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Comment by tiku | Hacker News Reader

I still remember the LinkedIn app ripping all my contacts, so no apps for me. I just use the sites.

> use the sites.

Which are increasingly user hostile, if not down right impossible to view on mobile. Go try using Reddit or Twitter on your Mobile browser.

My solution to this for past year: only use the laptop for most things. No more distractions in the pocket, feels pretty good!

That makes it real easy, actually. No Reddit or Twitter

RIF is a good alternative Reddit phone client.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

For those of us who can't go to the bathroom without reddit.

Actually twitter is fine on a mobile browser provided you use an account.

What I miss is the multi-container extension on fennec/firefox mobile. I keep using those sites in incognito mode but that mean I can only use one at a time.

> provided you use an account.

Within 3 days of registering a new account they will prompt you 'for a phone number, because we detected security issues with your usage'. Don't know how having a phone number helps with security issues like that, but again -user hostile-.

I'm not creating a Twitter account just to read their public site, because they are user hostile and privacy invasive.

Well I respect that if you don't want to participate that's fine. There are still way of using an alternative web frontend like nitter.

I actually find Twitter’s mobile web app experience to be pretty good–they don’t nag me to install the app every 5 seconds, it’s reasonably performant, the back button works properly and even mostly preserves scroll position. All of the core functionality is there, except new features like Fleets I don’t care about anyway. I use it regularly and have been pretty impressed.

Reddit on the other hand is absolutely hostile and basically none of what I said above is true of their mobile web UI. I refuse to install their app simply out of spite for how aggressively they nag for me to use it. I’ve said no like 500 times at this point, will I change my mind on the 501st prompt?

I all I ever see when following Twitter links on mobile is the lower 1/3 of the screen with a "it's better in the app" banner bullshit. What web app from Twitter are you seeing that doesn't have that?

I have the same experience. When I want to access twitter I use https://nitter.net/<twitterhandle>

Thank you!! I was unsuccessfully searching for something like this. Btw I also see a full screen, not closable login nag when scrolling down a few tweets. The solutions is to tap on login and close the dialog on the following screen. I won‘t make an account, twitter. Shut me out completely and I‘ll be gone, just like with reddit.

Happy to pay it forward. It was in a similar thread a few months ago that I found it.

Its significantly less hostile if you use it as an web app, logged in. Even presents a PWA that is basically indistinguishable from the Twitter-Lite app served to data starved localities in Google Play.

Yeah, maybe, but A) I don't have a Twitter account and B) when following a link from some news aggregator showing a "news" story that is nothing but a string of Twitter posts, the user won't be logged in then either.

Have you tried using the website without logging in? Basically impossible.

I just saw this in another article: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/banish-for-safari/id1632848430

I wonder if it can solve this problem since reddit/twitter/tiktok won't stop.

They also restrict your ability to copy links and text in apps, so that you can't open things in a non-walled app browser. This I believe is why sites like Twitter also uses URL conversion... There is a wild variety of ways in which they can limit where those URLs go, and I've noticed sometimes it even makes externally pointing links not work properly (Which can be turned on and off at will by the link service owner).

Those URLs also mask origination when they point to other sites, so that site logs don't provide any real specific data on where traffic to them is coming from.

The most Internet/user hostile era ever is probably going on right now. Will be interesting to see where this all goes.

I used this to reduce my usage of the sites. It's so terrible I'm in and out in just enough time to check notifications

Having said that I find Twitter to be quite usable in a mobile browser, it's one of the few that isn't awful

Facebook is by far the worst, image posts overlap the edges of the screen, terrible for anything with text overlaying[1]. You can use the mobile version instead but then you can't use FB messenger at all

[1] e.g. https://img.imgy.org/-7p8.jpg

It is infuriating that I can't browse certain Reddit pages because they want me to "use the app so they know I'm over 18". I first ran into this in my current attempt to play through Dark Souls 3. It seems like the community there has a lot of good discussions about beating certain bosses, but for some reason, Reddit has decided that the content in that sub-reddit needs age verification and they wall it behind the app.

> It is infuriating that I can't browse certain Reddit pages because they want me to "use the app so they know I'm over 18".

Nothing's stopping you. There is no such message on old.reddit.com.

I had no idea this existed

Use it while you can. Can bet they'll disable it soon.

Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook (and mbasic.facebook.com), LinkedIn, etc. are all user hostile.

This gets amplified when using ad/tracker blockers at DNS level (NextDNS).

I remember when the Twitter app asked if I wanted to sync the mobile contacts every time I opened the app. Thankfully Android has become better when it comes to this even if there are still flaws.

I just keep an old phone around for when I need to use apps (banking, especially). Can’t steal the information off my device if there’s nothing on there taps forehead

Quite a few apps from the early mobile days did this.

This theoretically can't happen anymore, right?

You have to give apps permission to get your contacts, right?

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