While it’s seldom been known for making popular decisions that enhance the user experience, Reddit’s latest blunder just might take the cake.
Despite having a perfectly functional mobile website, the self-professed “front page of the internet” has now chosen to lock users out of it completely, while pushing them toward its app.
Yes, seriously: a newly-implemented pop-up — which, unlike previous iterations, can no longer be closed — begs users to “get the app to keep using Reddit,” while blocking them from clicking any links or using the site in anyway. On your phone, it basically just turns the entirety of reddit.com into a huge ad for the company’s app.
To many frustrated users, it’s the latest sign that the platform is suffering from acute “enshittification,” a neologism coined by author Cory Doctorow that describes tech companies deliberately degrading their services to maximize profit.
“Thanks, Reddit,” one disgruntled user complained, on the r/enshittification subreddit. “Now it’ll be easier for me to quit you!”
“Are my days of anonymously browsing over?” another puzzled user wrote. “Is this a new rule of Reddit?”
The desperate measure highlights the precarious financial position Reddit finds itself in. Since going public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024, the company’s shares have gone on a rollercoaster ride as leadership tries to find a reliable method of monetization.
It’s also struggled to walk a tightrope, on one hand being tempted with major contracts to allow AI companies to use all of its user-generated data to train large language models — while on the other, trying to keep from further alienating its already-frustrated users.
In 2024, the company signed a contract with OpenAI, a contentious deal that allowed the ChatGPT maker to train its AI models on user-submitted posts.
The vast majority of Reddit’s revenue comes from advertising, as the Financial Times reports, which could help explain its ongoing efforts to force its smartphone app on mobile users.
Reached for comment, the company instead offered a puzzling explanation: that the site-breaking popup is for users’ own good.
“We’ve found users who are logged in have a more personalized experience and can more easily find communities that match their interests,” a spokesperson told us. “So, we’re running a test for a small number of logged out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the Reddit site.”
Later, the spokesperson followed up with another statement that seemed to imply that the company is specifically targeting mobile users who visit the site a log — the exact people, in other words, who clearly don’t want to download yet another app.
“We’re testing this with a small subset of frequent mobile web users because they’re already familiar with Reddit and we’ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app,” it read.
Whether the obnoxious pop-up will end up being a wise move for the company is anything but clear. For one, Reddit still hugely relies on users ending up on the platform via Google searches — via their browser, not the app.
While an app experience gives Reddit far more opportunities to monetize interactions, user data, and so on, the company is playing a dangerous game.
“Given app engagement is the most direct organic traffic, the level of disconnect implies the vast majority of Reddit engagement growth is coming via Search and not converting to sticky intentional engagement,” Rothschild & Co Redburn analysts wrote, as quoted by the FT.
Put simply, Reddit’s bread and butter is new users arriving via search, but it’s seemingly willing to scare them away — or even lock them out altogether.
For now, Reddit is profitable. It has 140 million daily active users, which may pale in comparison to other social media networks, but provide them with highly valuable and increasingly harder-to-find human user-generated content. Who hasn’t appended the word “reddit” to a recent search?
But given its frequently shaky relationship with its core users — there’ve been a fair share of rebellions over the years — its efforts to shut out new users could soon endanger the company’s efforts to keep growing in an industry made up of far larger players.
And on the most basic level, taking a feature that works perfectly well and deliberately breaking it feels a bit too on-the-nose in the noisome depths of today’s tech industry.
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