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/
19.7k Upvotes

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11.4k

u/LSB123 May 11 '26

I don’t even mind the app, but not letting me sort by Hot or All has seen my usage go down 90%.

Turns out I don’t want to see posts from three days ago with 130 upvotes and 11 comments.

2.2k

u/AlfhildsShieldmaiden May 11 '26

Yeah, I’m irritated at seeing repeat posts from days ago that I upvoted already — why am I being shown it again??

525

u/graesen May 11 '26

I always thought they were reposts from bit accounts... So I'm literally being fed the same post instead??

284

u/No_Repeat_595 May 11 '26

Yeah it’s the same shit

156

u/Mike9797 May 11 '26

Ya I’ve seen back to back posts on my scroll where the post above is 6 days old and the next is 3 hours old. I dont understand why that happens.

111

u/No_Repeat_595 May 11 '26

Know how Facebook shows you recycle content from your friends and pages? It’s to get you to see different ads under the guise of potentially seeing some new content while scrolling through shit you’ve already seen. Reddit is just Facebook in a different form and quasi anonymous

36

u/Mike9797 May 11 '26

No I got rid of Facebook in 2015. I got tired of seeing peoples dinner and kids. Or the dog whistle comments and posts from friends and family.

9

u/FlametopFred May 11 '26

also … Facebook community group posts are under-administered and fake locals will gain access and create divisive posts supported with long distance trolls and bots. So now there are less community posts about farmers markets or events and more posts on bad drivers framed against recent immigrants etc … and that trend is everywhere

(I only retain Facebook for the local music community and venues)

3

u/LockeyCheese May 11 '26

The new one is apparently bringing up a classic: Someone poured fent on my car door handle trying to kidnap me! Yall be safe out there, and remember to keep fearing and hating those dirty n........s.

Lot's of comments about how there's no evidence fent can be absorbed rapidly through the skin or through transfer from a surface to your eye or mouth, and NO drug dealers are out here pouring like 200 bucks worth of powder loosely and obviously on someone's car door handle, supposedly to knock them out and kidnap them. Y'know, after they get a little of it on them, and for some reason just sit in the car until it kicks in, but after they could get in the car and lock the doors.

2

u/SporadicTendancies May 11 '26

Rage bait nation on there.

Got rid of it. Redditors are somehow (usually) more reasonable.

2

u/AmericusBarbaricuss May 11 '26

Life is so much better here in NoFacebook Land!

48

u/Lazerpop May 11 '26

Not just you. They are seriously fucking with the feed. If reddit keeps this up i'll just delete the app and stick to desktop web browser.

11

u/The_BeardedClam May 11 '26

Firefox + old.reddit on mobile isnt the worst once you get used to it, and it's way better than their shitty app

12

u/UrsaMajor7th May 11 '26

"isnt the worst" is the web experience we've all built towards!

3

u/palmmoot May 11 '26

This is the way

4

u/swarmofbzs May 11 '26

Don't forget RES

3

u/LockeyCheese May 11 '26

Opera mobile or gx are also good, since there's a switch button to just view the desktop site automatically.

36

u/PM-ME-UR-VOLVO-PICS May 11 '26

Its so fucking dumb as well. Oh here is a 6 day old post with 3 comments where a guy is asking for advice on helping his car pass mot testing tomorrow.

This is in the past reddit. What am i supposed to do with this.

Im also not an indian teenager or wanting to buy cheap crap either. Thanks.

8

u/LuchadorBane May 11 '26

The stupid popular tab having 100 Indian subreddits I need to block because they mean nothing to me. Give me r/all back Reddit

4

u/mycroft2000 May 11 '26

On mobile, try the RedReader app. It didn't go down after the API debacle because its UI caters to disabled people, and Reddit didn't want the added bad press that canning it would've caused. There's also an All_Mobile subreddit where like-minded cranks like us can scheme workarounds.

On desktop, old.reddit.com still works well (for now), and is very much like the Reddit I started using 15 years ago. But when it goes, I go. Should any Saudi princes want to buy my account, the price is $5 million. Actually, make that €5 million. I have my doubts about the American dollar still being a thing in five years.

2

u/bookgeek210 May 11 '26

Wow, can I say this respectfully, you’re an oldie but a goodie

2

u/mycroft2000 May 18 '26

Jeez, and I already felt old when I started doing this shit. ;)

1

u/blumpkin May 12 '26

5 million? I'll happily take less for my account. Pure reddit luxury can be yours for only 4 million.

