They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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They can serve you ads just fine on mobile web, that’s not it. It’s that the app let’s them track your behavior far better than the web browser.
It's both. Firefox for Android lets you run uBlockOrigin, effectively killing the ads.
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What the F Reddit, are you trying to speedrun the worst decisions a website can do??
They are trying what Facebook did to their Facebook chat, forcing users to use the app by banning mobile web access
And I'm curious how many facebook users have the chat app. (and how many just walked away)
I’m one of those who just walked away.
I checked out Facebook recently because I needed help moving and it was the quickest way to ask everyone I knew.
That shit is like 90 percent ads and clickbait tick tocks now. It’s fucked. I don’t understand how people can use it without becoming enraged.
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They can get fucked then. I'm tired of this closed internet, walled garden attitude from large social media companies. They've taken the tools that people built to make information free and available, and have locked them down for their own selfish purposes. I will not give them any more of my time.
Right like how you can't copy images from Pinterest, a site that populates all your Google Image searches. Like you fuckers didn't create this content. You just got people to upload it to your site then blocked anyone else from accessing it without a membership and a share link.
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Why would the owners of a website want to make it harder to browse their website
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.
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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.
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Since Reddit removed the option to "stop asking to open in app" in mobile browseds it was clear this would be the next step.
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I honestly hope reddit keeps fucking up like this. It takes a lot of work and a long time to drive millions of casual users away from your site.
And from what I e been picking up it appears that reddit killing themselves is making for pretty good marketing for Lemmy and other reddit alternatives it kinda feels like a new era of the internet
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Hey Reddit, There's a reason why there were a dozen alternatives to your official Reddit app.
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CEOs will happily restrict your freedoms for just a bit of profit, and destroy any competitors who threaten their monopoly. I don't get how anyone can defend this system in good faith.
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And this is where I stop using Reddit altogether. I don't want to use any app, let alone the piss poor official app. I can barely read the site in desktop on my phone. And I only access it from my phone. So there's no reason left to go there. Taking away the compact site was bad enough, taking away the entire mobile site is the last straw...
But we need to track all your mouse movements, browsing history, eye gaze, hand shake, geolocation data, shopping habbits, political opinions, friends and family connections, to make it a better experience for you honest!
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]"
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Makes no difference to me.
I stopped using Reddit and I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about this kind of user hostile changes.
I'm utterly shocked and appalled. /s
They don't know that the primary use case for reddit on mobile is getting good answers from Google.
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With how awful the interface is and how it spams me with DOWNLOAD THE APP TO SEE MORE, it kinda already "blocks" it for me. Browsing via Libreddit on mobile is so much better.
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Companies that do this absolutely annoy me. Even Facebook doesn’t do this??
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Doesn't surprise me a bit, before you know it they'll block the site completely when they detect an adblocker. (I already found an app that refuses to start when you block ads, so the techniques are out there)
Even now anytime you access Reddit mobile website and see an NSFW post, it would prompt you to install the app without an option to cancel. Literally the only way to continue without switching to the app was by using old.reddit.com
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I genuinely don't get it. I fully understand pushing users towards the app. But there is going to be a portion of users who will never install your app. So at some point, you are just pissing off those users by making your product worse and worse, and they're never going to install the app anyway. I'd rather the utterly atrocious experience of browsing the laggy desktop site on my phone.
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Oh my, that is such a great idea, right on par with everything else they've been doing.
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.
If Reddit wants to kill itself, who am I to change its mind? (I already tried and they didn't accept my feedback because the form was rigged against being completed)
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Not surprising, since ad blockers are a thing even on mobile these days.
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How horrible. I refuse to install apps at all if I can avoid it. I much prefer having a back button, bookmarks, being able to save images, control location access and all that. I already barely use reddit now but this would ensure that I never do.
They've been making their mobile site hard to use and blocking most utility with a "you really need our fucking app" popup for years now. I can't imagine how they could make it worse.
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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.
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