Everything is political.

Return to freakin sender!

We gonna finally get a decent Zen 5 entry?

I was using the mobile app.

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

Fix this!

Yeah, that was my point.

Because so much of a (typical) mobile app’s behavior is delegated to first-party APIs, having a huge range of device models in the field doesn’t cause as much of a splintering problem as it would for software that defines more of its own behavior internally, like games tend to do.

Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.

For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.

Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.

Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.

Me right now. Slowly replacing everything I put in a special place, because I can only find the non-special stuff.

Instant promotion to… Essential Worker™

Cool vacations tend to be, unfortunately, bookended by extreme boredom and frustration of being stuck in a car. That was probably the most salient thought for that kiddo at that moment.

He had an aneurysm, caused by a horrendous misspelling of the word “persuaded”.

just sold you out

They been sellin us out since the start. And they never even paid for us!

Got bills to pay and mouths to feed, there ain’t no

thin in this world for free. No I can’t slow down, I can’t hold back, though you know I wish I could. There ain’t no rest for the wicked… til we close our eyes for good.

Do you condemn KHHAAMAS?

Looks more like an egg to me

Bean lied to*

The pieces fit in my ass

That’s cuz you gotta bring your own TP with you instead of it being provided to you for free. No need for a TP holder tube if you’re not gonna share.

Wait, are US bathrooms communist???

It’s the screenshot equivalent of a TV show cutting to the next scene the moment a punchline lands — usually a stronger and more “taboo” punchline that followed up in the dramatic pause after a previous more light-hearted punchline.