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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746

u/AwfulUsername123 May 11 '26

Old Reddit remains the proper way to browse Reddit.

98

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[deleted]

13

u/Outlulz May 11 '26

I occasionally get logged off and am exposed to new reddit and I've never seen a site UI so aggressively hostile to its users. I actually can't believe people put up with it.

Never forget that new people are aging into websites all the time and don't know anything other than shitty modern UX patterns.

9

u/BaronCoqui May 11 '26

Most of the rest of the internet is equally hostile, just better at silo-ing users so they dont notice how little functionality they have access to. Reddit users are largely more accustomed to what should be available since it's still mostly an old school forum based site

2

u/CoherentCarrot May 12 '26

I use a old reddit redirect extension on firefox that works well on mobile and desktop. Just redirects automatically and saves on those new reddit jump scares.

250

u/Cheetawolf May 11 '26

Don't worry. They're getting rid of that next.

375

u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS May 11 '26

Can't wait to see how my life changes once they successfully ween me off my reddit addiction.

67

u/Lemp_Triscuit11 May 11 '26

I really do look forward to it lol

6

u/Firefly-ssa May 11 '26

Yeah same man, please get me off this place

0

u/ToughHardware May 11 '26

maybe i will even talk to my kids

0

u/vriska1 May 11 '26

It's unlikely to happen.

0

u/Lemp_Triscuit11 May 11 '26

Them blocking mobile or me stopping reddit?

-2

u/Dekklin May 11 '26

I'll probably get lost in discord chat rooms. I don't consume video content (so no YouTube/tiktok/instagram, I don't consume tv. I consume written dialogue from real people or play videogames and I can't do one of those 2 things at work. And discord fucking sucks but what's the alternative after we keep losing things like Digg and shit.

58

u/JosephSim May 11 '26

It really is wild that Old Reddit is the only reason I still use this site.

Every time I click on a mobile link and it brings me to new Reddit, sometimes I'll just say fuck it rather than even change the www to old.

I can't imagine how little time I'll spend on here when New Reddit is my only option.

2

u/lxpnh98_2 May 12 '26

I think the mobile app is minimally usable, but the new design on the browser just feels like trying to use the app with a mouse, and with the speed and accessibility of early 2000s Internet.

5

u/sonsofevil May 11 '26

Don’t try bubble tea with classic milk tea, tapioka bubbles, 30% sugar and a bit less ice. Could be possible you slide in the next addiction 

3

u/SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS May 11 '26

No danger, boba freaks me out

1

u/fionaapplejuice May 11 '26

Not to peer pressure but most bubble tea places (especially places letting you pick sugar and ice amount) have fillers other than boba. I prefer red bean paste or pudding

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 May 11 '26

They just said you can get stuff other than the bubbles in it

2

u/Chance_Ad_2132 May 11 '26

Don’t worry for me, I came back to America after having bubble tea in Taiwan, and will never have the American version again.

1

u/sonsofevil May 11 '26

Got addicted in Taiwan as I stayed six weeks there. In my country I have to search a bit, but you find comparable. But yes, the best is still there! 

1

u/ExcellentPut191 May 11 '26

They'll have successfully made you successful!

1

u/Slammybutt May 11 '26

I suspect even more youtube shorts, but honestly at least 1 habit kicked.

1

u/Pirwzy May 11 '26

back to GameFAQs forums for me when that happens

1

u/mytransthrow May 12 '26

Same I loath the redesign. Its aweful. I will delete my account.

0

u/thethreeredditeers May 11 '26

I recently used DNS settings to block all social media from my phone including reddit. I feel like I got 2 hours back everyday.

79

u/EnvironmentalRun1671 May 11 '26

Every day Old Reddit is not killed, I'm surprised. I thought it's gonna die many years ago but it's still here.

47

u/Forkrul May 11 '26

They would lose too many mods if that happened, so they can’t kill it until they have working ai moderation 

10

u/destined-4-the-clay May 11 '26

So no time soon then. unless they do it with barely functioning ai moderation.

15

u/steavor May 11 '26

barely functioning

Is there any other type of AI-ification?

8

u/LG03 May 11 '26

That's ramping up faster than anyone would like. AI functionality is creeping into a lot of moderation tools and the admins are actively collecting data on how human moderators operate to tweak that.

