I'm surprised that's their only problem with the mobile site. I purposely do not follow Reddit links because they show me a spinner for 7 seconds before showing the text of self posts. I can only assume that this delay to show a kilobyte of text is purposeful and meant to further steer users to the app, and not simply gross engineering incompetence, since the desktop site loads instantly.
(Though, thank you to the OP for posting an explicit desktop link so I didn't have to suffer this pause.)
At least AMP seems mostly dead. Though between cookie notices, "use our app" and "subscribe to our mailing list" popups, fixed navbars, and the damn on-screen keyboard popping up for no reason, I'm lucky to see even a single line of article text on some sites on mobile, though which line it is changes every few seconds as ads on invisible parts of the page pop into and out of existence. And then the article is shitty modern "long-form" journalism that doesn't get to the point until after 10 paragraphs describing the latte the reporter had while giving the interview. I've had better experiences reading click-bait slideshow articles than those from some so-called "professional" outlets. God I hate the modern web. Get off my lawn.
Ironically the mobile site is a full single page app, while the desktop site (or at least the old one) was mostly server rendered. It's not impossible to create a fast mobile client rendered site (Twitter have done well) but it's certainly not as easy as it is with plain old HTML.
The Reddit .compact view is great, and should be how mobile sites work. All server render, and a tiny bit of interactivity. It's miles better than the real mobile view.
try setting your browser's native font size to medium or large. It will fix up most sites' font sizes if you have issue viewing (sometimes, at the cost of bad scrolling if the site isn't doing content flowing properly).
The fix is to switch the browser to "Desktop Mode" (i.e. make it advertise a desktop User-Agent). That redirects you to the desktop site, which is never ratelimited. I wonder why. cough
(Note: I do this with Firefox for Android. No idea if other mobile browsers have a similar "Desktop Mode" feature.)
Twitter is the other major "use our app" and "please register to continue" abuser. The mobile website shows trimmed comments and the original post that cannot even be followed or scrolled through without a forced register-wall appearing.
Yeah, the operating assuptions of client side rendering seem to be that server-side CPU is expensive while network bandwidth and latency are cheap and the client has a fast CPU which it isn't using. I do wonder how it ever took off.
Forbes literally shows a loading spinner for _minutes_ if you try to opt out, and when it finally completes, you're sent to an empty page asking you to opt back in to tracking.
I used to occasionally read stuff there when an interesting-sounding article was posted to HN, but I'm not visiting that page ever again.
(Though, thank you to the OP for posting an explicit desktop link so I didn't have to suffer this pause.)
At least AMP seems mostly dead. Though between cookie notices, "use our app" and "subscribe to our mailing list" popups, fixed navbars, and the damn on-screen keyboard popping up for no reason, I'm lucky to see even a single line of article text on some sites on mobile, though which line it is changes every few seconds as ads on invisible parts of the page pop into and out of existence. And then the article is shitty modern "long-form" journalism that doesn't get to the point until after 10 paragraphs describing the latte the reporter had while giving the interview. I've had better experiences reading click-bait slideshow articles than those from some so-called "professional" outlets. God I hate the modern web. Get off my lawn.