... So thanks for keeping my periods of distraction very short! Maybe they just care about their users' mental health and are sacrificing their engagement for it :)
(old.reddit.com still does give reddit data, and from my experience Reddit does a lot of tracking IPs + working with google + traffic correlation to figure out what stuff you browse. However if you still prefer old reddit, libredirect does provide an option to automatically redirect to old.reddit.com instead of libreddit or teddit)
That's what https://old.reddit.com is for. Simply prepending "old." to the reddit link makes everything work better.
Works on mobile and desktop, just as it always had.
And no fuck-you banners.
I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.
also, beware of reddit URLs bouncing through out.reddit.com — which tracks all link clicks on reddit across mobile and desktop (profiling interests), regardless of login state
I think smartphones would be much less popular if people understood why corporations love "apps" so much. It's nothing like the older PC world full of software more or less for its own sake.
Do people not turn these off? When I get an unwanted notification, I immediately withdraw permissions to send notifications, or even uninstall the app
That's it. That's the whole story. Mobile apps provide more opportunity to spy on the user.
it’s a vpn profile that just intercepts dns requests locally and screens with a hosts file
1/ New UI, forcing people on to old.reddit.com 2/ Mobile pushes HARD for their app, which is pretty buggy on Android from what I can tell 3/ old.reddit.com now shows "other links" midway down the page! Absolutely useless. 4/ old.reddit.com now forces "show more comments"
This is why people left digg to go to reddit. :-)
All I want is the old reddit interface in the middle, feel free to place ads on the right. I even went reddit gold or whatever it was called for a while. I really miss the old reddit UI, there is so much good tech information on reddit for random things, that it's a shame.
My phone can't even work all that well with apps like that or Chrome browser/WebView for that matter. I use Opera on my phone because they allow me to have 50-100 tabs open with no issues, but maybe that's only passable because I never do anything important like banking on the phone anyways.
So, whenever I'm coerced into installing an app for actually browsing content, reading comments, looking at media (vs something more one-off like ordering food/a ride), I just look the other way. Ergo, I never use Reddit on my phone without spoofing the user agent or whatever the "request desktop site" option in Opera does, but then the UI becomes unusable on a phone.
Sadly, cases like mine don't show up in any metrics, nor do people care about that use case, so it's likely that this will keep being done a lot.
Sorry but this just isn't true. They want the app for the tracking, push notifications, etc. Apollo doesn't have the tracking and does it's own push notifications (so you don't get Reddit's marketing-type notifications). Also it's much harder, if not impossible, to block ads in an app vs the web. Apollo has zero ads, they absolutely don't want you using it, even the web is better for Reddit. It's only a matter of time before they "Twitter" up their API even more than they already do. There are multiple things (stats, polls, certain profile features) that they don't expose through their API.
> It's only a matter of time before they "Twitter" up their API even more than they already do.
When that happens I imagine I’ll fall off of Reddit. “old.reddit.com” and Apollo are the only reasons it’s bearable to use other than a Google search destination.
There is and will be for years if not decades a ton of important/useful information on reddit. Things like cooking tips, home server building, relatively unbiased product reviews, video game help, and the list goes on. A good portion of that content is evergreen. But as for participating, I won’t go back to the official app after using Apollo, even if that means leaving Reddit after over a decade.
If only more companies followed that principle and just left the bloody interfaces alone unless that had a very good reason.
I found a good trick was to use AN app, just not their app. Apollo on iOS and Boost on android are really good alternatives to the official Reddit app, which is littered with ads.
At my previous job our app had much higher retention than our web product, despite the web product being much more mature, modern, and feature rich. We verified this across multiple marketing channels, and looked at long term user retention over years.
We certainly did encourage users acquired on the web to download the app, and the fact that those who did were retained longer could have been a selection effect, but I don't think this accounts for users who never saw the other platform.
It's not just real estate on the screen, it's faster on-device processing with lower latency, rich offline abilities, better and more persistent access to more API's from notifications to storage, stronger identity with durable logins, and of course better analytics tracking.
It's not always the correct choice but native apps are the overall winner for mobile UX.
The problem with data is that you can't see the things that are real but not in the data.
More often then not, the front end devs responsible for the app are not very good with "normal" web frontends - so they sabotage the competition, to reduce work. Also, web pages, could be repackaged into Apps by others leeching from the products attention.
Sabotage feels pointless given you're still competing against other native apps. Also I don't even know how you would 'sabotage' the competition, your average app engineer doesn't moonlight as a blackhat hacker.
It'd be understandable if the smartphone apps came first and the developers decided a web app wasn't worth it, but a lot of these smartphone-app-only developers use PhoneGap and other tools wherein one already has to write a web app.
People generally gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which is something you already see companies exploiting with things like unfavorable privacy settings defaults. Having an app is another instance of that. There is much less mental friction in pushing a button on a home screen compared to opening a browser, punching in a URL, possibly having to log in, etc.
Given that this is rideshare, this is important, because the services offered by other companies are effectively identical. If someone has Uber installed, they would be much more likely to go the path of least resistance — using the installed app — as opposed to going out of their way to use an equivalent offering.
Additionally, there are problems in mapping that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to solve in a browser. For example: localization (precise positioning) would be incredibly difficult without a native library, you wouldn’t be able to do any offline re-routing, like gmaps does, among other limitations.
I own a platform with native apps + web, and I can confirm that retention on mobile apps is better, by the numbers. I'm not comparable to Bolt though, neither in the business model or the number of users.
This doesn't apply to Bolt nor any of their competitors. They all work off VC money subsidizing rides and once the VC money dries up users will flock to the next competitor that's being VC-subsidized. This will happen much quicker than the users wisen up to the abuse.
Long term hardly matters for most these days, they're optimizing for $ and promotions as mercenaries. That metric bump will get the PM promoted where they'll jump ship to the next company and juice the app metrics the same.
The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user's home screen at all costs, because your app's icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.
But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I'd argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.
Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.
Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can't trick the longer terms statistics.