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Earlier today, we reported on an incredibly irritating move by the social giant Reddit.
Though the company has a perfectly functional mobile website that lets you browse its communities and discussions on your phone’s browser, it’s now intentionally sabotaging it — by displaying a giant popup that prevents any use of the site while imploring visitors to download its app instead. Don’t believe us? Just look at this monstrosity, which prevents you from scrolling or clicking anything:
Anyone who doesn’t use the app obviously has their reasons. Maybe they don’t want to be tracked further than necessary or install yet another pointless app, or object to the company’s dealmaking with the AI industry, or they just want a general overview of what the average user is seeing instead of a personalized feed. Maybe they just object to the entire idea of an app that does nothing except recreate the functionality of an existing website.
For all those reasons and more, Reddit users are furious with the change, griping about the move in a barrage of angry posts.
In response, a Reddit spokesperson told us something interesting: that the company is specifically pushing the site-breaking popup to its most active mobile users.
“We’re testing this with a small subset of frequent mobile web users because they’re already familiar with Reddit and we’ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app,” the company said in a statement.
Beyond the unbelievably annoying attitude of “we are going to bully our most loyal users into doing something they are intentionally choosing not to do by debilitating the experience of their product,” the explanation also provides an important clue.
Specifically, this isn’t affecting all users — just ones who visit the site frequently. In other words, Reddit is tracking its users and only punishing only the most engaged ones.
As redditors quickly discovered, that means clearing your browser’s cache and cookies makes you look like a fresh visitor once again, beating back the pesky popup and making the site usable again. We tested the technique on a mobile browser, and it indeed gave us back a functional reddit.com.
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