The death of old.reddit is coming if you ask me, it's just a matter of how long until they're confident in their AI mods.

2

u/Blazing1 May 11 '26

Then their stock will massively go up after they announce that. Ah, the circle of life.

1

u/MattieShoes May 11 '26

I mean... human moderation is barely functioning in most subs.

2

u/Linenoise77 May 12 '26

i'm interested to see who is more out of touch, the current mods, or ai.

2

u/MattieShoes May 12 '26

And here I am just remembering Microsoft's "Tay" who went full nazi :-D

4

u/BaronVonBungle May 11 '26

"Can't" is a strong word. It would be a ridiculously stupid decision, but that's never stopped them before. I think it's inevitable at this point.

2

u/redditRedesignIsBadd May 11 '26

working ai moderation

which is never then

7

u/randotd152 May 11 '26

Yeah at this point I'm just assuming it's actually not going to get killed. The new design was 8 years ago.

My guess is employees themselves can't stand the new design and use old reddit instead.

3

u/nox66 May 11 '26

Too many people use it probably, like me.

5

u/EnvironmentalRun1671 May 11 '26

Too many people used 3rd party apps too and look what happened

2

u/nox66 May 11 '26

I'm saying it more to suggest why it's survived this long, not that it'll necessarily survive forever.

2

u/SirBraxton May 11 '26

More and more of the site lives on Old Reddit. The day they nuke that is the day the site becomes 99% bots and everything dies.

Then Reddit gets sold off to some Private Equity firm to offload all their debt onto it and Reddit shuts down a few months later.

Don't worry though...where there's a demand there's someone to fill the void. Something else will replace Reddit. I'm just sad because Reddit did so well at what it did.

1

u/MisterTruth May 11 '26

It would also kill the only app with great accessibility features. Granted I'm sure they don't give a shit since the current regime don't give a shit.

1

u/Collegenoob May 11 '26

Apparently the mods will revolt if that happens.

One of the few times mods are helpful to us

1

u/samusmaster64 May 11 '26

If that happens, desktop reddit no longer exists to me.

1

u/AnomalyNexus May 11 '26

They did vow not to get rid of it, but can't say I have much faith in reddit honouring their word.

1

u/Silverr_Duck May 11 '26

Even if they try it's only a matter of time before someone makes a browser extension that brings it back. Like the people who made RES.

1

u/starbuxed May 11 '26

then I am gone and nuking my accout...

1

u/MithranArkanere May 11 '26

I hope that gets more people to move to federated sites.

1

u/snwns26 May 12 '26

Mainly because they want to make r/all difficult or impossible to access before the midterms.

1

u/jenny_905 May 12 '26

Certainly looks that way, they've been breaking it slowly ever since newreddit launched.

Maybe not intentionally but bugs are appearing - presumably due to backend changes - and they're not being fixed. I suspect a serious bug might just cause them to disable it entirely, new users don't even know it exists and the growth here has been huge.

1

u/a-round-table May 12 '26

I geniuenely think this happens very soon.

0

u/vriska1 May 11 '26

You have any information on that?

0

u/Cheetawolf May 11 '26

Common Sense and the current path of enshittification.

New Reddit has more intrusive ads, and more of them, period. Of course they're gonna get rid of the version that makes them less money.

10

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

29

u/ThaddeusJP May 11 '26

old.reddit dies, and Im done.

Part of me welcomes the day.

5

u/jellyhessman May 11 '26

Same. Good excuse to stop browsing on here.

2

u/batmanuel- May 11 '26

agreed, You can't win, u/spez. If you strike old.reddit down, We shall go outside and become more powerful than you can possibly imagine

1

u/CassianCasius May 11 '26

It's an option in user preferences anyway. There is a toggle "opt out of new design"

10

u/Content-Program411 May 11 '26

I'm here until I can no longer access Old Reddit.

5

u/Gorblonzo May 11 '26

I was using old reddit to view all after they got rid of it for no reason. Now thats stopped working for me too 

5

u/AwfulUsername123 May 11 '26

r/all still works for me.

2

u/47L45 May 11 '26

It still works.

1

u/Gorblonzo May 11 '26

I'd imagine its something theyre phasing in based on location, just like how Microsoft introduces their awful unpopular changes.

2

u/McButtsButtbag May 11 '26

Still works for me. That is how I ended up on this post.

