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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

The reddit website on mobile has gone from incompetent to extremely embarrassing. If I ever worked there, I would be embarrassed to put Reddit on my resume right now.

I don't really understand how a site worth billions has such bad programmers. Everything about it is bad. It's slow, it crashes frequently, basic things go missing like the image you were trying to view, you frequently get "whoops that page no longer exists" simply reopening your browser on a thread you were viewing the previous day.

But go to the desktop version, and it all works fine.

They even inexplicably implemented AMP, even though the whole point of the site is up-to-date comments, not a cached one sitting on google.

The only competent part of their team seems to be ops, as it has finally stopped falling over.

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Perhaps they want an unpleasant mobile web view, to herd more people towards the blessed app?

There's only a few ways to monetize a site like this, and selling sensor, identity, and behavioral data from phones is one of them. Maximizing their bean count would dictate not leaving that money on the table.

Of course they do, the amount of data you can gather in an app compared to what you can get in a browser...

What are some things you can collect from a mobile app (without asking for outrageous permissions and uploading user’s contacts, etc) that you cant collect on a web app?

its mostly to guarantee ad views... mobile web clients can filter/change/block content where the app forces it in your face.

Here is the permission list from the Play store. There's a number of questionable items on here that are not needed to display stories and comments.

    This app has access to:
    Identity

    find accounts on the device
    add or remove accounts

    Contacts

    find accounts on the device

    Location

    approximate location (network-based)

    Photos/Media/Files

    read the contents of your USB storage
    modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

    Storage

    read the contents of your USB storage
    modify or delete the contents of your USB storage

    Device & app history

    read sensitive log data

    Other

    receive data from Internet
    view network connections
    create accounts and set passwords
    full network access
    read sync settings
    draw over other apps
    use accounts on the device
    prevent device from sleeping
    toggle sync on and off
    install shortcuts
    view network connections
    create accounts and set passwords
    full network access
    read sync settings
    use accounts on the device
    prevent device from sleeping
    toggle sync on and off

At this point, scrap the mobile view if you're going to half-ass it.

> it has finally stopped falling over.

Even that I'd disagree with. I still get "You broke reddit!" screens every few days or so

Blaming the programmers seems misdirected; blame management, if anyone. Programmers rarely get to set the priorities or determine resource allocation.

I think it’s fair. If the management is incompetent and keeps rushing programmers to build poorly thought out features, they’re also usually unable to evaluate the quality. The programmers on the other hand know exactly how bad the things are that they’re building and if they sign their name and say “I built this!” then it’s on them.

Maybe I’ve just worked for companies where developers have a lot of say in what and how gets built.

> Maybe I’ve just worked for companies where developers have a lot of say in what and how gets built.

that's probably closer to the truth.

if you're large enough to have multiple teams of multiple people, in most cases, they don't all have a full view of what's going on (priorities, roadmap, feedback, etc). even if someone said "I ain't doing this!" and quits, there's no real impact. If an entire team dug in their heels on something, that might have influence, but you're getting to a situation that doesn't often happen.

At my current company we have 4-5 independent teams and the PMs talk among themselves and come up with the roadmap, but then they bring it to their teams and there are multiple opportunities for devs to comment or raise any objections. It was similar at my previous, much smaller company.

Throwing the keyboard across the room and yelling "I QUIT!" is one way to give feedback to the management, but usually I've found that raising your hand and bringing concerns about performance or stability is enough to get people to listen since they also want to build a great product.

Lots to hate about the mobile experience.

Look at the bottom of the screen here: https://imgur.com/a/n59XcKQ

The "Open Reddit App" button covers a large portion of the "Next >" button. Argh.

My two main annoyances with the mobile web app are:

1. The annoying popup that comes up every other click asking you to install the iOS app

2. If you are not logged in and accidentally click the comment button it brings up the login modal. After dismissing the modal, if you close the comment box, it brings up the login modal again. I'm gonna assume this one is a bug.

Other than those two issues, I think it's a great mobile web app, especially when you consider just how terrible most web apps are.

Adding to that they left an old full DB backup on an unsecured cloud store which got breached recently.

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