"This community is available in the app"
Reddit has been a/b testing behavior like this for months. Multiple different popups with variations on "view this in the app"; in some cases the popup is on every single page load, sometimes only once. They started blurring images on select subreddits with a message that you could only view the sub in their app.<p>Okay, I know they're chasing one of two things here: a higher level of revenue from the advertising they can embed in the app, or some app-download metric that can be converted somehow somewhere to more money.<p>But for users like me, they have a couple of significant problems. First, that if I were at all motivated to use their stupid app in the first place, I would've already done, which means that these attempts to force the issue mean they're <i>really</i> scraping the bottom of the barrel, and ohwow that looks bad.<p>And two, I <i>don't trust them</i>. There is absolutely no way I am ever going to give them that level of access to my device just so I can browse their website. And every step of their behavior here only reinforces my decision. They aren't tempting me into using their app with irresistible new features that really can't be provided by a regular ol' mobile website. Instead, they're showing me just what kind of behavior I should expect from their app by playing these dirty little games.<p>On the plus side, all this has caused my Reddit time to fall off a cliff and I'm cruising through books at double last year's rate now.