As quoted from the linked post.
It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
This is separate from the API issue. This will actually BLOCK you from even viewing reddit on your phone without using the official app.
Archive.org link in case the post is removed.
It’s unbelievable how’s user hostile all of these major site have become. I deleted my 11 year old Reddit account today and while it hurt a little it’s important that we send a message and not use Reddit at least until they repeal this bullshit.
Same! I deleted my 10 year account. Kinda not even sad. It was going downhill for a while now. But hey I just created my own instance for gardeners called thegarden.land so now I have a new home to grow roots and thrive!
Fellow account 10+ year deleter checking in! It sucks but reddit doesn’t care about any of its users despite us being the only reason it exists.
Fellow plant enthusiast here, thanks for the link to your instance!
That’s awesome! It’s nice to see that people can actually try things here without getting downvoted to hell like on Reddit :)
I’m pretty sure I’m going to delete my three year and ten year accounts and just walk away for good. Honestly I was a little sad all day today, because I have a few hobbies I’m really crazy about and the cooking, baking, gemstone, and gardening communities have felt like home for a long time…but just using lemmy for a tiny little bit, I’m actually really excited! I’m having a much simpler experience here that’s refreshing. I like the content I’m reading.
Nice new instance! I’ll come check it out and subscribe to a community. I just made a new one yesterday too, Lemmy.pro
Yay! Nice job! Your page is blocked for me at work but I’ll subscribe when I get home. Do you know, under the instance settings it says “allow instances” do I need to add anything there?
Nice! Just joined 🤓
Hey from the Garden! We had to restart the site last night. Having some difficulties getting off the ground. I think we lost all our users! Were you one of them? Could I ask you to try there again and tell me if things are working okay, if you still are logged in, etc ? I Appreciate the help. Thegarden.land
Is there a way to follow this instance directly from the Jerboa app? Sorry to be daft, clicking the link seems to take me directly to a chrome tab :(
You should be able to add it as an account, I think from the top left when you are the main feed.
All working fine from my end 🙂
Great! Thank you
They’re not gonna repeal anything. The only thing that will stop this is by Reddit dying and becoming a part of web history, which is hopefully on its way to happening.
And even if they do back down this time, the next lamebrain attempt at the same thing will be brewing. Let it burn.
Jeez. The speed at which I’ve gone from “man it sucks that Apollo is shutting down but I still really enjoy Reddit and will suffer the first-party client” to “wow, Reddit is really trying to destroy their service and it’s probably best I don’t invest any more time there” is insane… going to draft up some thoughts and a probable farewell message for my frequented subs and followers there. End of an era.
It’s getting worse by the minute. I really really hope Lemmy usage picks up.
Having already rather violently shot himself in both feet, spez has started aiming for his other body parts.
I hate when people use passive voice in these things. It’s such a slimy way to try and avoid responsibility.
“We have blocked you from using a mobile browser.” is the active voice. It includes a subject (“we”) and a verb (“blocked”). It says that someone made a decision, executed that decision, and is responsible.
"It looks like … “, " … is currently unavailable” is so fucking weaselly and irresponsible. You are 100% a complete piece of shit if you ever say something like that. You are not responsible enough to handle a Wendy’s drive-through order, let alone a large organization.
I didn’t know there was a word for it. I always just called it “corperate talk”
You learn to talk like this inside a large corporation too. I try not to do it, but it’s difficult and I catch myself doing it every now and then, because you see other people writing like this all the time.
Even in corporations that are committed to a good culture of kindness, you can still find opponents who won’t hesitate throw you under the bus in order to further an agenda.
Using active tone in corporate is risky, because office politics can accuse it of being aggressive/hostile in order to block a policy. They don’t necessarily care that the messenger winds up getting written up by HR and sent to sensitivity training.
I find myself being very careful about then tone of my emails after getting caught in the crossfire between two warring factions. Passive tone is less likely to come back to haunt you.
I really hate having to navigate office politics, but it is what it is.
I learned to do it when in a call centre to avoid laying blame on any particular party (the company or the customer). Agreed though it can come across pretty shittily.
I think many people only know what it is because MS Word would (does?) suggest rewriting passive voice into active.
Its a commonly taught thing in English classes where I’m from (Ontario) – we would get harped on it fairly regularly
This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.
Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?
The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.
They want to force more people to download the app so that they can show potential investors how many people are using the app, and so they can mine data off of phones with the app. I fucking guarantee that’s what this is.
They are gambling that the people who incidentally land on reddit using their phones to search for things will be more likely to download the app than stop using reddit when it comes up in a search.
It doesn’t even work! When you google something and then are forced onto the app it just sends you onto the home page! not the one you were originally on!
They can’t even figure out deep links?
This will cause search engines to deprioritize reddit threads in search results due to the ‘bounce factor’.
logged-in mobile web experience
If it’s blocked for logged in users, why would that effect search engines?
The implication here is that if they are testing it on logged in users, then they will eventually roll it out to ALL users, whether logged in or not.
Never thought that reddit would make so many gaffes to push me to use… bing chatgpt search.