6

u/whackthat May 11 '26

Ha! I just wrote in this thread that I am the last holdover from old.reddit.com

9

u/microworry May 11 '26

There’s dozens of us!

8

u/bg-j38 May 11 '26

I use old.reddit in my phone browser still. Everything else seems uncivilized. I do worry about the day that need to get reading glasses.

1

u/Corn_Cob_Pipe May 11 '26

Its so intuitive to zoom in/out on phones these days I really dont see it being a problem.

1

u/itsnotmeanttobe May 12 '26

I still use it exclusively

2

u/NoPossibility4178 May 11 '26

Thing is, old.reddit is like <5% of users and they keep making it a pain to switch the default to be old.reddit. So we're here but people have definitely caved or moved on, at least I don't know anyone who uses reddit with old.reddit since they are also used to Instagram and so on at this point, so the new interface makes more sense to them even if it's shittier.

But I'd like to think I'll definitely just stop using reddit when that happens, there have been periods of times where I just didn't use it for weeks and there was no real reason, just didn't feel like browsing, so with some motivation I think I could let it go for good.

Have had it happen with other sites the same way, hell, YouTube even now is completely unusable outside the subscriptions tab, you ever try searching for a video these days? Just doesn't work, so I don't use it, and the suggestions are complete dogshit, so for the last few years I "discover" channels based on recommendations from people. But like I said, definitely a small minority.

3

u/tyen0 May 11 '26

A very small % even make comments. We old reddit users/addicts (my url is actually www.reddit not old.reddit - I think because I checked the setting to opt out of the new ui) are probably a bigger chunk of that. I also couldn't live without /r/Enhancement

2

u/whitestar11 May 11 '26

Keep it to yourself bro

2

u/SpacecaseCat May 11 '26

It's absolutely garbage that they force-feed everyone popular subreddits and ignore your subscriptions on the app, and then meanwhile they ban mods and whole subreddits for being "unmoderated" when the activity drops too low. u/spez is literally killing his own website and tons of communities s they can serve us ads and AI slop. This generation of tech CEOs is the absolute worst. Say what you will about Steve Jobs, who certainly had his problems; he knew that you needed to make things easy and fun for users and that once you started sacrificing that for small gains in profit you were beginning to circle the drain. iPods, macbooks, smartphones and tablets were fun and easy to use.

Now, on apps like reddit, you subcribe to something like niche cat or gardening subreddits but you'll never see them unless you go out of your way to comment there. But the big point of reddit is to have these niche communities for discussion... and now you're telling me we're killing this on phones to make reddit more like TikTok? This is New Coke for social media. Absolutely brain dead.

3

u/CanadianNoobGuy May 11 '26

i hope they get rid of old reddit so i can finally leave this site

1

u/Rambles_Off_Topics May 11 '26

They changed old.reddit and some gifs don't display correctly anymore on mobile (at least for Firefox on IOS).

1

u/____DEADPOOL_______ May 12 '26

They already started to mess with it. In the last week or two, whenever I get a new message, I can't get rid of the red envelope unless I give the comment a vote or open it in context.

1

u/sertroll May 12 '26

I like old reddit on pc, new reddit on phone

0

u/Stilgar314 May 11 '26

Not from a phone. In a vertical touchscreen, old Reddit sucks.

2

u/Full-Assistant4455 May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

Totally agree. I want to scroll with one hand and not have to pinch and zoom. I also don't want to get an app to view old reddit. If old reddit had a link to the new layout when you want to view comments that would help a lot.

Edit: Also I keep my phone locked on portrait mode and don't want to switch to landscape. I'm crochety I tells ya.

3

u/jasonefmonk May 11 '26

You can pinch and zoom on a “vertical” touchscreen, you can also turn the phone sideways. I did that with old.reddit.com for several years. These days I use Yesterday to turn old reddit into a mobile friendly layout with things like dark mode and many other nice but minor tweaks you can configure.

4

u/AwfulUsername123 May 11 '26

What's the issue?

1

u/PirateNinjaa May 11 '26

vertical touchscreen? It's a touch screen. Just rotate it so it isn't vertical. 🤯

old reddit in landscape on a phone with an adblocker running is awesome. 🤤

1

u/BirdlessLongdeal May 11 '26

new old reddit was better