Also uhh the default search engine in mobile Safari. Just Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the app. If you have the app, it's a half-page notice to use the app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.

I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of their computing devices is extremely important. With the appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data directly.

The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years.

Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you.

I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable.

Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?

I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"

And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website

Websites shouldn’t know if you’re on desktop because they are clearly gonna abuse that bit of information.

Web browsers were designed by naive, pre surveillance capitalism developers

I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the page with unclickable buttons.

Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully out of the page.

Chat feature is completely unusable

I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers.

Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time.

AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children.

I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked.

The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app

The formula to clear out the old people is to clear out their input area half way the first draft of their TL;DR They will just go away for a few years.

Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.

They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.

Reddit used to have a really excellent mobile experience at i.reddit.com. It was a minimalist fast-loading mobile-first formatted version of the website. Unfortunately they shut it down not too long ago.

I personally really like the old.reddit.com experience on my phone. Everything works surprisingly well. Sure you have to zoom in and scroll around and I know some people hate zooming in but it's never bothered me.

I personally can't stand apps that stop me from zooming in on things.

My sister complains about the information density of old Reddit being too high but that's exactly what I like about it!

I'm one of those people that dislike having to zoom and (importantly) pan around on a 2D canvas.

I miss Apollo.

That was the day I stopped reading reddit.

A recent mobile web A/B test on Reddit will tell you when opening a link that the subreddit has not “been reviewed” and blocks access unless you open on the app or login.

They’re this close to just 100% shutting down the mobile web version.

I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn’t work well. I don’t understand why people use it — does it just work for them in a way it doesn’t for me, or are they more tolerant of its terrible usability?

It’s not designed to work well, it’s designed to serve ads.

The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it, it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more time.

I hate imgur with their freaking redirects of deep links that have .jpg or .png in their URLs. They redirect to the HTML and then ask me to download a shitty app and prevent me from looking at the damn content.

If you cannot afford the web traffic, just shut down your webservers instead of this bullshit.

the imgur website is one of THE shittiest ever made. Just try it on mobile or without ad blocks. They can't even play a gif properly.

Imgur is particularly infuriating because it was initially touted as an alternative to the shitty image-sharing sites of the day (photobucket and the like) - one that would let you just link to an image without any bullshit. Now it's completely unusable.

We just need to repeat the cycle again.

Every ~5 years someone makes a new good site, it's great at first, funded from donations. Then they hire people, feature creep, add ads, sellout to VC, enshittyfi, rinse and repeat.

And a big thumbs down to Google Maps, that when presenting a location on the web, that's already being shown, it will cover it with a pop-up heavily steering the user to download the app.