zlacker

The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.

WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly what the other poster said: a browser context with access to some local native API's in order to hoover more data about the user. It is rare that a first-party app actually has some effort put into it to be a quality app. Is in fact so rare, that the sites that actually put in the effort suffer because folks can't believe that a native app for a site could actually be better or worth it.

>>jasonj+(OP)
I think the parent's point was that an app for reddit only makes sense because they deliberately don't add the features you like to the mobile site. There's no reason those features couldn't work perfectly well in a browser, they just choose not to (and to kill off third party apps).

>>ghostp+p
If Figma runs perfectly well in a web browser, Reddit can do the same. It was built for and evolved almost entirely within the browser, like many other Internet forums. Pure data grab.

>>ghostp+p
They’re not indifferent to browsers (less data mineable contexts) so much as actively hostile. For the past few years some things I have to add “-reddit” to my Google searches, because they killed i.reddit.com, which was the only useable, fast, non-complete-shit mobile site they have ever built. Their old. subdomain isn’t really readable in a cell phone.

Their new version is incredibly slow, moves me to sub-pages trying to expand comment threads (very disruptive if I saw something in the Google preview snippet and want to control F to it, but whatever comment that was literally isn’t loaded), and sometimes outright fails to load. now I can’t/wont use it.

So screw reddit, it’s a glorified q&a site, with sub forums run by fedora neckbeards, that’s gotten uppity and chosen to be hostile to users. And for some reason Google hasn’t just downranked it to death. The other day there was a thread complaining that their AI responses are reducing websites clicks. I hope that it is very damaging to reddit.

>>DrewAD+U8
Reddit runs well IMO if you go to old.reddit.com. The mobile site is borderline useless, presumably intentionally.

>>zxexz+Ob
According to Reddit's "Staff Platform Engineer (Web Platform Team)":

--- start quote ---

Old Reddit has the advantage of being pretty much static non-interactive content. No video, tiny thumbnails, and barely any JS or styling. Some people like this and some don't, but the end result is a very lean website that performs well out of the box.

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841087335414280571

Suffice to say, I'm on the frontend perf team and we're acutely aware of these problems

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841092341991403974

--- end quote ---

This was in October 2024.

Which is of course a bunch of bullshit when you consider that Reddit's backend returns most data in under 400ms, and it takes Reddit frontend 3+ seconds to render it

It could be that they are just incompetent.

>>DrewAD+U8
Figma is sort of an Apollo Project among webshit, isn't it? IIRC they did rather extreme amount of R&D to make the webapp performant in spite of the web as a platform. Great that they did, and I hope their insights will keep trickling down to everyone else - but I don't think they're currently an example anyone can actually follow.

>>DrewAD+U8
Figma shows what it is possible to do in a browser, but the cost of doing so is basically prohibitive. The level of persistence and technical nous needed to stand it up are on par with getting a first-person shooter running at an interactive frame rate on a 286 -- they basically reimplemented a browser within the browser.

>>landl0+rb
There are extensions that redirect to old.reddit.com with mobile friendly CSS.

>>jasonj+(OP)
> make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.

McMaster-Carr begs to differ. Hell even old.reddit is pretty snappy (but deliberately shittily rendered on mobile). Websites can be fast if you don't stuff them with bullshit or degrade then on purpose to drive traffic to the app.

>>grues-+Qv
Right -- their website is a great example of a great web app. Their web site is brilliantly organized. But their revenue comes from sales of their products, not harvesting user data, so they have little need to add all the extra jank.

But if they had a native app (do they?) I imagine they would have the wherewithal to build the app natively, with the same stellar navigation of their website, and maybe some native-only features? Imagine if you could use the 3d sensor + camera of an iPhone, and point it at an assembly, and the app would identify the parts it could, and you could order with one click, or integrate with a local ERP or other systems...

>>akobol+sq
I’ve worked on teams that made complex production web apps with a tiny tiny fraction of Reddit’s cash flow.

>>TeMPOr+1q
It’s great, but it’s not Apollo-level anything. Most games are far more interactively and visually complex. Apples to oranges with UX and interaction problems to solve, but certainly not depth and complexity. I’ve certainly experienced bugs in Reddit’s interface before — there seems to be this idea that they have to be so risk averse that they can’t do anything significant— I’ll bet you a pizza that their official app which implements all the features that people really want to use is made with JS/HTML on the back end anyway.

>>troupo+Ti
Based on how universally horrible their video playback performance is (even in the iOS app), I can only assume incompetence.