https://www.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/6hk9ot/androi...

It's annoying to follow a link from a search engine and not notice it's Reddit only to be hit with the "INSTALL OUR APP. EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER!" shtick every time.

I browse Reddit on mobile in Incognito mode in Chrome, frequently, for various reasons.

This means that there is no cookie history, and (when Chrome shits its pants and dumps the Incognito session), the settings are lost. This seems to occur every few days, occasionally every few hours. Reminds me a lot of Netscape 4 days.

Every. Fucking. Goddamned. Time. I go to Reddit, I get:

1. The "Use our Mobile fuckwitted app" fucking nag screen.

2. I have to disable that fucking nag.

3. I have to select "use Desktop".

(Chrome's own "use Desktop site" option isn't sticky across sessions, or even tabs, AFAICT, when selected on a site-by-site basis.)

And I'm finally where the fuck I wanted to be in the first fucking place.

I maintain a small but fairly well-received sub, and moderate a few others. For numerous reasons, these haven't taken off or succeeded in generating much by way of active discussion (Reddit has long been an exemplar of how to design site mechanics to fully kill and destroy any active conversation). Mind, that's a hotly-contested field, but for all it does vaguely well (and yes, Reddit does have some nice features and a large and not entirely useless community), there are a few small things that could be changed to improve this ... which manifestly haven't happened.

Another site I criticise heavily, Google+, actually does this fairly well, given a number of preconditions.

1. The discussion has to be actively and effectively moderated.

2. There's got to be a good, and not overly-large, discussion cohort. I find ~5-10 people is a minimum (with the right 5-10), and in rare cases, up to a few thousand probably an upper bound. The most lively conversation I saw was in a private community of about 50 people, tightly monitored for behaviour but not (with a few bounds) content.

3. The fact that a discussion stays live for an extended period of time and the Notifications loop back earlier participants is key.

4. Individual discussions can only run to 500 comments. This keeps things from running on too long.

5. Discussion is flat, not threaded. This isn't my initial choice, but it actually works ... fairly well. I'd ultimately prefer client-based determination of order, much as with Usenet or decent email (that is: Mutt) clients, including threads.[1]

I'm not saying G+ is great. It has many, many, many flaws. But it is the best general-use system I've found on today's Internet, despite my many reasons for wishing that weren't the case.

I've found and met some great people, and had really good conversations, many lasting days and weeks, more than a few months and years.

And no, not all discussions go well. One of the best hosts on the site is its former chief architect, Yonatan Zunger. And even he has increasingly had to shut down discussions that ended up as shitshows. See: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cnqAekPSFgB

The fact that Google doesn't have to crank up impressions on the service for advertising dosh probably helps. The other games the company's played for generating activity stats have quite negatively impacted it in many peoples' eyes, my own included. The G+/YouTube fiasco being the worst.[2]

________________________________

Notes:

1. Mutt offers: threaded, date, sender, and subject sorts, reversible ordering, and extensive filtering, including the ability to arbitrarily tag items and view only those. It remains hands down the best messaging tool I've ever used, though I find email almost entirely untractable for other reasons these days.

2. This ended up with the three top stories on HN on that date being either items I'd posted elsewhere being submitted here, or related fairly directly to those. Interesting experience. http://imgur.com/YgEjUuI https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-11-16

I don't understand the drive to force people to use the app. Medium trys similar but less annoying tactics. Either way you get eyeballs on your site. Perhaps there's better tracking that they can get hold of from the app.

[0]: https://i.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/89o16y/im_mark_karpe...

But yeah when ever you don't follow the path that the major sites want you to go down you have to keep jumping around

Similar with Gmail, all links in the email go via Google tracking so you have to do a right-click and get the link then open a separate tab and paste it (obviously a signal for me that I shouldn't be using Gmail in the first place).

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1891738/how-to-modify-cu...

More: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8avwul/open_th...

Apps will cut down multi-site use too, stop users "changing the dial".

Also sometimes now the location of the "n comments" button becomes a "share" button, with the comments moved over to the side. but again, only sometimes. I keep clicking share on accident, because it happens infrequently enough that I haven't learned to check.

