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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

I switched my iPhone to Duck Duck Go over the last few days simply because I hate hate HATE getting linked to Reddit AMP pages from Google.

Reddit (and Stack Exchange) pages are what I use most to find honest discussions about some topic. Very convenient to use those results to filter through the blogspam.

Reddit's AMP pages are especially bad, with multiple annoying pop-ups that don't get cookied when you dismiss them on AMP. I don't understand what Reddit is getting out of the deal... their mobile site is equally as "mobile" as the AMP page. The AMP experience is so bad.

No preference to un-AMP yourself on Google. So, I switched my search engine. The DDG results seem significantly worse, or at least very different. But old.reddit.com pages load perfectly, and fast.

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I 100% agree with the reddit experience - it takes like 4 taps just to get to the #%!* page. No I don’t want your app shoved down my throat on every load. It has completely ruined reddit for me on mobile. Just show me ads if you need to and leave me alone.

If I had the time I'd work on a Reddit clone without the new redesign and ads. Run it completely funded by Wikipedia-style donations, then turn it over to the community for governance.

Reddit's money grabs piss me off.

To bootstrap the thing I'd crawl Reddit and copy threads, users, subreddits, comments - everything. Users could prove account ownership or create any account that wasn't already allocated. If Reddit sues, they'd face backlash. Comments all used to be GFDL (then Creative Commons) anyway.

Have you tried using some third-party app for Reddit? "Reddit is fun" works pretty great for me, no nonsense and good usability.

That may be, but how long do you expect them to allow 3rd party apps?

Once they can get 3rd party usage below a certain threshold of engagement, they'll block the API.

They've been allowing for a good while so hopefully for a bit more at least.

TBH if they block third party I'm done with them. Def won't be accepting the default user experience.

I bought Sync for Reddit to get rid of ads. I've used it for maybe two years. Even if they block it tomorrow it would have been worth it because the experience has been tremendous. If I'm forced to go back to the official app I'll just stop using Reddit on my phone.

And also, they'll get third party usage below a certain threshold if people don't use it so... Don't help them!

"Reddit Is Fun" is great and has been around for years, the unfounded belief that they may block access one day isn't really a valid reason to not use it.

Apps are too risky.

The risk that any app will, now or in the future, be hacked, sold or just changed to suck all the data from your phone and send it somewhere you don't want it sent is too high for my taste.

There are good FOSS reddit clients for android. Build one then install it.

> If I had the time I'd work on a Reddit clone without the new redesign and ads. Run it completely funded by Wikipedia-style donations

Already exists and made by one of the earlier reddit employees: https://tildes.net

Indeed. Anyone interested should check out the initial announcement on the blog: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

Privacy oriented, open source, user funded, focused on quality content, aiming to develop a user-centric moderation system like slashdot and stack exchange that puts moderation into the hands of the people who participate in each individual community.

If you have a reddit account, you can visit /r/tildes and leave a reply in the sticky invite thread to get an invite code within a day. Or, you can send an email to invites@tildes.net to get one.

It's worth noting that Tildes is created and operated by Deimos, the same guy who created reddit's automoderator and subredditsimulator.

There is at least one established anti-reddit, Voat and there's an open source version of it.

Voat is a great place to go for people skeptical about Jews, non-whites, the overweight and transsexuals to freely share their... concerns.

So I don't think software is sufficient to compete, you need heavy community moderation.

My impression is that Reddit, Twitter and Quora are completely broken on mobile. My only possible conclusion is that these companies don't care about mobile users. Or at least not about casual mobile users who don't have the app installed. (I'm certainly not going to install a separate app for every website I visit; I already have a browser for that.)

I find twitter to be quite usable in mobile safari. I have the app too, but usually find myself still browsing in safari.

Quora is just a broken site right now, mobile or not.

reddit OTOH still seems to work okay on desktop. For a plaintext discussion forum that I prefer to read anonymously, theyve reaaaally screwed the pooch on mobile. I aboid reddit links whenever possible now, which is... sad.

Quora is now working fine for me on mobile Firefox, but it was completely broken a week ago. Twitter refuses to show any content at all half of the time.

Some of this could of course be related to privacy settings in Firefox.

Another advantage of DDG: the result links are straight to the destination, unlike with Google where there's a tracking redirection in between. This is great on Android, as I can open the link straight in an app (like Wikipedia) without going to the page first and then launching the app.

I'd also noticed this behaviour but never really thought about why. I've been using DDG full time for a couple of years now and I've been very happy with it.

Yes, not to mention when you want to share the link in DDG you share the original link directly but in Google you'd share the redirector link.

