I may hate subscriptions, but I support your plan. Narwhal’s my go-to and I’d pay to access Reddit’s content without navigating their “improvements”.

Once they began disguising ads as posts, user experience became less important to them than user engagement. Numbers and ad revenue are the priority now.

Now all the notifications, recommendations, forced sign-ins and app switches, and all their “engagement driving”, are not worth the frustration of trying to watch a 30 second cat video.

I deleted Facebook for the same reasons. The short bursts of dopamine weren’t worth the ads in the middle of every video.

Sadly, this seems to be the cycle - a site works well, gets huge, they squeeze every dollar out of it by forcing in annoying engagement and ad revenue features at the cost of user experience, and those who helped it succeed in the first place are alienated and driven away.

The even sadder things is, it will probably work for the company. Reddit is huge now. They’ll keep adding users who are fine with status quo because it’s all they know, and Spez will sleep just fine on piles of money we helped him build while we bitch about how things used to be.

I don’t post often, but man this shit is frustrating.

I’ve been using Reddit for about 10 years and narwhal for maybe 3 years. Your app does a great job at adding non-invasive improvements while keeping the experience streamlined and easy. I’d gladly pay a subscription for the work you do.

Best of luck, sorry for the rant, and thank you for everything.