Reddit doesn’t seem like an overly complex website to navigate but making its content easy to view on a mobile app is a challenge. The content variety is huge; you get everything from text based posts, videos, images, GIFs, to links. On top of all that there are the comments and the nested comment threads. The official Reddit app for both iOS and Android has a little Down button that helps to make navigation within threads easier but it can get in the way since it floats over the content. What few people might know, and Reddit user u/Neonlad discovered, is that you can move the Down button on the Reddit app. You can literally position it anywhere you want.
The Down button, if you don’t recognize it by this name, is the floating button with two arrows pointing down. To see it, you have to tap on a post and start scrolling through the comments.
Tap and hold on the button and it will grow larger so long as you’re holding it. Drag it to any part of the screen that you want, and then release it. The button will stick to wherever you dropped it.
The Down button on the Reddit app remembers its position after it has been moved. You can move it again whenever you need to. Each time, it will remember the last place it was dropped.
This is useful for both text posts and other post types. For text posts, the button is bound to be covering something up. It’s small so it can’t exactly hide an entire paragraph or even a sentence but if you’re trying to read a thread, it can consistently make for a poorer reading experience. The freedom to move it means you can position it somewhere that makes for better reading.
For other posts, those that aren’t text based, the freedom to move the button means the content is never hidden. Imagine every image on Reddit having an annoying button at the side. Sure, it might be on the side but it would nevertheless obstruct an image.
It’s obvious a lot of thought went into the app’s design and no doubt Reddit listened to feedback from its users while developing and refining it. It does seem that, since the app is complex, the on-boarding leaves a few things for users to discover on their own.
You can move the Down button on the Reddit app for both iOS and Android.
