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.
Funneling the herd into the slaughterhouse.
It sure seems like half the herd has wandered off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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)
It’s unbelievable how’s user hostile all of these major site have become. I deleted my 11 year old Reddit account today and while it hurt a little it’s important that we send a message and not use Reddit at least until they repeal this bullshit.
Same! I deleted my 10 year account. Kinda not even sad. It was going downhill for a while now. But hey I just created my own instance for gardeners called thegarden.land so now I have a new home to grow roots and thrive!
That’s awesome! It’s nice to see that people can actually try things here without getting downvoted to hell like on Reddit :)
Fellow plant enthusiast here, thanks for the link to your instance!
I’m pretty sure I’m going to delete my three year and ten year accounts and just walk away for good. Honestly I was a little sad all day today, because I have a few hobbies I’m really crazy about and the cooking, baking, gemstone, and gardening communities have felt like home for a long time…but just using lemmy for a tiny little bit, I’m actually really excited! I’m having a much simpler experience here that’s refreshing. I like the content I’m reading.
Nice! Just joined 🤓
Hey from the Garden! We had to restart the site last night. Having some difficulties getting off the ground. I think we lost all our users! Were you one of them? Could I ask you to try there again and tell me if things are working okay, if you still are logged in, etc ? I Appreciate the help. Thegarden.land
All working fine from my end 🙂
Great! Thank you
They’re not gonna repeal anything. The only thing that will stop this is by Reddit dying and becoming a part of web history, which is hopefully on its way to happening.
And even if they do back down this time, the next lamebrain attempt at the same thing will be brewing. Let it burn.
This is both informative and unfortunate.
I, for one, welcome my Louis Rossman overlord.
Aye aye! Aware of any Rossmann communities over here yet?
Given the nature of the platform, I think everything is a Rossmann community. ;)
If there isn’t already a right to repair group, we should make one!
Yepp! Found a self repair one on Lemmy.ml, although it’s been inactive for a year:
https://lemmy.ml/c/selfrepair !selfrepair@lemmy.ml https://lemmy.world/c/selfrepair@lemmy.ml
Searched on feddit browse for a Rossmann one and there isn’t any yet 😟. I don’t think my instance allows new groups so I’m hoping someone makes one soon
Now I’m trying to figure out how to subscribe from Jerboa.
Since I’m using the app right now, I’ll have to recite this from memory. But at the bottom of the screen you should see a button second from the left three lines.
Click on that and search for a group in the top portion. Click on the group once found, and there there is a subscribe button. As of yesterday clicking it appears to do nothing. In fact it does work. Exit the list and go back in, you will be subscribed.
Let me know if you figure it out, I had to do it through the browser
Yeah, I had to do the same.
I’m waiting for him to talk about this in a video now lmao
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.
It’s literally the same wording as that the API isn’t going anywhere, and the same reasoning as why it won’t go away. Reddit is definitely stupid enough to get rid of it
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
Ditto. What a shit show this whole thing has been and probably will be, shall be interesting to see what happens when there ipo gets released.
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’.
logged-in mobile web experience
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.
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.
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” just 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
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
It’s a less mature platform with less features
That’s why I like it. It literally has every feature I used or wanted on reddit already.
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.
It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content.
Well… that’s kinda why I like it lol
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.
Lemmy is better than mastodon, for me at least. There was nothing interesting going on at mastodon, but Lemmy is thriving.
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.
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 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.
This happening in the middle of the API gate seems like a pretty dumb move, even for Reddit.
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.
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.
Between this and Twitter, I feel like “enshittification” is really the word of the past year. It’s incredible to watch these massive social networks completely turn on their users in the name of profit.
Twitter probably opened the floodgates when they managed to shaft users and cut API access without outright killing themselves. Now everyone else is emboldened to ask “why can’t we do that too?”.
The thing that made me saddest about Twitter is how they shafted their own people.
*without outright killing themselves YET.
I know Netflix has been enshitifying for a while now but that’s accelerated a bit this year too. I work in tech and it’s been happening everywhere.
Forgot about Netflix! Yeah they’ve got to be pretty close to late-stage enshittification at this point. They can only raise their prices so much while simultaneously removing content before they completely lose their users.
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.
Some asshole at Deloitte is going to make a ton of money writing case studies about this.
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.
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.
Google is pretty useless now. I do the same really, search reddit, and duckduckgo.
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.
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.
Unbelievable. Are they actively trying to get as many people as possible to leave their platform all together?
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.
