The clumsiness of the redesign aside, I’ve noticed that the experience on mobile is getting progressively worse as time goes on.
Now it’s almost impossible to browse reddit on mobile via browser, as you’re almost always get hit with the “see this community in app” or “log in to view this community”.
I use Slide or Narwhal as my reddit clients on mobile, and while this might be subjective, I’ve noticed how the experience has gotten progressively worse over time: gifs/videos take longer to load or don’t load at all, notifications either don’t arrive or arrive with great delays and a lot of other quality of life worsenings.
Part of this is probably due to the nature of third party apps and reddit’s api etc etc, but I get the unshakeable feeling that reddit is trying to close down it’s ecosystem, a la “death by a thousand cuts”.
Has anyone else noticed something similar or is it just me?
I also have noticed that. They are making their web browser for mobile experience worse and worse in hopes that you will succumb and install their app. That way they can better track you and serve up adds/sell the data they collect on you.
Its definitely a possibility that they’ll shut down or heavily restrict 3rd party mobile clients in order to funnel people toward their official ad-ridden app, just like twitter did.
That’s a shame, as many others I already use a third party client (slide in my case), because the website is heavier than a whale.
There are still interesting subreddits that are not political or full of bad people, usually DIY is one of them, selfhosted follows in tow (even though it’s becoming progressively worse).
I hope they’ll at least leave the rss feed working, it might be the last step before being forced to use their new app/website.