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It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell

It's honestly astonishing to see how poorly the leadership team at Reddit has been executing. People shit on Twitter (Zuck called Twitter "a clown car that fell into a gold mine") but Reddit is so much worse. The fact that Reddit didn't have a decent mobile app until a few years ago is unbelievable. Indie-developers were shipping a better reddit mobile apps than the company.

deleted 4y ago
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bojan 4y ago
Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them? The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better. I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.
- exreddit 4y ago
- koshergweilo 4y ago
  Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.
- LewisVerstappen 4y ago
  It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today. Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter). Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps. Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.
- munificent 4y ago
  APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model. If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
I bought Apollo (iOS, highly recommend) out of sheer spite for Reddit pushing their own shitty mobile version through dark patterns and shitty design.
MrMan 4y ago
Reddit is much better than Twitter in terms of social UX and worse in terms of app UX

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[deleted]

bojan 4y ago

Why would they need their own app when they have good APIs and enough people to create perfectly good third-party apps for them? The only reason I can see is monetization, with your own app you can control the user engagement better. I specifically don't use their app because I explicitly don't want all the fluff features they've added over the years. That's also why I still use old.reddit.com.

exreddit 4y ago
koshergweilo 4y ago
Also ads. Specifically more data to better target ads.
LewisVerstappen 4y ago
It's incredibly important for so many reasons. Just as a reminder, users have been shifting from desktop to mobile so the world is now mobile-first. Facebook had a bet-the-company shift in the early 2010s from desktop to mobile and the Instagram app is a huge part of why Meta is valuable today. Reddit makes money through ads. Charging for API access and expecting third-party app developers to build an entire ad platform is not possible. The tech is incredibly difficult to build and then you have to actually get advertisers to use the platform (btw - this is something that Reddit is still failing at versus Facebook/Google/Twitter). Something like 50% of Reddit's traffic is from mobile users. If Reddit wants to add new features for these users, it's impossible to do so if all the users are using third-party apps. Bunch of other reasons that I can enumerate in a bit.
munificent 4y ago
APIs are fundamentally at odds with an ad-based revenue model. If you let third-party apps provide a UX for your data, the app developer will naturally try to make the bext experience they can for users. The first step to doing that is to ditch all the ads. Now you're paying all the cost to host and serve the data, but the third-party app is killing your income.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

I bought Apollo (iOS, highly recommend) out of sheer spite for Reddit pushing their own shitty mobile version through dark patterns and shitty design.

MrMan 4y ago

Reddit is much better than Twitter in terms of social UX and worse in terms of app UX