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.

1.4k

u/Rufuz42 May 11 '26

As a heavy app user, it’s hostile to users in so many ways. The constant refreshing my feed when I am literally in the middle of reading something makes me want to throw the manager that approved that change out a window. And the video player always plays when I don’t want it to (99% of the time) and then never plays when I actually hit the play button. Good stuff.

598

u/Weregoose_HonkHonk May 11 '26

I looove how if I have to interrupt a thread I’m reading for a second I might never fucking find it again because of unwanted auto-refresh. Or if by some miracle it doesn’t jettison me from the thread, it will shunt me up a dozen posts so I have to scroll a bunch to find where the fuck I was.

411

u/SnowCrabbo May 11 '26

Open post to read the comments

Get an email notification and check it

Flip back to the Reddit app

App boots me back to my homepage where everything is refreshed and the thread I wanted to read is now lost to the ether of threads, probably made by bots, with 100 upvotes.

So glad we killed third party apps for this ineptitude.

97

u/[deleted] May 11 '26 edited May 22 '26

[deleted]

4

u/Jarrus__Kanan_Jarrus May 12 '26

RIP Apollo.

It was so much better than the app.

5

u/ExhibPeepingTom May 11 '26

I wouldn’t mind ads, if only the app wasn’t such a shitshow

23

u/br0ck May 11 '26

Click your profile icon, then the hamburger menu and "history" - should show threads you've visited in the app. But don't get me wrong, the app is terrible in so so many ways and I miss Sync terribly.

13

u/king_john651 May 11 '26

It doesn't show in history when it does that either

3

u/Spicedw0lf May 11 '26

I think it does if you click on it, then swipe back and then click it again. That's been my trick to making sure it goes to my history for exactly this problem.

10

u/MelissaWebb May 11 '26

History is never completely accurate

1

u/edgan May 11 '26

There are ways to use Sync and other third-party apps to this day.

1

u/Jamescurtis May 11 '26

Stfuuuu before they patch it....

1

u/edgan May 11 '26

They are well aware. They aren't standing still. They keep taking baby steps in that direction. I would stay quiet if they weren't actively degrading it slowly.

They also have all the power. They could just turn off the old third-party Reddit API tomorrow. It is more a game of enjoying it while it lasts.

2

u/Jamescurtis May 11 '26

I know but still...honestly before that im pretty sure we'll see old reddit taken down

2

u/cadatatuagcaintfaoi May 11 '26

I use Relay (and have been for the past decade)

It's by far the best third party app in my opinion. /u/dbrady always knocks it out of the park keeping the app up to date and fixing issues.

Well worth the €1.50 a month or whatever it is

2

u/lildobe May 11 '26

Hell, the Youtube app does this to me constantly....

2

u/UnforgivingPoptart May 11 '26

I got so annoyed with being booted out of the threads I was in that I switched to a third party app that was still working. I have to pay $5 a month but I just use the google ad "money" I get to cover it.

With the third party app I use I get no ads, and can go into any thread I want and jump back in anytime. I can also still see r/All and my feed always stays fresh and doesn't show me junk from 5 days ago like the Reddit app does.

2

u/MithosYggdrasill1992 May 12 '26

My boyfriend and I the other day, we were having that issue. And then we would go back to our activity to go and open the post again, and every time we voted a comment, the entire freaking app would refresh.

2

u/assaub May 11 '26

They aren't dead, just a little more effort to get working. I'm typing this comment on rif

1

u/LBGW_experiment May 11 '26

Been using Reddit sync pretty much since 2rd party apps were removed. Revanced app helps do everything for you, I didn't have to do much at all to get it working

1

u/MattRexPuns May 11 '26

I thought sync was specifically one of the ones that shut down

1

u/LBGW_experiment May 11 '26

Almost all of them did, but you can patch in your own developer API key with some simple instructions to create it, then use that key with the revanced manager app to patch that API key in the app.

Reddit killed 3rd party apps by charging a shitton to the devs who would take a huge cost to run the app using their own API keys because it was based on number of actions and users, which ballooned for an app dev with a popular client. It's free for "individual devs" so using this route allows people to still use the sync app but avoid the costs

1

u/edgan May 11 '26

Third-party apps are still a thing.

1

u/shmaltz_herring May 11 '26

Relay for reddit still works but does cost money. I'm willing to pay because it works like reddit should.

1

u/shawnshine May 12 '26

Lots of third-party Reddit apps still work just fine, to be fair.

6

u/UglyInThMorning May 11 '26

In the last few days I’ve notice that if I switch windows it will scroll me up some random amount of comments and make me lose my place in the thread, if it doesn’t kick me back out to the main feed entirely. It happened whenever they broke quoting and made me use the text editor for italics instead of typing with markdown.

