Can I just say something super weird? I was recently looking for a solution to an issue I had and I needed to look at an image that I could see clearly so I had to zoom in, but because if I’m in the Reddit website, zooming in actually zooms into the Reddit UI, I did what I used to always do and opened the image in a new tab. No longer does that open the image only. It now opens the image AND some Reddit UI around it so guess what happened when I tried to zoom in? That’s right, I zoomed into the UI so I still couldn’t see the image!!! What the hell, Reddit, it’s almost as if you don’t want people to use your website anymore??
Yeah, I believe that was a change they made not long after shafting 3rd party apps. I had a couple older iOS devices with their own older versions of third party apps, and that change effectively made any post with a Reddit uploaded image unviewable. Incredibly infuriating and I can’t understand the logic behind it either.
I will say that further to that, a few years ago Imgur made a change that does the same damn thing if it detects you’re on mobile. Unless you tick “Show Desktop Site” in your browser, it’s impossible to actually standalone view a direct image.
Presumably to disable that hot linking from other websites/apps. Especially if they use scrapers.
But yeah, bad ux.