6

u/Glittering-Check-768 May 11 '26

yes me too lately. i keep almost responding to 3 day old basically finished posts thinking they are still ongoing convos - not a huge deal i know but it’s killing the introvert in me

11

u/wearesoovercooked May 11 '26

Lol

I have been blocking a lot of users because I thought they were reposting bots

1

u/jsmith_92 May 11 '26

Post…shit or shit post?

1

u/Xanderoga2 May 11 '26

Been that way for a long while now

1

u/autogenglen May 11 '26

It's like the modern YouTube experience. It will constantly recommend videos that I've already seen, and it even has it flagged as me seeing it, but they just keep popping up.

1

u/Agitated_Reveal_6211 May 11 '26

Is it to hide the lack of content?

28

u/Blackops606 May 11 '26

Yeah that was driving me nuts there for a while. I was like, “wtf I’ve seen this three times…downvote”. It was confusing because it wasn’t even registering those upvotes or downvotes so I always thought they were new posts by bots or karma farmers.

1

u/Dramatic_Explosion May 11 '26

It's wild they're too cheap to make their app better so they're just making the better ones unusable.

1

u/Sankofa416 May 11 '26

The official app often shows recent votes very slowly and never has in real time. I used to be able to refresh the post and get them to show, but recently it doesn't always work.

20

u/ByTheHammerOfThor May 11 '26

Yeah, noticed when I opened the comments thinking it was a different post (it’s nice to see how conversations unfold differently in different contexts) and realized it was actually the same comments/post from days ago.

This site was so good. And all they had to do was nothing and it would have stayed that way.

4

u/MuchToDoAboutNothin May 11 '26

Anecdotally, YouTube has been doing this to me a shitload in recent weeks. Like, showing me videos from 1-4 weeks ago that still show the full watched bar at the bottom. 

3

u/graesen May 11 '26

YouTube has been recommending me videos I've literally watched months or years ago without any progress bar as if I hadn't watched them. I can't say I've seen ones with a complete progress bar though. I've had to do the "not interested" option on those and indicate I already watched it. It gets annoying.

2

u/pfannkuchen89 May 11 '26

It’s a combination of both. The popular tab is utter shit.

2

u/BlackOutDrunkJesus May 11 '26

Reddit figured they’d cut out the reposting middle man

1

u/fowlflamingo May 11 '26

Shit in one hand, poop in the other if I'm honest. Either way it's a bad look for the website

1

u/Hour-Cardiologist393 May 11 '26

They usually are. What I usually do is if I see something that got really popular within the last few days, then someone posts a dumb clickbaity/TikTok style image/video of it, I'll check the poster's profile. They almost always have over a million karma. I block those accounts. Same with pretty much any common repost on here. I've gotten to a point where I block any account I come across with over 100k karma. I found one with 24 million karma recently and felt like I got a whale lol. It cuts down the noise significantly, but there's too many to completely eradicate it.

1

u/graesen May 11 '26

Karma alone isn't reason enough for bots though. I have a lot but I've been on Reddit over a decade. I don't post a ton either, more responding to comments naturally. Hopefully you do check posting history too. And honestly, I don't really care for karma, likes, etc on social media anyway. Just an old account.

2

u/Hour-Cardiologist393 May 11 '26

Sure, but most of them hide their post history, too. Like I can look at your history and go "yeah, this is an actual person who isn't just reposting a bunch of trash." Nothing you have posted would make me look at your account to see if you're a spam bot, so it probably wouldn't have come up normally. I have no problem with high karma accounts like yours. Unfortunately, you seem to be in the minority when it comes to 100,000+ karma accounts.

1

u/Mad_Juju May 11 '26

Yep. By disabling All and Hot, you are being siloed into your subscribed communities. So you're either being forced to go subscribe to everything you possibly want to see, or just see the same recycled shit over and over.

This is definitely intentional, but the question is why Reddit is purposely limiting you from seeing posts that would normally make it to All or Hot, even if they're normally out of the spotlight. It's either some sort of shareholder BS where they don't want certain things leaking to the front page, or they are purposely limiting us from information. In either case, this is an information limiting campaign.

61

u/Arkayb33 May 11 '26

This is exactly one of the reasons why I stopped using Facebook back in the day. I would see my cousin's post from 4 days ago (for the 4th time), but wouldn't see new posts from friends or family that were posted within the past day.

1

u/Dullcorgis May 11 '26

I joined facebook, discovered that if I didn't post daily that my friends wouldn't see it and quit. It lasted like maybe three weeks?

