Reddit Pushes Web Visitors to App
I’ve recently developed a daily habit—perhaps one I should cut back on—of visiting several subreddits to keep up on things like audio production and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But I was surprised this weekend to suddenly find myself cut off; Reddit simply would not let me visit the site on my mobile phone.
Instead, a new overlay popped up, saying, “Get the app to keep using Reddit.”
There was no way to skip, bypass, or close the overlay. It did not provide any instructions or alternatives for continuing to use the mobile web version. What it did offer was a large button I could press to get the app. If I did so, the overlay told me, I would be able to “search better” and “personalize your feed”—two things I don’t care to do.
[…]
The block seemed curious, given that Reddit began as a website, and websites generally want traffic. […] But some services, including X and Instagram, aggressively push users toward apps—or at least toward being logged in to them.
So far this is just an experiment for “a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users.”
Via Nick Heer:
It sucks that the open web is getting torn apart because commercial websites are incentivized to direct people to apps where large-scale scraping is a bigger challenge.
Previously:
- Only Google Can Crawl Reddit
- Twitter Now Requires Logging In
- Reddit API AMA and User Revolt
- Apollo Shutting Down June 30th
- Disabling Universal Links
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Surely the main reason is that it's way harder for the casual phone user to block ads in apps. I also hate apps for missing all the other conveniences of a browser, e.g. search on page, quick zoom, history.
@ED this is absolutely one reason.
The app can also request and usually get all sorts of other invasive permissions and information.
Reddit was dead the moment Huffman took over. He made it abundantly clear from day one that the purpose of reddit from now on is to be monetized by all possible means. He should be a "see also" in the dictionary entry for the word "enshittification."
@someone else Not sure why you're giving them the benefit of the doubt in this case. Reddit has been trying to force people to use the app in multiple ways since before the AI apocalypse hit websites. Sometimes, people really are just malicious
