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Comment by nokya | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's obsession to constantly show me an "ad" to install the app has basically cured me from drifting and spending more time than strictly necessary on the website. I hate it so much that it triggers a negative experience everytime I visit the website and I just tend to watch links shared to me.

Honestly, I thank them for that and I hope they don't remove it.

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Their redesign combined with the incessant harassing app crap turned me from an hours-a-day-and-modding-some-decently-big-subs redditor to visiting for 15 minutes a couple times a week when on the dunny. Their entire site is so user hostile now it’s actually bordering on funny. They’ve become a parody of everything they set out to defeat.

Do NOT have your phone with you on the dunny and don’t spend 15 minutes on it! Make it a one minute job.

You’ll thank me when you won’t get piles ;)

Actually forcing the whole thing in 1 minute will get you piles, afaik?

Both true! Don't force it, but also don't spend more than 10 minutes there. (Source: med school, personal experience :\ )

If one isn’t actively forcing, what’s the difference between sitting on the loo and sitting on a chair?

Is there evidence that lingering on the loo in a relaxed state causes problems?

I can't find a good article, but my (albeit anecdotal) understanding is that the hole pulls down your butt muscles while the ring compresses the veins responsible for blood return.

For anyone uninitiated to that particular term, apparently "piles" is another word for Hemorrhoids.

Also, these concerns can be mitigated with a a squatty-potty [1] or a small footstool to get you into the proper position. We've lost the flexibility for that in Western Culture [2]

[1] https://www.squattypotty.com/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/can-you-d...

Give a Squatty Potty a try and you'll only need that 1 minute with no forcing.

For those wondering what "Squatty Potty" is, the company that makes it has a video that explains it well, featuring a pooping unicorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q

Thank you for making it worth getting out of bed today.

if you can't make a 1-min poop, apart from other specific physiological reasons, it means you should check your diet, in my opinion. If you get the right amount of fiber and enough water, the whole thing shouldn't take more than that. This and a squatty potty have been life changing for me.

For those in the US, piles=hemorrhoids.

The original 'they' are long gone.

Not to ruin you but try https://i.reddit.com

When I click on that link, there's an obnoxiously large button that says TRY REDDIT'S MOBILE WEBSITE at the top of the page.

I thought I was the only one. For a while I really struggled with a crippling addiction to Reddit, and no amount of Screen Time blockers seemed to help (it’s too easy to override).

Simply uninstalling the app did the trick. In the beginning I would open the mobile browser out of compulsion, but the UI was so revolting that it’s essentially cured my addiction.

This comment is a great answer to the originally posed question :)

The Apollo app, that everyone seems to love for reasons unbeknownst to me, had that effect on me. I was happily addicted to the official reddit app when I decided to try something else. It ruined my experience so badly that now I barely even go to reddit.

I have this problem too, uninstalling apollo right now.

I also hate the mobile UI, I think this will work.

That’s the best way to get available time hours up for me. Deleted IG, FB, Reddit and I grab my phone, switch through the home screen pages, I don’t find the apps for those places, and turn the screen off. No more drifting through trash feeds of unnecessary content. It’s been great. Now I only drift through HN and my RSS feed, but at least I choose what I see.

I was having a similar problem, so I turned to blocking on the network level (pihole). The work arounds were annoying enough to finally deter me off the platform, circa 2016. It was such a relief to have those wasted hours of my life back, as well as abandon some of the echo chambers. It’s also shocking to see how hostile the design choices have gotten since then, so I’m glad I got out when I did.

One handy tip: Reddit I find, is still one of the best sources of user submitted content for niche hobbies, traveling, consumer advice, etc. So I use Google’s cached search results for those instances where I want to take advantage of Reddit’s information, but don’t want to actually go to the site.

https://selfcontrolapp.com

That blocker / screen time app (MacOS only) worked for me. Also having trusted person set the screen time password on iOS is an approach I've heard people using.

Unfortunately, for every conscientious person that they push away another user is hooked even deeper. Their redesign is insidious. Their page is now aggressively attempting to manipulate you into browsing longer; infinite scrolling, and the way they put questionably-related links in the middle of comments sections is no better than the chumbox clickbait you find at the bottom of bullshit-web articles.

Yeah I recall how they used to be different looking -- the ads, I mean. Enough that you could tell they're ads and would only click on them by dumb accident or if they were interesting.

Now they just look 100% like regular posts, and it feels more and more shady.

But I already WANTED to browse Reddit all day... They didn't make it more encouraging for me to do that, they made it more difficult

> Their redesign is insidious

I must somehow be immune to the charms. I find it intentionally, aggressively irritating.

I used to lose hours there, but now don't browse around at all anymore. Follow a link in, find what I'm looking for, and dismiss the junk-pit.

People didn't need any encouragement to browse longer on reddit, they actually built user solutions to infinite scrolling (RES) years before reddit incorporated it proper.

It's quite irritating if you browse 18+ subreddits and they stop you from seeing content, stating you need the app to see 18+ content.

It's easily circumvented by replacing "www" with "old" in the URL, however, quite irritating nonetheless.

Thanks for the tip bru

There are browser extensions which automatically do this.

Ugh, imgur does this now too. The one time I don't want to be logged in is if I'm looking at something nsfw...