To give them their due (little as that may be), this only seems to prevent users from logging in to the mobile web interface, not from viewing content as a random user from Google.
I didn’t get the notice, but scrolling through a sub yesterday, I got a notification that this action (viewing a subreddit) is only available for logged in users on the app. Seriously?? Just to view a sub? I reloaded the page as desktop site, and it allowed me to view the sub, although formatted terribly. Reddit is getting much worse than I thought possible.
Which means users will log out if they want to use reddit that way, and they’ll get even less traffic and data from them then before. The user-generated content they want to sell to AI training models or advertisers will just be less and less and less…
This just further incentivises my intend to delete my accounts and leave Reddit entirely if literally no account is more useable than having one.
Damn now this is just next level bullshit. I thought that even if I can’t use Infinity anymore I can still access reddit through a firefox mobile with adblock and privacy addons to make the ux somewhat bearable.
So…
Destroy reddit speedrun any% [WORLD RECORD]
Yeah the desktop site especially is why i wanted to leave reddit for the past few months, im happy they shot themselves in the foot the past week so we could move over to a different platform. I kept having to switch back to old.reddit just to see a NSFW post without an account, they made it so you cant even sort comments anymore without being logged in recently. Just malicious design. The website on mobile has been shit for years now asking you to USE THE MOBILE APP.
I’m really hoping for Infinity for Lemmy… My first experience with reddit was from Infinity. That app is great.
The dev posted on r/Infinty_For_Reddit that he’s gonna try a subscription model first, and that he personally doesn’t use Lemmy, so there’s no Infinity for Lemmy client in the works, although he says that making Infinity For Lemmy should be easy with the API Proxy that the Lemmy Developers are making
Looking at Infinity’s code, porting it to use a custom api url isn’t that hard, allowing the use of the Tafkars reddit api-lemmy bridge
You can spoof the user-agent, it’s a PITA but not that hard. I did it to use chat gpt with bing, but didn’t bother for Reddit
I recommend libreddit, no commenting and it’s slower, but at least it works on mobile
Unfamiliar with the way libreddit retrieves its data. If it’s supposed to work after API BS, I’m guessing good ol’ scraping?
It uses the API. They’re discussing what to do next, probably “wait and see” for now https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785
Between this and Twitter, I feel like “enshittification” is really the word of the past year. It’s incredible to watch these massive social networks completely turn on their users in the name of profit.
What were they thinking doing this experiment in the heat of the third-party app protest?? Are they trying to aim for their foot?
It’s one thing to test a new idea or a UX tweak or similar on a small portion of users - but just turning off a key way to access your service is so just so weird to me. How many of Reddit’s decisions at this point are some version of, “hey, how angry do they get? What can we get away with?”
People need to understand that this is about tracking your eyeballs. Reddit viewed on a webpage does not provide the metadata they want. What metadata does the app provide? Things you wouldn’t think about wanting as a human, but the aggregate is very valuable.
Stuff like how long did you watch that video Ad? Where did you click on screen and at what time? What content were you viewing and what course of action did you take to get there? Web viewing only shows the landing page you arrived on reddit from and the exit page that took you away from reddit. Performing these actions in the app provides metadata cookie crumbs like a trail of roach shit to every single thing you’ve done on reddit in micro activities.
I’m not sure. I’ve worked at companies using amplitude and hotjar that can record all click event and sessions on web
Users can block those with extensions so the data isn’t as reliable
That’s probably a big part. Web browsers can do ad blocking. Within the official Reddit app that’s way more difficult.
Users can block those on desktop without issue. On mobile it’s a bit harder so most people I know don’t even if they use ublock or something on their PCs/laptops (though that is of course only anecdotal).
So if anything if that was the issue they should’ve shut off support for the desktop version LOL /s
It’s not as common to push users to apps on desktop, but its a tried-and-true practice on mobile. I’m sure companies would do it if they could, but app stores and app lockin aren’t as strong on desktop as on mobile
It’s a bizzare move though, given that basically every other social media in the world doesn’t block mobile browsers.
It’s so completely wild and backwards. Imagine your not a reddit user, but a search leads you to a reddit link, and you’re on your phone. You see all this stuff about downloading the app instead, and you’re just going to bail, never reading the post. If there was no friction, they may have converted a new user.
They act like everyone already uses reddit and the users are so addicted they’ll put up with anything.
Bruh, I agree. I’m super interested to see the fallout of the community from this. I know it’s super easy to say “fuck /u/spez”, but how many people will truly pull through to delete their accounts and/or stop using reddit?
Already deleted any accounts I had. Overwrote all comments with this tool too.
Gotta weigh in here and say overwriting comments like that can hurt the end user more than it hurts Reddit. A lot of traffic to Reddit is intentional, with posts and comments showing up in search results from ddg/google. I know I’ve found my own posts from troubleshooting the same issue years later. Sure, delete/overwrite comparatively useless comments and posts, but leave up other useful content and use an ad blocker instead. That will hurt them more than deleting content, but still allow others to find the info they need.
