Reddit on iOS safari has been getting incrementally, nearly unusable worse. It had some sharp edges before but it seems they are moving faster now with the same or greater defect rate and shit is getting bad:

- URLs commonly auto-link to the things behind them, even including spaces and words.

- Pinch to zoom on the homepage causes the page to reload. Forcing you to lose your place/content.

- I sometimes cannot click to play videos on the feed. I can click through the comments and then click play on the player.

- Comments pasted from perfectly valid markdown render as whitespace deleted garbage

- Clicking "reply" then tapping in the box makes it disappear. I literally cannot see what I'm typing. I have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.

- After typing into the comment box the "comment" button to submit it is not visible

- Being a mod: The dropdown for selecting a removal rule will not let me scroll past what shows on the initial dropdown.

- Rare but critical interfaces like banning a user (or managing an existing ban). Essentially cannot be used on mobile.

- When typing responses to people as a mod, depending on the box sometimes I "lose" the comment button.

And, I noticed yesterday, old.reddit.com now requires login. Which renders a blank page on my phone. Check and mate.

With Reddit I think it's on purpose. They want to drive users to the mobile app. Maybe they aren't introducing bugs on purpose but not addressing them isn't a accident.

The pinch to zoom issue is actually a WebKit bug (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305622), although technically the root cause is Reddit using a ton of memory

My conspiracy theory is that Reddit intentionally makes the iOS Safari experience awful to drive people to download the app.

I’m sure it works.

But for me, it drove me to stop using Reddit on my phone.

I presume that's in addition to all the intentional enshittification.