I've started switching to using their .compact site, which has neither problem. Only a small "switch to the new mobile site" button at the top of the page. The thumbnails aren't as large but thats fine with me

according to comments works for this specific purpose. Haven't used it myself.

I was hoping ublock did it but doesn't appear to.

If i.reddit.com is a different IP then a hosts file entry might do it.

Does pi-hole do this?

The single nicest thing you can do for yourself after an ad blocker is to get Javascript under control. I personally am using JS Blocker, which takes too much effort, but allows you to selectively load JS. There are others - I like the control JS Blocker offers, but it is a bit annoying.

This is not without problems; there are sites that don't work/don't work well. I frankly don't care about most of them, so that's fine with me, and I leak much less data to the various panty-sniffers[1].

Life is much nicer when you take back control of what runs on your machine.

[1] I block FB, Google and several others' IP space, but the smaller adtech/government/who-knows surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with, and, well, defense-in-depth is the way to go.

I change the default settings to block all JavaScript by default, and then use the Brave button to whitelist sites I trust and actually want to use.

Browsing the web (especially news sites) on my Android has gone from "a complete nightmare" to "tolerable" because of this.

Now if I could just force pages to load in Brave instead of web view, that'd be amazing.

Related tip: if you open the Google app, menu -> settings -> Accounts & privacy -> disable Open web pages in the Google app, that will fix it for google now links.

Super annoying. In Firefox in about:config, you can set: media.autoplay.enabled to false. That works well for me.

these ublock origin rules ended that:

  www.reddit.com##.splash-design
  www.reddit.com##.modal-open:style(overflow: visible !important)

Also it is easier to root your phone with a malicious app than with a web page. Heck, if you are an app developer why even bother to root phones when you can just do whatever you want, after all if the user does not give you all-in permissions you won't even let the app run.

They said, while posting on a web forum

which, to be fair, is accessible via numerous 3rd party apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14684105

If you're using Firefox, go to about:config and set media.autoplay.enabled to false.

But overall I get a much better experience using the free, open, 3rd party app Slide ( https://www.reddit.com/r/slideforreddit/ ) so, maybe give that a try? (Assuming you're on Android - ios, I've no idea.)

Enable cookies at that point then, don't turn them on globally for everyone.

> Blame the stupid EU cookie law for that though, not the sites.

If every site didn't turn on cookies by default as if they're somehow needed to read a text page a didn't contain a billion trackers then there would have been no law in the first place.

The need for this law lies squarely at the feet of the sites themselves, the industry has shown no desire to regulate itself.

Prior to that you could just disable them if you liked.

One can say that policy makers had good intentions - certainly. However, I can not imagine a valid evaluation that wouldn't conclude this policy as failure.

The browser not being able to distinguish between essential and non-essential cookies does not change the fact that cookies are and were entirely voluntary.

http://prebake.eu/ https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ https://github.com/r4vi/block-the-eu-cookie-shit-list

AFAIK some prominent cookie notices are also part of the Fanboy Annoyances list: https://easylist.to/

The only prominent nags that are not very well targeted with those lists are in webapps like reddit mobile. Primarily because of their dynamic, non-descriptive ids.

There are good alternatives like reading books, watching movies or going out. Web sites are shooting themselves in their feet. Blockers end up being too much work with this arms race. They think they're "winning" when they're actually just selecting the people that can't choose.

For sessions where I know I want js to "just work", like online shopping from a set of presumed-trustworthy sites, I use a different browser profile without privacy extensions, but I use it just for those purposes and avoid general browsing with it.

To make multi-profile browsing simple, I theme the profiles differently, so it's obvious which one I'm in. On desktop, my launcher for firefox does --ProfileManager --new-instance and on mobile I just use different firefoxes - ff-beta and ff itself.

Is this "too much work?" - I can see how it might look like that, but I've been using this system for a few years, and though it takes a few minutes to set up on a new system or device the maintenance overhead is low, so I'd say it's not "too much." Also, the time gained not waiting for js-encrusted sites to load probably outweighs the setup/maintenance by a considerable factor.