.
From what I’m seeing, Lemmy and the Fediverse are going to fill my social needs quite nicely, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever make it back to Reddit.
It’s funny you post this. Not more than 5 minutes ago I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Firefox on my phone. I kept trying to login over and over again on mobile and it didn’t work.
A week or so ago, I really felt like reddit was nearly an S tier social media platform. It’s heartbreaking to see it completely destroy itself. It’s nearing Twitter in how bad it works.
Reddit doesn’t want to have people browsing from Firefox because it’s one of the last privacy conscious browsers available on mobile. They’d rather block you from using the service entirely than allow you to do what they call ‘freeloading’—accessing the site without viewing ads or becoming infinitely trackable through the use of their data-sucking app.
