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.
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.
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.