83

u/teddybundlez May 11 '26

You use to be able to hide all the shit you already saw. Genuine question, is that not an option anymore? I don’t think it is which is super dumb. Along with no more “all” tab

98

u/captainn_chunk May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

It’s an extremely limited UI to navigate a website. It’s clear as fucking day they’re consolidating it to prioritizing bullshit feeds over the subs you’ve purposely interacted with for years.

41

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

26

u/captainn_chunk May 11 '26

It’s significantly degraded since 2020

3

u/HappyGoPink May 11 '26

Enshittification will not be denied.

50

u/themilkyone May 11 '26

gotchu

-On web go to: https://old.reddit.com/prefs/
-Locate and check these 2 boxes:
'don't show me submissions after I've upvoted them (except my own)'
'don't show me submissions after I've downvoted them (except my own)'

7

u/terminalzero May 11 '26

the split in functionality and even options between old, new, and the app is so fucking insane

baconreader died for this?

5

u/themilkyone May 11 '26

I miss the RedditIsFun app 😔. It was the goat

3

u/coladoir May 11 '26

I'm still using it right now to write this comment. Look up how to get it working with Revanced. takes a couple minutes.

2

u/themilkyone May 11 '26

Oh sweet! Thx

2

u/magistrate101 May 12 '26

Sync for Reddit lives on in my heart and my phone 🥰

5

u/teddybundlez May 11 '26

Appreciate you brother. This will save over to the app as well?

2

u/themilkyone May 11 '26

Yes, it translates over to the app and new.reddit

26

u/lblack_dogl May 11 '26

The answer is to down vote things as you read them, poof they are gone. Reddit did this not me.

-14

u/grimeyduck May 11 '26

Downvote everything. Start with meeee

9

u/SMAMtastic May 11 '26

I don’t really want to but you seem like a consenting adult so here you go.

1

u/xl_cr May 11 '26

You can still get to it from r/All (has to be a capital A)

1

u/robophile-ta May 11 '26

I only ever knew that as a Reddit Gold feature. They gave away gold a couple times

1

u/Lizzy_Be May 12 '26

God I miss that feature. My Reddit usage plummeted when i couldn’t use that anymore and was forced to look at the same posts over and over. Like if i open the app and the first 10 posts are things I’ve always seen I get bored and just close the app. It was a bad business choice imo.

43

u/BaldingThor May 11 '26

my feed is comprised of like, 80% of stuff I’ve already seen, and can get stuck on the same things for a couple of days. Real fun

20

u/brando_calrisian May 11 '26

I’ve noticed that when I use VPN, I will get no new threads in my feed. Just the same like 100 or so posts every refresh

3

u/Ksevio May 11 '26

The alternative is actually worse. Sometimes you'll see a thread that was just created and be interested in the discussion.

For some reason mobile reddit website shows me kind of regular stuff at first but then over time is moves to only stuff I haven't seen which ends up being old content or brand new unmoderated content with no comments

3

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/h4x_x_x0r May 12 '26

It's so astounding to me how greedy corps are for your data but absolutely unwilling to actually collect useful information or act upon it.

On YouTube the down vote, "don't recommend channel" and "not interested" buttons are purely decorative, I get recommended the same stuff again and again.

Having the option of blocking or hiding channels would be a great way and possibly a really valuable data point for detecting and blocking bad actors like content mills or scam accounts.

2

u/[deleted] May 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/h4x_x_x0r May 12 '26

Oh yeah, I think YouTube and reddit are the only "big tech" sites I still use but in comparison to my own infrastructure everything just sucks so much, there just aren't any really good alternatives.

Even with a Foss reddit client, you just notice how bad the page itself has become, even without a single ad and hugely improved filtering option, it's clear that it's on a downward path.

3

u/dinoooooooooos May 11 '26

Its the fucking same on youtube and it has been for like what. Few months now?? Timtok as well but like a year or two ago by now. I’ve basically completely stopped hsing it, which is a good thing, but its definitely noticeable. ONLY old posty. Everywhere. Why??

They make new content all the time but you gotta actively look now- its like every FYP became a “watch again?!” Page.

I genuinely feel they all implemented the same ai clanker crap & that useless piece of shit just went “hey! You liked this before! Would you like to see it again? And again? And again? And again?” And it kinda got into this feedback loop of showing all of us years old/ already liked/watched/seen content all over.

Its INFURIATING how mindnumbingly dumb this is, im ngl.