It’s true that it will hurt people long term but it will drive traffic away more than deleting the inane stuff. No website like that should be such a central repo when it’s unstable like this. The internet has survived link rot and info loss before.
You’re not wrong, but also I’d like to move away from the world of “site:reddit.com” being the go-to troubleshooting/advice-seeking search, and my posts turning up in such searches would be driving traffic to reddit, which I don’t want to do. I also don’t want my account history used for advertising purposes, and across the life of an account I tend to share more personal specifics than I’m comfortable with sharing in aggregate.
But you’re not wrong, either. I can see both sides of this one.
Make sure it actually overwrote all your comments. PowerDeleteSuite doesn’t respect the edit rate limit. I used a fork which runs much slower but respects the limit.
Also, it’s a good idea to wait several days between the editing and deleting your account. Many users on reddit were suggesting that reddit holds on to pre-edit text for a while. Obviously archives hold onto it forever, but if your goal is to deny your content to reddit, that’s orthogonal.
I did this as well. Sad to see the content I created disappear, but at least now I can start reposting to a whole new fediverse 😅
That’s a positive at least. I’m still ripping data from my accounts, but afterwards bye bye!
deleted by creator
I deleted my 10 year and 5 year old accounts. I didn’t purge my posts and comments, as I doubt they’re truly deleted from the database and I wanted to leave that content for people who aren’t reddit. I’ve moved to the fediverse, andi think I’m here to stay.
I’ve heard editing comments is likely more effective, but it’s hard to say. I’m guessing they take regular backups anyway, so maybe that’s not really a thing anymore.
Regardless, I’m planning on replacing all of my comments with something like “screw you Reddit, use Lemmy instead” or something to that effect. I have a ton, so I’ll need a script to do that, which will probably get blocked anyway.
The whole blackout thing is super interesting, and to my knowledge it’s the biggest protest of it’s kind since Reddit hit the mainstream. I can’t imagine it kills Reddit soon though. It’s just the start of a brain-drain that will make Reddit lose relevancy over the next 5 to 10 years, and they’ll wonder where they went wrong. Even I’ll probably keep my alt account there, but the days of actually contributing will end for many.
But also fuck spez ;)
There’s some communities on Reddit that don’t yet exist in other places; so I’m going to continue browsing those rarely; but once they move somewhere else I’m moving with them.
I thought I’d be making a long-tail exit as well, but I’ve been looking at my feed of mostly niche subs with an especially critical eye this week and concluded that even there, the signal-to-noise ratio had hit the point the web did as a whole that initially drove me to Reddit.
I’ll still use it to declutter Google results, but I expect that utility to decline as helpful, detailed posts become fewer and fewer. There’s still some distance to Facebook-level network lockdown.
Spez must have seen that “reverse funnel” episode of IASIP and thought it was an idea worth stealing. “We’ll just funnel everyone into our broken app and then endless profit!”
I wonder if some of it is fluffing the metrics too, like “Since we announced that third party apps are going away, we’ve had X thousand downloads of the official Reddit app” (meanwhile not mentioning that they’re forcing a majority of mobile users away from the mobile website)
The more I look at this mess, the more I see elements of speedrunning. Reddit is really trying very hard to loose as many users as possible as fast as possible. It’s as if there’s a competition between Reddit and Twitter.
Reddit finding ways to actively make things worse, while lemmy rapidly improves.
Pretty disappointing to see something I’ve spent so much time with go down the tubes like this. I know that for a lot of people, Reddit has been dying for years, but I’ve stuck to old.reddit and my Android apps, and haven’t looked at /r/all in a long, long time. I unsubscribed from all of the big/default subreddits, and just hang out in my happy subs where people (mostly) are people and aren’t lunatics, and it’s still been a nice place.
Killing the mobile apps is pretty much the last straw for me. I’m sure I’ll still click on search results from Reddit sometimes, but I won’t be logged in anymore and it will only be on a browser with ad-blocking and privacy features. There is no way I’m downloading their app.
If they were to go this route for all users, I would simply never use Reddit again on my phone. And yes, I’m in the minority, and yes, I know they don’t care about losing me, but man, what a bummer.
Reddit’s unwavering stubbornness to continue spiraling is just plain sad. What a way to go.
They already crippled the mobile site years ago and put login walls from a long while ago, way before the pandemic. old.reddit.com was the only thing that let me skip it. They deserve to die out.
The more they push their shitty mobile app, the more people won’t use it.
This definitely has some Microsoft Edge vibes to me.
Somehow Microsoft was still quiet sucessfull with Edge in large parts of the society.
Yes that’s true and I’m sure it isn’t that bad. I just don’t like the way they are trying to force their browser on everyone which is why I try to avoid Edge as much as possible. It’s kind of a personal principle now. Microsoft likely doesn’t care about that though since, as you said, they are successful with that technique.
Funny enought i installed Edge on Linux in order to use Teams decently. But happily avoid Microsoft elswhere.
Teams works fine in Vivaldi or any chromium browser on Linux.
I actually don’t mind Edge now that Bing chat is a thing
Unless here the main user iuses the official app, including me because I forgot how good rif was.
