I don't think its a strange alien place. But I do think its stupid. Go on the reddit mobile website (not the mobile app, the website). Try to get the little thing asking you to download the reddit app to go away. I couldn't. (although if you can make it go away please tell me how but I don't think you can)
Oh god, fuck mobile Reddit... Every goddamn time you navigate somewhere it pukes up 2-3 more spam messages about installing the app (Note: I did in fact install the app at one point. It ran like ass, so I got rid of it. Then they doubled down even harder on the advertisements for it) and have to work
very carefully so as not to let it think you actually want to download the damn thing. I've had to completely kill the tab and reload it sometimes because it gets so bogged down in trying to advertise the app to me that the actual pages just stop loading in.
There are a few different examples I've seen... One is a little blue bubble at the bottom of the screen, which isn't that bad and can be removed by just tapping the X
very carefully, because its tap zone is really tiny and is next to the huge "OH YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD THE APP DO YA?" zone that comprises the rest of the bubble.
The second is a little dialog that pops up at the bottom and fogs over the rest of the screen, and asks if you want to open the page in the app or in the browser. You need to hit "continue" rather than "open", because that's clear as fucking mud.
Third, you've got your screen-blocking pop up that just takes over everything and slaps its digital dong smack in the middle of your viewing area. There's a teeny tiny X in one of the corners that'll get rid of it.
And then you've got the asshole navigation grab that instead of taking you to the thread you clicked on, just redirects you straight to the app download without further ado. There's no way of getting past this one, but it only shows up if you tap on the image next to a thread link rather than the header text of that thread link... Don't ask me what genius came up with that one.
At this point, I'm convinced that the only reason they're doing all this is to make the non-app browsing experience so
miserable that they annoy users into downloading the app. Which, I'm guessing, still probably runs like complete ass.