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Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Technology
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It will well and truly be dead and gone once old.reddit.com stops working. It remains the one good way to view the site, regardless of device.
My theory is that they realize that a significant number of power users on the site are still using old.reddit.com, so they are keeping it going because getting rid of it would turn the website into a ghost town. They will continue to push their app and new website because they can push more advertising through it to the people that are just there to consume.
You think there are still redditors around?
I think it's just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.
A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those "catch phrases" then I see a few votes.
I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.
One thing I've noticed lurking on AITA is that there's suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you'd see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.
It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It's still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.
While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?
I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.
They can't use FACTS, their bible doesn't have any good ones.
It's mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.
I can guarantee you the Argentina subreddit is heavily brigaded by the extreme right. That's the case I know, but it's easy to imagine it happening in a lot of not so popular subreddits
I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I've been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they're better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.
* my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv
I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.
Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.
Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it's all speculation that can't be objectively disproven* so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.
It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.
Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.
Idk the nish communities are really helpful, 3d printing, Photoshop help, all that kind of stuff. Hell I even was able to have my Dad's memorial pic photoshopped by somebody. It turned out good too
I haven't checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they're not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!
On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming
As well as flashlights.
I just left last month, I'd say 30% users and rest bots
Lemmy world does the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Since they have so much of the users on the fediverse, them controlling their front page really controls the votes and who sees what.
How would that work?
We are all on different instances. With different algorithms, technology, and differing filters. The code doesnt support what your saying.
I know nothing about Lemmy's architecture, but how does my instance tally votes on a post from another instance?
Does it trust that instance? Does it only take into account votes cast on itself? Does it ask every federated instance for their vote totals?
Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.
Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.
I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc... but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).
One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.
Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.
That's quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they'd have to stream a bunch of fake events.
Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.
If an instance has the most people and blocks those people from seeing your post, delays it from posting, or downgrades it as a source, it could easily be done. They have control over their own instance.
Old reddit still has screens and moderation tools that haven't been rebuilt. It's kept on life support for mods right now.
I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of people that only interact with social media through apps in this day and age. Even on Reddit I would be surprised if the old design is more than a few percent of the user base.
It honestly does raise the question of why they are still maintaining the old UI. It seems like it would be an annoying legacy product to keep alive for a tiny part of the user-base. Perhaps it’s used as an API stability canary or something though.
Not at all. I'm comparing the vast majority that only consume to a small minority that actually interact and provide the content that others consume. Without that minority all that would be left is bot comments.
Reddit pushes an ad and tracking infested app to make money off the consumers while doing the minimum to keep the content submitters on the site even if they make no money off them. I wouldn't be surprised if old reddit was a couple percent of users but 25% of the comments that aren't bots.
I keep seeing people saying that Reddit will be dead when this or that happens. I've seen a handful of those things come to pass already and reddit it doing just fine.
Most people don't care. They will continue using it. It will survive.
Reddit is doing fine and Reddit is fine are two different things.
Most users complain consistently about it. That's not a good sign for them.
Their popular posts don't get as many upvotes/comments as they used to. There's definitely a decline in usage.
It's being overrun by bots.
Tons of people are getting bot banned off the platform.
It's not like it's going to just disappear anytime soon. But I've seen this many times before. It's a dying platform. But it'll be a slow death. And by death I mean it'll just become irrelevant compared to other platforms. It'll probably never actually go away. No one I know uses Facebook anymore. It used to be HUGE. We ALL used it. Now it's a ghost town on my feed. I've messaged people and never got a response and run into them at a birthday or something months later and "Oh sorry, I don't check it anymore". It's still there, but may as well not be. That's Reddit's future.
Two things I noticed was most subreddits that weren't front pagers are getting way less traffic than they used to across the entire site.
The other is why I left: I saw a front page millions of subscribers subreddit go out of their way to temporarily bot purge during the IPO* drama. Upvotes went from 10k+ to...hundreds. Posting frequency fell off a cliff. It was so disturbing I left because I saw that in conjunction with Benn Jordan's video estimating how much of xshitter was bot traffic which he estimated to be a full third of all traffic on xshitler a year ago.
I'm not defending reddit, nor care if reddit dies, but you are saying shit as if it is fact and not providing any sources to back up anything you are saying, and it might as well be reading nonsense from a Facebook MAGA boomer