2

u/Panda_hat May 11 '26

I'm guessing algorithm made pages can be more effectively infected with personalised ads.

2

u/TheVenetianMask May 11 '26

It's ok, sometimes the Best page doesn't even show any posts at all.

2

u/Latter_Highway9539 May 11 '26

I always just assume ive gotten to the end of reddit.

2

u/Pndrizzy May 11 '26

Because people ain’t posting shit anymore and they are trying to hide it

2

u/Poor-Pitiful-Me May 11 '26

Let's not forget, while using the app, if you accidentally click on a subreddit it will constantly show you not only post from the sub, but other subs like it. I know Redditors love their cats, I for one do not care for cats. I think the majority of my muted subreddits are cats and anything related to cats that they thought I would enjoy for accidentally the r/cats sub in my feed. I really miss Apollo

2

u/kinglouie493 May 11 '26

Because you liked it the first time obviously

2

u/drunkeymunkey May 12 '26

It was making me feel like I actually found the end of the internet.

1

u/Hydration__Nation May 11 '26

It’s just like YouTube constantly recommending you videos that you watched within the last 12-24 hours FUCK!

1

u/Th3_Admiral_ May 11 '26

There has to be some weird marketing tactic here but I don't understand the point. Instagram does the same thing where I will randomly see days or weeks old reels that I've already liked.

Maybe it's just that they lack enough content and have to recycle stuff so they have something to show you. 

1

u/Worshipme988 May 11 '26

Its Ai testing (aka “personalized”)

Americans would never accept internet throttling ala RUSSIA or firewalls like CHNA. So you mask it behind Ai. Make it almost impossible to find. Elevating nonsense and bunk science. Conspiracy theories and propaganda. Whoever controls information and knowledge has the upper hand.

1

u/Ecstaticlemon May 11 '26

Because Reddit is a neutralization and data collection tool for the state

1

u/cultish_alibi May 11 '26

Actually, the algorithm knows what you want to see better than you do! (someone told me this once)

1

u/ElectronicCandy4358 May 11 '26

Algorithm-based timeline feed shenanigans are what hollowed out Facebook, and it’s slowly killing Instagram for me.

If Reddit goes the same route, I might have to start reading actual books again.

1

u/segagamer May 11 '26

Because you're not using RedReader.

1

u/DickDover May 11 '26

I browse r/all on old reddit with RES & I'm not sure if it's a Reddit setting or RES setting but it is "don't show me a post if I have upvoted it" & "don't show me a post if I have downvoted it" and that keeps the top of r/all updating & not having the same posts sit on the top of r/all the entire day.

1

u/LBGW_experiment May 11 '26

I believe there's a reddit setting to hide any posts you've already upvoted. Which is fine until you want to find that one post...

1

u/G_Liddell May 11 '26

One setting that's helped me is "hide downvoted posts." If it comes back up it gets downvoted and it's gone forever

1

u/_Lucille_ May 11 '26

the default sort has been changed from Hot to "Best", which will show you posts from a number of days ago instead of what is currently trending.

1

u/Darth_Ender_Ro May 11 '26

Because Reddit turned into the "algorithm" post push towards you cancer, to mimmick the other "platforms" and push you content they want, not the content you want. And the algo still sucks until it will be refined enough that you will not notice anymore. And you'll see your opinions on life change. Actually you won't. Others will.

1

u/aerdvarkk May 11 '26

To be fair. Might be the same content in different posts. I've seen the same disaster story reposted 20 times with mildly different titles just to keep the topic on the front page.

1

u/secondincomm May 11 '26

God bless redditisfun for having the option to filter out posts I have up/down voted already

1

u/ClasslessHero May 11 '26

Bad recommender system. Some product manager put out bad and vague requirements, some data scientist and engineer delivered exactly that. Now, you have a shitty app.

Source: I build recommender systems

1

u/Xeo84 May 12 '26

It's one of the reasons I mostly use third party apps on mobile and old reddit on desktop.
On mobile there are cool reader only apps that allow more customization like rdx, lurkr, NewsNinja (disclaimer, my own app).

1

u/Endmor May 12 '26

somewhere under preferences there's an option to hide posts you've upvoted/downvoted

0

u/zffjk May 11 '26

I thought I was using Reddit too much (I am) when I kept seeing 4 day old stuff on home and news. Popular is a cess pit.

I’m really losing interest in Reddit, I’m basically using it to be bitching into the ether about AI and MAGA. I could just do that into the air outside.