How to browse Reddit on mobile without installing the app

Reddit, the company, really wants me to install its app. When I try to browse the site on my phone I get a pop-up telling me to “Get the app to keep using Reddit”. Reddit has its reasons for this. It wants to gather more data about me, for one thing. It wants to stop me from blocking ads. I want to not let Reddit do those things, though, so I’m not going to install the app. As I’ve joked, I’ve been trying to quit reading Reddit anyway. But I couldn’t help but wonder: is there a workaround? And there is, sort of: you can use the old version of Reddit, which you can access by adding old. to the beginning of any Reddit URL. You won’t see the pop-up—but editing URLs is an annoying thing to do on a phone. Also, the old Reddit is too small to really read on my tiny phone screen. So I needed another solution. It turns out that Sink It, which I wrote about for WIRED a couple years ago, solves these issues. This free browser extension works in Safari on iPhone and Firefox on Android (the mobile version of Chrome doesn’t support browser extensions). As of this writing, the extension does not solve the mobile pop-up directly, but it does support re-directing Reddit to the old version of the site. You’ll have to make this change in the settings. There are also options in SinkIt that make the old version of Reddit easier to read on a phone. I tested this and can confirm it works. Every site I open loads in the old version of Reddit, adjusted to work well on mobile. Even better: no amount of browsing will cause the “Get the app to keep using Reddit” pop-up to show up. As I said: I’m kind of enjoying Reddit being broken on my phone, so I’m going to uninstall this. But if you want to scroll Reddit, and don’t want to install the app, this method works.