Given Google's scale they probably don't care about the long tail of technical users such as us.

I tried this just now and this particularly seems to be a problem on Firefox.

On iOS (WebKit) and Chrome, Google’s search results can be copied just fine - there’s no redirector because Google uses hyperlink link auditing (<a href="..." ping="...">).

Firefox does support ping but disables it by default for privacy reasons.

Which is good, I guess, because now the link tracking is more apparent, but it does still happen and leads to a worse UX for the user.

Especially useful in the Images search to share the link or find the original image directly.

I’ve never been to an AMP page where I haven’t clicked forward to the actual site because the AMP sucks. Which means that Google’s attempt to, well I don’t really know what the hell they are doing with AMP pages, has made searching such a damn hassle.

Unfortunately Duck isn’t very good in my country.

AMP's not that bad for, like, a local restaurant website or random news article or whatever. Fast and mobile friendly, when it might normally not be. Bit annoying if you want to copy the link, but whatever. Fine.

But Reddit already has their own mobile site, and app. And half of the appeal of Reddit are the AMP-incompatible features such as voting and commenting! Why do they allow AMP to destroy their website?!

With reddit it’s extra annoying because once you’ve clicked through the amp, you still have to manually replace the www with old.

I’m not sure how we ended up with an internet where you need to move through a search engine and two shitty mobile web apps to get to the page you wanted, but here we are.

You can set 'old' as a preference in your reddit account. It doesn’t seem to be 100% reliable, but it’s far better than all that url manipulation.

I did, but it doesn’t seem to work very well when I’m on my phone. I may be alone in this but even though old isn’t particularly mobile friendly I still prefer it to the mobile web app.

AMP experience infuriates me. I'm used to the browser native gestures and AMP takes over it all in a way that breaks my muscle memory. I have blacklisted Google News and switched to DDG because of it.

Now in iOS 13 you can set a preference to always request the desktop site for a given domain. That's the only thing keeping me on the Google search default on my iPhone.

It's a bit annoying to have to zoom in on the results after every search, but that's still less annoying than trying to escape from AMP pages. And, no matter which engine I use, I have to deal with the crappy Reddit redesign - so that's still annoying.

On my desktop systems where I'm not constrained by the walled garden, I have browser extensions to redirect to old.reddit.com (because I don't want to sign in with an account everywhere) - but mostly, I am just looking forward to whatever will replace reddit hopefully some day soon.

Where is this preference?

The “aA” in the address bar

So you set that for google.com, and then zoom in to see the non-mobile SERP every time? And non-mobile Google never links to AMP?

I was hoping there was a setting for the results domain that disabled AMP.

You used to be able to double tap to zoom very easily but somehow that does not work as well anymore in iOS 13. Now when you do it, it selects the text as well as zooming.

OK, correction: something I just figured out today is that you can actually set the zoom level for a given site as well now. So I set it to like 50% for Google and now I get the desktop version zoomed in properly whenever I search.

> I switched my iPhone to Duck Duck Go over the last few days simply because I hate hate HATE getting linked to Reddit AMP pages from Google.

Funny thing because I also switched to DuckDuckGo to avoid AMP on mobile and stayed on DDG for years (!g is still needed sometimes unfortunately).

I hate AMP pages, but hadnt thought about using DDG to get rid of them. Switching now.

here is the 2016 announcement for Reddit using AMP:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/53q42z/read_redd...

What's AMP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

> General criticism

AMP has been widely criticized by many in the tech industry[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] for being an attempt by Google to exert its dominance on the Web by dictating how websites are built and monetized, and that "AMP is Google's attempt to lock publishers into its ecosystem".[27] AMP has also been linked to Google's attempt to deprecate URLs so that users will not be able to immediately see whether they are viewing a webpage on the open Web or an AMP page that is hosted on Google's servers.[28]

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, said: "there is a sense in which AMP is a Google-built version of the web. We are moving from a world where you can put anything on your website to one where you can’t because Google says so."[29] Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish member of the European Parliament, said: "AMP is an example of Google dialing up its anti-competitive practices under the nose of the competition regulators."[29]

IMO I find the regular mobile version of Reddit as bad as the AMP. I just ended installing an unofficial app (boost) for whenever I wanna browser Reddit on mobile.

Blame Reddit for wanting you to use their app, not AMP.

If the SERP linked me to Reddit, I'd have a cookie to saying I've dismissed the App pop-up before AND my logged-in account would be set to load Old Reddit directly. AMP breaks both. The links work perfectly from DDG.

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