This is the Daily Tech News from Monday, May 11th, 2026.

We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context and try to help each other understand this crazy tech world.

Today, Reddit is trying to force some mobile users into its app instead of its website,

and boy, are some of them upset.

They are not pleased.

I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Rob Dunwood.

Let's start with what you need to know with that big story.

So last week, we actually mentioned this, Ars Technica's Nate Anderson was among the folks who noticed that when they tried to visit Reddit on a mobile browser, a pop-up told them to get the app to keep using Reddit.

And then it said you can search better, personalize your feed, never miss an update on your favorite communities.

But there was no way to

dismiss that pop-up. And the only option it offered was tapping a button to get the app.

Now, when ours contacted Reddit, Reddit said it was a test on a, quote, small subset of

frequently logged out mobile users. Anderson was able to access the website again by clearing his cookies. So if it's a test, the cookie would be like, oh, they're in the test, give them the pop-up. You clear the cookies. Maybe you're not in the test. You don't get the pop-up. Supposedly, logging in also prevents the pop-up. I'm not sure what the maneuver was to be able to log in without getting the pop-up,

because the pop-up would kind of prevent you from logging in.

Anyway, the audience has not died down about this.

Now, I tend, Rob, to, you know, not get into the internet is mad stories,

because pretty much every story is the internet is mad

and a lot of people that are mad are not really that mad or they're bots using LLMs

to stoke anger.

This one strikes me as legitimately people unpleased that Reddit would even experiment with saying like, no, you don't get to use the

web. We want to make you use an app, which is the opposite of what we usually see. Usually we see

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