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Reddit experimenting with blocking mobile browsers
(old.reddit.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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'.
If it's blocked for logged in users, why would that affect search engines?
The implication here is that if they are testing it on logged in users, then they will eventually roll it out to ALL users, whether logged in or not.
Lots of users use search engines to find topics or solutions on reddit. Since the inbuilt search function of reddit is so bad, it's easier that way.
Reddit is one of the best places to find tech support for more niche topics like open RGB, but you have to fund them somehow.
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.
It doesn't even work! When you google something and then are forced onto the app it just sends you onto the home page! not the one you were originally on!
They can't even figure out deep links?
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.
I didn't get the notice, but scrolling through a sub yesterday, I got a notification that this action (viewing a subreddit) is only available for logged in users on the app. Seriously?? Just to view a sub? I reloaded the page as desktop site, and it allowed me to view the sub, although formatted terribly. Reddit is getting much worse than I thought possible.
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.
Never thought that reddit would make so many gaffes to push me to use... bing chatgpt search.