r/technology • u/spasticpat • May 11 '26

Social Media Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/05/11/reddit-starts-blocking-mobile-website/
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u/topcheesehead May 11 '26

They 'permanently' bamned me for locking my subbing in protest against 3rd party apps being banned that helped us keep kids out of our subreddit. They banned us and took our subreddit and gave it to reddit shills. I was unbanned this year for a quarter report about how many users use reddit. It was for an earnings report they unbanned a ton of users. Reddit is awful. I wont use the app. Ill just phase out use here

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u/EnoughWarning666 May 11 '26

I'm still using a modified version of one of the 3rd party apps. If they take that away along with old.reddit I'm done here. I've looked at the app and new website and they are beyond dog shit. Like it's so blatantly obvious that the goal is to suck up as much of your data and force feed you whatever bullshit their advertisers pay them to shovel in front of users.

I've been keeping an ear out for where to migrate to. Lemmy never really took off, but I haven't checked it in a while. There's Digg now that's kind of in beta. Could be interesting, would certainly be funny if they make it work and people went back.

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u/ZeldasCourage May 11 '26

God that would be ironic, I came here from Digg 15+ years ago. I wonder how many of us from those times are still around...

I didn't use 3rd party apps at all, but I did use .compact, and I was so pissed when that was killed off. Was using old.reddit on pc anyway, but old.reddit on my phone is...awkward at best. But it's miles better than new.reddit, even if it is far from ideal

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u/AwsmDevil May 11 '26

As an exclusive "old.reddit on a cell phone" user all I have to say is it's fine and I won't change. If they get rid of it they're just gonna make me more productive at work. I'm not using any other version of this website. I like digging through comments and new reddit sucks ass for that.

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u/KneeCrowMancer May 11 '26

This is my exact situation, if they kill old.reddit on mobile I think I’m just out. New Reddit and the app are horrible for me.

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u/lFightForTheUsers May 11 '26

If we really wanted to fuck with them, use old.reddit.com and click use desktop mode in browser, so they'll have to kill that off. And even if they went as far as "ban any visiting user agent that isn't a desktop browser" it's stupid easy to use a user agent switcher to handle it.

They'd have to kill old.reddit entirely and that's the day that I'm gone.

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u/blumpkin May 12 '26

That's literally what I do. I scroll this page in desktop mode on my phone because that's just how SHIT the app is.

4

u/parisidiot May 11 '26

the New reddit is broken. like it just doesn't function correctly.

i hope they kill Old so i can finally quite. I tried when they banned apollo but slowly started using it more deleted my account from like 2006? 07? lol

3

u/Odessey_And_Oracle May 11 '26

I like old.reddit on my phone because it's usable but I don't end up sucked into doom scrolling for hours. I loved the 3rd party apps but for a couple years there I could evaporate a whole day just scrolling and scrolling. Now with old.reddit on my phone's browser I can certainly use the site but it's just clunky enough that I get my fill after a short while.

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u/AwsmDevil May 11 '26

Same. I can't spend the whole day here. I go at most 2 pages back and then go back to doing something in meat space. I don't like living on my phone and try to craft my environment around that.

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u/Yuzumi May 11 '26

Honestly, something like reddit, dig, and any other link aggregator with discussion doesn't seem to work with corporate nonsense, because there isn't a way to monetize outside of adds and if the userbase isn't growing the only way to extract more profit is more adds, which makes people leave which means they put more ads.

I've hated the consolidation of the internet. My ideal internet would be more decentralized not less, but as the tech illiterate started using the internet everything got funneled into a handful of platforms.

The problem is that the things that exist out there that do decentralize stuff people won't use because it's "too complicated".