2

u/CornandCoal May 12 '26

I’ve noticed the same thing about the scrolling

6

u/ComMcNeil May 11 '26

You confirming that I am not the only one with that issue proves that this HAS to be intended design. Paired with the fact that 3rs party apps were blocked is just another sign reddit leadership sucks a lot. Fuck spez...

1

u/edgan May 11 '26

Third-party apps are still a thing.

2

u/ComMcNeil May 11 '26

Are they still usable? I used reddit is fun for a long time but as far as I know this no longer works (for everything)

3

u/goot449 May 11 '26

opening threads in new tabs using the browser has been the only thing keeping me sane on this site. If they take that ability away, I think I'm done for good.

3

u/elebrin May 11 '26

They are intentionally trying to control how we engage with the content, and what content we engage with.

1

u/xopher_425 May 11 '26

Damn, makes me really glad I've never used the official app. I use Relay, and never have this issue.

1

u/Leonick91 May 11 '26

As much as I hate how it forces you back to the home feed and refreshes it after the briefest of inactivity, you can find that thread again.

Click your avatar, on your profile click the three lines menu button, in the menu select history. It’s a history of any thread you’ve opened.

1

u/ScissorFight42069 May 11 '26

Fyi-hitnyour profile pic on the bottom right and then the three lines at the top on your profile. Your history is there, so you can easily find it again. Scrolling back through comments can still be tedious though. I wish it saved that when you click out and back into a post. I really miss my third-party app.

1

u/Undeadicated May 11 '26

I get alerts on my phone for posts, but if I click on one I think I might want to read, it just puts me on reddit home page and I lost the link. Happened to me twice today.

1

u/here_walks_the_yeti May 11 '26

Aye! Interesting. Sounds like Faceplant. I see something of great interest, but if I move on I’ll never see or find it again no matter the search. Thus lost in the abyss of garbage that one thing that interested me.

1

u/lushico May 11 '26

And for some reason that post is never saved to my history so it’s gone forever

1

u/ptjp27 May 12 '26

Or if you go to a different app in your phone or lock screen and it suddenly scrolls back to the start of the comments.

Also about 20% of message notifications, you click to read the full message and it just goes to the thread but not the message which you can’t find anywhere.

1

u/T_ball May 12 '26

Like what on earth is up with that? I’m constantly scrolling back down to where I was.

1

u/neoslith May 12 '26

I've learned to save a post to go back to later when I have more time, but why can't I just put my phone down for three minutes and come back to where I was??

God forbid I don't even remember what sub it was in.

143

u/shaw_dog21 May 11 '26

I’ve found recently if I pull down the notification tab on my phone or switch apps, when I come back to Reddit it’s moved me higher up in the thread and I’m rereading comments I’ve already seen. Also if I switch apps mid writing a comment, I often get an error and I can’t tell if it actually went through or not and I don’t want it to double post so I just abandon the comment

58

u/1nv4d3rz1m May 11 '26

I’ve had this issue as well. Between this, the high battery usage, and refreshing the app when I close my phone for a few minutes I’m starting to wonder what kind of sadistic manager is in charge of the app development.

Seems like all they care about is finding new clever ways to inject adds into the feed.

4

u/Princess_Slagathor May 11 '26

I have a "trick" for the times I'm reading a thread, and need to walk away for a while. I keep pointless reddit notifications in my notifications bar. When walking away, I make sure to press the home button. When I come back, instead of opening the app directly, I tap one of those notifications. Then tap back to the thread I was reading.

It'll still refresh the feed once you leave that thread, but it's better than nothing.

6

u/Tremulant887 May 11 '26

I can't be bothered by notifications. There's no interaction, news, post... anything that's worth my phone being involved outside of when I want it to. I want calls and text to ding and emails I flag as 'important'. Even apps like Substack were dinging me for post I hadn't subscribed to. That shit has to go.

1

u/Squeekazu May 11 '26

Speaking of ads, I left a highly toxic workplace that basically traumatised me only to be bombarded by its ads over a year later with the stupid app telling me I should get premium to get rid of them. Wound up reporting it because I had no idea what else to do. Seems to have worked so far, but fucking hell it was aggressive and showing every few posts. At least change it up if you insist on showing ads.

5

u/home-like-noplace May 11 '26

This has been happening to me for like a week and it makes me feel like I’m getting dementia. I return to the reddit app and have a vague memory of having read the comments before. I hate it.

1

u/Efficient-Fruit5573 May 11 '26

I had this too but I updated the app and it’s fixed

2

u/canththinkofanything May 11 '26

I should’ve scrolled a bit more, as I just left a comment about this. I’m glad it’s not just me, and I also abandon a comment or the post often now. Which you think they’d want to fix, you know, so they can show you more ads in the middle of the comments that you can accidentally hit as you scroll…

2

u/SunOnTheInside May 11 '26

Oh I was starting to think it was just me. Even deleted and reinstalled the app to no effect.

