72·
5 days agoA 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.
I was using the mobile app.