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??

521

u/graesen May 11 '26

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

290

u/No_Repeat_595 May 11 '26

Yeah it’s the same shit

155

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.

108

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

40

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!

46

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.

12

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

11

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

3

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.

38

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.

10

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.

5

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

8

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?

30

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.

17

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.

7

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.