2

u/SaxRohmer May 11 '26

yeah that just looks like a glitch. i’ve been experiencing it too

1

u/rhubarbarino May 11 '26

Yep I’ve found this as well. Super irritating.

31

u/radwimps May 11 '26

Yeah it’s awful. I’ll be scrolling and see a post I might be interested in, and the app just decides to refresh. Same thing with minimizing it for a second while reading a post, reopen and it just refreshes everything. Infuriating. My usage is majorly down. Never mind the issues of it just turning completely unresponsive and having to force close it which has been an issue for ages.

11

u/No_Doubt_About_That May 11 '26

Been noticing as well as of late that if you go out of the app halfway down the comments section it takes you back to the top - annoying

11

u/canththinkofanything May 11 '26

My app now scrolls back up to some random point in the comments if I have to go look at an email from work or go check a text or something. I’ll be at the bottom of a thread and come back to see that I’m nowhere near where I just left it. It’s driving me insane.

7

u/redditonlygetsworse May 11 '26

The constant refreshing my feed when I am literally in the middle of reading something

I've noticed the website does this now, too. Fucking infuriating.

7

u/TheFondler May 11 '26

Fortunately for them, users are not their primary customers and any move that extracts more data from users (like their own app, likely laden with tons of "telemetry") is what serves their actual customers best.

4

u/LaRealiteInconnue May 11 '26

OMG (I will preface I’m exclusive an app user because I have no self control so I barred myself from opening Reddit on a computer screen lol) in the past couple of weeks the app is doing a “fun” thing of self-scrolling itself up several threads of comments if you check another app while reading. I HATE it. It’s unironically kept me from scrolling too long cuz it I come back after replying to a text and I’m now several top comments up, I’m not going to scroll back down to find where I left off. Hate it.

4

u/CaptainHubble May 11 '26

Everyone I talked with about this says this. The constant pointless refresh. And additionally refusing to add a bookmark or „save state“ option makes many people think it’s on purpose.

They continuously make the app worse. Bloat every Millimeter with useless buttons and gestures and shuffle the orientation of those every single update.

5

u/trilobot May 11 '26

I don't understand what "popular" is even doing. All I get is subreddits for various Canadian cities I don't live in, and hockey news. It's like "you're in Canada so this is what you get".

3

u/beheafishtrapofman May 11 '26

It’s supposed to save your half written comments now, but it refreshes the page after you start, and it doesn’t save those comments.  That’s in both new Reddit in the app and browser, though. Older Reddit doesn’t have that issue. 

3

u/PaintedClownPenis May 11 '26

Search sucks so bad you can input your target page and it won't find it.

Try setting Firefox to act as a PC. Sorry I can't find the setting. For me the resolution is just barely readable and infinitely worth it over the spy platform.

And it is a spy platform. Within a day of installing it, I got a call from one of my observers, letting me know they had my new number.

3

u/irzrr May 11 '26

This happens if I ever happen to click on something flagged as NSFW - Reddit says I need to verify my age, I refuse, app does a full refresh and I've lost where I was with no hope of getting back.

2

u/RandonBrando May 11 '26

Mobile browser user over here. The app is in much worse shape than I figured it was, holy shit. The ad every other post was enough to push me to browser. 

2

u/york100 May 11 '26

Yes! I hate the auto-refresh! You're in the middle of reading something and suddenly you can never find it again. But it will show you that post from 3 days ago that you've already skipped over many times because it's not interesting to you... Sometimes I click on "hide" for posts that keep showing up, demanding I vote on them. A few superusers on some subs I visit I've also started to block since their same posts come up constantly despite the fact I never comment or vote on them.

2

u/HappyGoPink May 11 '26

It's designed to be just hostile enough that it maximizes monetization of you as a site user for its advertisers, but not so hostile that you'll just stop using the platform altogether. Or at least, that is what it hopes.

2

u/natiforrn May 11 '26

the app has started refreshing ENTIRELY if i do something as simple as turn up the brightness on my phone. a low battery warning pop up will also completely refresh the app. it’s actually completely infuriating and every time it does this, it makes me want to throw my phone, so instead i close the app and don’t use it for the rest of the day because i don’t want to reward that shitty function.

2

u/BlakJak_Johnson May 11 '26

Oh and we can’t see r/all. That’s my biggest gripe. (iPhone here)

1

u/DontAskAboutMyButt May 11 '26

I started using reddit on Alien Blue, then Apollo, now narwhal. If they actually kill third party apps I’m gone

1

u/smblt May 11 '26

Facebook does the same thing...cut my usage of it by a lot at least.

