Reddit Joins Other Social Media Platforms in Worsening Its Website and Pushing Visitors to Apps ⇥ arstechnica.com

Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:

The block seemed curious, given that Reddit began as a website, and websites generally want traffic. Few are in the practice of turning traffic away.

But some services, including X and Instagram, aggressively push users toward apps—or at least toward being logged in to them.

I reached out to the company to ask what was going on. According to a spokesperson, “We recently started running a test for a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the site. These users are already familiar with Reddit and we’ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app. The app offers a more personalized experience and users can more easily find communities that match their interests.”

Like other major social media platforms, this turns Reddit into a walled garden. Presumably, this is in part of the company’s aggressive strategy to license users’ posts for A.I. training, plus encouraging user growth. It sucks that the open web is getting torn apart because commercial websites are incentivized to direct people to apps where large-scale scraping is a bigger challenge. This whole thing used to feel so quaint.