As quoted from the linked post.
It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
This is separate from the API issue. This will actually BLOCK you from even viewing reddit on your phone without using the official app.
Archive.org link in case the post is removed.
This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.
Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?
The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.
Never thought that reddit would make so many gaffes to push me to use… bing chatgpt search.
This will cause search engines to deprioritize reddit threads in search results due to the ‘bounce factor’.
They want to force more people to download the app so that they can show potential investors how many people are using the app, and so they can mine data off of phones with the app. I fucking guarantee that’s what this is.
They are gambling that the people who incidentally land on reddit using their phones to search for things will be more likely to download the app than stop using reddit when it comes up in a search.
It doesn’t even work! When you google something and then are forced onto the app it just sends you onto the home page! not the one you were originally on!
They can’t even figure out deep links?