Reddit gets its app to 50 million Play Store downloads, mostly by making the mobile web experience miserable

submitted by [deleted] from (androidpolice.com)

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[–]forgottenpasswordguy 11 insightful - 2 fun11 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

It's borderline unusable if you're not using old.reddit.com

Shoutout to saidit for having a quality mobile site

[–]johnnybravo 11 insightful - 5 fun11 insightful - 4 fun12 insightful - 5 fun -  (1 child)

Saidit's mobile website is really good and should be treated as the standard all mobile websites should try to be like.

The old.reddit.com works fine on desktop, not so much on mobile. The new reddit website seems to have been designed for kids, by kids, having that modern internet aesthetic of big bloated buttons, grey backgrounds, excessively large borders on the side, a whole lot of unnecessary stuff and you need to click on "view all comments" if you want to see comments past the first one and its first child (this was some time ago, not sure about now). Why the fuck would one click on "comments" if they don't want to see all of them? Oh and the website is one big blob of JavaScript, and it takes ages to load.

[–]C3P0 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

They are probably trying to save on bandwidth. Or they think users like it better that way.

I can't stand websites that have JavaScript bloat. They say, "oh, this library is only 0.5 MB." Then you end up with 10 MB webpages. jQuery sucks. Why would you want to use a dollar sign to obfuscate your code?

[–]iraelmossadreddit 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

so dirty...

[–]Turn0ffy0urmind 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

That is a bullshit move, I bought Boost just so I wouldn't use their app. Now if we could get more users here and say goodbye to reddit forever.

[–]johnnybravo 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Reddit app was so garbage at least when I uninstalled it. The thing had bloated up to 500 mb like Facebook and the likes, you couldn't browse without logging in first, you could only search for subreddits - not go directly to the one you have in mind. Only Steve Huffman knew how the search results were returned because even after typing the entire subreddit name, search wouldn't return anything. Perhaps it only showed what Stevie wanted you to see. You couldn't copy text from self posts. Iirc it drained the battery too.

So that's that - the unholy trinity of bad things in an app - uses excess resources, underdelivers, and treats you like an NPC all the time.

[–]D0z 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Use https://reddit.jamesbarnett.io for a lightweight mirror of reddit.

[–]RightousBob 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Too bad they are about to be shut down.

[–]hfxB0oyA 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

One of many reasons I'm barely visiting that site now.