The whole point of the new reddit (and many other sites like Anandtech and Tony Ortega's blog) is to make you click on ads accidentally. Someday the world will wake up and realize this is not just annoying but it is good old fashioned fraud... but it will still take a while.
One advantage of a mobile app over a mobile web site is that you can use the accelerometer and other sensors to predict when somebody is going to click on something and you can trigger a layout shift and... oops!
So if the goal was to get clicks on ads, they'd be pushing you hard to mobile web.
The real reason is the app can get much more interesting data from you.
> One advantage of a mobile app over a mobile web site is that you can use the accelerometer
Accelerometer API access has been available on mobile web for ~ a decade. I think it'd actually be more trouble than it's worth to listen for a "tilt" to shift the view and misdirect the user's tap. Most UI's just put the ad dangerously close to an element that's also interactive, or style the ad to look nearly identical to the other content in the feed, like reddit. It's to make you encounter ads and maybe tap on them purposefully or accidentally. They will happily take either.
E.g. this demo triggers a permission prompt:
https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html
I also agree with your other points though.
This has been a very frustrating experience with new YouTube which now hides comments in the vertical layout. I used to pay for Premium, so it’s some random recommended video that I constantly accidentally click, it’s very frustrating, esp when it doesn’t save my location in an hours long video. It only clicked for me that it’s actually for adverts when I saw someone else’s app.
Now, instead of paying Google $10 a month for a better experience, as I was happy to do, I’ve just spent a few bucks on Vinegar and donate the $10/mo to a couple of creators I like on Patreon. I’ve been successfully converted from an extremely happy paying customer to an annoyed leech.
> you can use the accelerometer and other sensors to predict when somebody is going to click on something and you can trigger a layout shift and... oops!
Is there anything out in production that’s provably doing this? That’s pretty aggravating if so!
It’s happened to me a few times… I think? But hard to know if it’s just “ads load slowly and I decided what to tap on equally slowly”.
The official app does not support landscape view, or at least that is a big reason why I use Infinity on my tablet.
I couldn't trigger a layout shift on purpose.
The problem is that BigCos destroy the 3rd party apps that they acquire. The same thing happened after Twitter acquired Tweetie.
Indie devs and BigCos have vastly different incentives. Simply acquiring an app won't help, because the app will no longer be developed and managed by an indie dev. Wreckage is inevitable.
So buying apps would just shorten their runway even further. And even if they did, they would just be bringing in more users of the same type they have today - users who are unwilling to pay for reddit accounts.
They need to figure out what their business model is, not just buy apps that keep them running down the same path they have been on for years without profitability.
It's not an accident that Twitter just went through this too. We're in a new era of too-big-to-be-disrupted enshittening.
If have seen versions of this serveral times, and it assumes that what is good for users is good for Reddit. It is like asking "if people like free lunch, why dont all restruants serve free lunch. Imagine all the customers they would have."
In reality, there is a trade-off between happy customers and customer revenue.
Many of these 3rd party apps are made by single developers, some are open source. Reddit could clone or recreate them easily if they wanted.
grain of salt and everything, as it's a conspiracy theory off twitter...