Reddit is also appending a new theater mode for seeing images, videos, and GIFs from visual subreddits like r/pics more clearly on mobile, as well as live commentaries and the addition of the iOS app’s speed version of a reading button for Android users. In a bit of a gift to heavy mobile Redditors, the organization is making it so the celebratory “cake day” icon, which lets different users know when you registered the site on the anniversary of that day, is visible on mobile and not just on the desktop.
These features, while comparatively minor additions on their own, do link to make a convincing argument that Reddit sees its mobile app as the future of the whole platform, where it hopes a majority of its users will move and where new users will necessarily sign up. It’s on mobile that the organization can shed its anachronistic design, one it begrudgingly keeps around on the web too so as not to threaten or alienate the passionate society that creates and moderates its content.
Reddit for a long time neglected mobile, and the company only began taking the program seriously in 2015 when co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian reassumed control of the company’s day-to-day administration and product improvement efforts.
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