Replacing "www" with "np" also works. Functionally I believe it's identical to "old" but without voting/posting

Really? I just went to /r/gonewild on my phone (browser) to test it out. It gave me the usual "are you 18+?" message and let me proceed to all of the amateur nudity you'd expect.

(Firefox mobile, not in desktop mode if it matters).

It happens ever so often but not always -- maybe they're still phasing it in?

Yeah it only happens sometimes. They also will randomly, occasionally not let you read the comments on a post without downloading the app.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21780092

I wonder if it’s partly due to business / product people taking control and trying to aggressively push for more user engagement rather than let the engineers keep the site enjoyable to use.

Either way, it’s turned me off as well, and I thank them for it because I got a lot of free time back.

Maybe, but from experience I can assure you that engineers are just as capable of ruining user experiences all on their own.

Yeah it's driven my usage down now too. I actively try seek alternatives.

Agreed. No, I don't want your app. Why can't I just use the browser? I can't even view pictures anymore in some threads without the app. HN is so nice with its simplicity.

That and the fact that they somehow make video playback continually less reliable somehow.

This. The reddit's video player is a total mess, in both functionality and usability. For the majority of time it simply doesn't load the video, and when it does, the play/pause/seeking is extremely laggy, and often any interaction causes the video to just not play.

I'm having hard time understanding how someone manages to write such horrid piece of software, and how it keeps on being used on one of the most popular websites in the world.

Or how they expect to remain one of the most popular sites in the world if the core functionality doesn’t work right.

Network effects?

The story of social networks depending on network effects alone is the story of Wile E Coyote going off a cliff; it works and until it suddenly doesn’t. Hey, remember Digg?

Reddit’s risk here is that there’s very little value to their back catalogue, since most users use it as a stream of new and novel things. So the only thing protecting reddit is that it’s still the main place people go to post funny videos and similar, which is much easier to move than their back catalog. The fact that video playback basically doesn’t work is a serious problem here.

I felt the same. I've tried to quit reddit several times without success but since these changes the constant annoyances were just too much that I completely stopped using the site.

I have the issue that I find Reddit extremely useful to become proficient.

I knew what problems my tomatoes were having the moment it started. I learned about blueberries needing something stronger than coffee.(and more)

I learned what microcontrollers are popular in the enterprise world by lurking.

I got some extremely useful information in a table form which was impossible to find in a Google search.

I suppose I just need to stop browsing the popular feed and it would always be useful.

I completely and totally disagree. Reddit is of no benefit for anything you could just Google. Reddit's commenting dynamics create a false consensus around whatever the first thing that a bunch of people who Googled it can not disagree to. That's bad enough but when you start talking about subjects that have any degree of subjectiveness people's desire to have their world view confirmed abounds and it becomes even worse.

Pick a subject you're very familiar with the nuances of and start sorting comments by best, go straight to the bottom and among the low quality junk you'll find that there are tons of valid and well informed opinions that get rejected because they required more nuanced thought to understand than a bunch of amateurs who just googled it could muster or wasn't 100% compatible with the ideology of the group at large.

The net effect is that you get "if you just Googled it yourself" quality answers (pretty much every "open to the internet riff raff at large" platform has this problem to an extent) but sent though a filter that removes a substantial fraction of the opinions from people who actually know what they're talking about. Frankly the chans are better in this regard because the only mechanism for disagreement is to reply and the content of replies makes the nature of agreement/disagreement pretty obvious.

As bad as HN is about rejecting anything that doesn't fit it's narrow ideology about how the world works it at least usually doesn't reject things if they're technically correct. The same cannot be said for Reddit.

If you want professional advice you need to go somewhere with some sort of permanence and a higher bar to entry (i.e. the people who wind up there have actually care enough about the subject that they sought the place out), traditionally forums fill this role.

And yet... reddit is still probably better than the alternatives.

Half of what I search for nowadays has a "reddit" version tacked on the end in googles auto complete. That is, people are deliberately searching for results to questions explicitly from reddit and it's popular enough that it's surfacing in googles autocomplete.

The only other site that gets that kind of treatment is stackoverflow.

I find this completely wrong. Every time I want to answer a question, googling it will give me 2-3 pages of SEO hypercharged shitty articles that take way too long to go into the point.

Compared to opening 2-3 reddit threads you get 20-30 opinions all without filler and get to then form your meta opinion on that. Its absolutely magic!

Maybe I need that on HN :p

Go to your profile settings and play with maxvisit, minaway and delay.

I am giving this a try - it has been great so far!

I like to think of myself as an adult with agency and yet I log into HN on reflex probably over 100 times a day...

Use an RSS reader. While HN doesn't force engagement through dark patterns and notifications. There are still things that create FOMO such as the fast pace of the front page. With a good rss reader, you can check back to read what you missed.

https://edavis.github.io/hnrss/

Check no proc option too.

I forgot about that, probably because I don’t see it anymore on iOS/iPadOS. I go to the www.reddit.com URI, not the mobile one.

Perhaps it is because I autopay $5/month to Reddit? It could also be the newer version of Safari in the beta iOS and beta iPadOS?

So how many hours do you spend on the site each day?

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