Hey Reddit, I Don’t Want To Install Your Fucking App

Update 8 July 2022: P.P.S Every other social media site is trying this shit too. Can they do something other than try to eat up everyone’s attention?

Update 17 July 2023: Reddit didn’t get much better and we all have Twitter. Also, it kind of makes sense that subs would have to be tagged so people don’t get caught browsing naughty things unexpectedly, but given the hostile design, I assumed the worst.

I lurk Reddit and I don’t want to open an account. This wasn’t a problem until the website redesign which while fresh was just terrible, as if it were made using resume driven design. At this point, it was merely frustrating to use.

Over time, it kept getting worse and worse. Endless nagging to sign up or install the app. At least you could close it until you couldn’t. Fine then, tick the “Don’t Ask to Use App”. You do that and you get a notification saying “this community can only be seen in the app”, which is a fucking lie. You go to an NSFW subreddit and it says you must use the app for some reason.

What got me to write this is they are now writing this stupid prompt whenever you browse a thread, blocking the content.

Turns out it’s an experiment to see if it’ll get people to use the app. Obviously it’ll work since you aren’t giving people a choice. They’ve gotten 50 million app downloads by making the website shit. Talk about self fulfilling prophecies.

Then again, this isn’t the biggest problem in the world. An annoying one sure but I’ve got bigger things to worry about. Reddit is also free while it’s infrastructure isn’t, so it’s fair they try to make something through the app. Also, I could always use Classic Reddit (old.reddit.com) and Compact Reddit (adding /.compact to the URL). You could also use a third party client.

P.S. Your media host is terrible as well. Can’t play a video properly.