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by josephcsible·4mo ago·view on hn ↗
Hall of shame:

* Reddit won't let you read "unreviewed" content on mobile web (but will on desktop web)

* PayPal won't let you pick your 5% rewards category, or set up balance auto-replenish without their app

* Robinhood Banking won't let you see your credit card statement or pay your balance without their app

* Instagram won't let you share posts as stories without their app

* SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no will call, mailed tickets, print at home, or mobile web)

10 comments
How about an 81-year-old Dodgers fan who has held season tickets for 50 years, and doesn't even own a smartphone, who can no longer order the traditional book of season tickets: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...
Hah, I submitted the same story here just a few hours before you posted that. I don't know whether that's actually an example of this particular problem or not, though, since I'm not sure whether they have a website that can display the tickets.
Linkedin is the worst offender of them all. My feeds don't get updated for days when I use the web mobile version and I start seeing new posts only when I switch to desktop mode (switching to mobile shows the same old feed). They also don't even let you reply to comment replies or see reactions. They even scroll you all the way to the top if you dismiss their annoying "linkedin is better on app" pop-up just to punish you for not using their app. I'll never install apps of these companies that are actively hostile towards those that don't want to be constantly spied on by them.
They are so paranoid against scraping or someone building automations on top of their app they don't want you to have, that they are willing to make their actual application borderline unusable for the power users who would actually be willing to pay for their first party upsells and features.

It's infuriating. I have literally tried all of their paid products in various forms (they are expensive but the value is clearly there if you're a business). If only they invested as much in making them actually good as they did in preventing you from using extensions or other tools to implement the features they can't or won't, I'm sure they'd get a lot more business.

> SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no mailed tickets, will call, print at home, or mobile web)

Wow. I guess it's been a few years since I've used SeatGeek but this is news to me. Stuff like this and MSG's facial scanning regime (I'm sure the venues are all doing it to differing extents) make me not even want to bother with big concerts. Club shows are almost always a better time, anyways.

Spotify arbitrarily gatekeeps even basic function like accessing your Liked songs on the PWA
old.reddit.com
I've been on reddit since the beginning. If they kill old.reddit, I'm gone.
After abandoning all my reddit accounts [1] (some back into the aughties), I eventually found hackernews. Here is now the only place online which I write publicly.

Still, I love sharing tips for navigating reddit (you can do these without logging in):

1) old.reddit.com allows you to use Reddit's built-in link shortener,

e.g. To link to today's top post (<https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1seo5rj/cafe_in_brazi...>), you can just write ` https://old.reddit.com/1seo5rj ` [this does not work without old.]

2) you can string multiple subreddits together using the ` + ` operator,

e.g. <https://old.reddit.com/r/dogs+cats+fish> to view /r/dogs + /r/cats +/r/fish in a single stream/webpage

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[1] in 2021; Dear /u/Spez: my promise given after your US Congressional testimony/fabrication... remains promised. —Rita/mod/bayarea

I fully expect it to get retired in the wake of the forthcoming de-anonymization of the web. But I’m frankly shocked they haven’t already given how aggressively bad the “new” one has become.
Red reader is another option to make reddit usable.

https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader

It's probably the only reason they keep it around - to keep power users from going to or starting a competing forum.
Instagram has had both significant mobile only features, and desktop only features.
Robinhood gets double shame points for naming the app "Banking" (previously "Credit Card"), no Robinhood or RH in the name. I love the card but hate everything about that app.
A counter example, Bank of America app don’t have functionality to do ACH transfer natively, you can only do it on the web app.

But this may be on purpose by Bank of America.

Google maps is also severely nerfed on mobile web.
* Untappd won't let you tag your co-drinking friends without their app