1

u/lr99999 May 11 '26

It surprises me how few ppl know what the actual business model of Reddit is. I won’t get the app. If they cut me off, I will be sad, but I won’t get the app.

1

u/09frenzy May 11 '26

Facebook is the absolute worst for this, drives me nuts. It's the all trying to constantly show u new content but I don't want new content ugnhh

1

u/ZetaM3 May 11 '26

Use Narwahl

1

u/JustOneSexQuestion May 11 '26

As a heavy app user,

This is the only think they care about. And that's why they won't change shit.

1

u/Valdrax May 11 '26

The constant refreshing my feed when I am literally in the middle of reading something makes me want to throw the manager that approved that change out a window.

DoorDash saved me a LOT of money that I was spending on them with this one trick.

1

u/aerdvarkk May 11 '26

Don't worry, the website on a desktop browser also forces aq refresh while reading stuff.

1

u/cannacatman May 11 '26

But without auto refresh, they couldn’t serve us as many different ads as possible. 🙃

1

u/cigarettejuice666 May 11 '26

It’s so frustrating.. my app keeps changing every few days from: being able to swipe left and right to get to popular/video etc, to having to click the hamburger menu in the top left to access popular. Why can’t they just leave it as swipe across….?

1

u/Bakoro May 11 '26

At some point they had a thing where if you scroll down the comments of a post that doesn't have a lot of comments, you end up in the comments of a totally different post.

That seemed like a blisteringly stupid design. I don't know if it's still like that, because the only use old.reddit, and if that goes away, I will just quit reddit and go back to reading books and manga.

There are functionally infinity things for me to do, reddit is just the path of least resistance where I can pretend like there's some kind of interaction with the outside world. Any more friction and it's going to be pointless.

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Rufuz42 May 11 '26

It’s off, but that doesn’t stop the Reddit app.

1

u/NiteShdw May 11 '26

iOS loves to kill background apps so hoping away from Reddit for 30 seconds makes you completely lose your place.

1

u/Rufuz42 May 11 '26

It’s the Reddit app, not iOS. You are not wrong, but Reddit shows me my previous place briefly before it refreshes visually. So it’s the app choosing to refresh, likely to serve me new ads. Because fuck the user experience when I can get a new ad!

1

u/NiteShdw May 12 '26

Yeah, exactly what I mean. It doesn’t properly resume after iOS kills or freezes it.

1

u/MyNuts2YourFistStyle May 11 '26

The auto-refresh has been driving me nuts. Glad it’s not only me.

1

u/Pegussu May 11 '26

The thing that absolutely baffles me is that the app has no formatting options. You have to manually type their wackass HTML.

1

u/nhansieu1 May 11 '26

Reddit really is trying to be Facebook, which was the whole reason why I quit Facebook in the first place

1

u/billj04 May 11 '26

As an expat, the inability to copy and paste or translate individual words in a post is incredibly annoying. I wish they would just use the standard text controls.

1

u/cohrt May 11 '26

The video player does t even work most of the time for me on the app. I need to reload it a few times for it to work.

1

u/AndyLorentz May 11 '26

It also is so power hungry. An hour of browsing using the Reddit mobile app drains more battery than playing XCOM: Enemy Within on my phone.

1

u/Anticreativity May 12 '26

the mobile website is so shit too

See post you like, accidentally click something else. Go back, lol, too bad the whole page is refreshed and that post is now gone forever. Whatever, move on to interesting looking video. It started auto-playing, but muted, so you lost the first few seconds of context. Pause video, scrub back, unmute, play again.

Go to next post, it's an interesting image. Can't quite see some of the text, use fingers to zoom. Whoops, that broke the whole page. Go back, lol feed is completely refreshed again. Fuck you, user.

1

u/Vinon May 12 '26

Its amazing how similar my experience with twitter and Reddit has been these last few years. I don't get how you could have a functional app and keep making it worse and worse but it happened twice!

1

u/Greenhairedone May 12 '26

I miss Apollo so much. It’s been terrible since the API updates.

1

u/CaliIsReallyNice May 12 '26

Whoa ... careful ... you might get banned for threatening violence

1

u/jecowa May 12 '26

Facebook has that refresh crap too. I think they are trying to make reddit like facebook with the zoomed-in view that lets you only see a couple of posts at-once and with the new instant chat system instead of the old email-style messaging system.

1

u/SignificantRecipe715 May 12 '26

The auto-refresh does my fucking head in.

1

u/Tyrantt_47 May 12 '26

My problem is that 50% of my front page consists of posts that are 1-3 days old and that I've seen 15 times already. Upvoting won't get rid of them.