19 ms·

Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader

125 points by gibspaulding 3y ago

skeoh 3y ago
Without RedReader I would not use Reddit. It's understandable that they would want to capitalize off third-party app users -- this approach is pretty disappointing though. Been on the site over 15 years but looks like things are coming to an end.
monksy 3y ago
Honestly, this is a great call for setting up Lemmy and getting the environment sutable for people to move off of reddit. It looks like this is going to kill RedditSync.
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  Lemmy?
  - monksy 3y ago
    https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
jjulius 3y ago
>[Reddit says] that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. [Reddit] raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else. I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it. Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".
- fphhotchips 3y ago
  Reddit continues to forget what made them successful: the collapse of Digg when they pulled the same shit that Reddit keeps trying on now. I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord. And this is frustrating to me as a user, because Discord is much more of a pain to try to search and navigate.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Yeah, I was gonna say—Reddit's UX has been getting steadily worse for years now, but Discord is a poor replacement. No hate to Discord's own UX, it's just a totally different kind of experience for what Reddit is (supposed to be).
  - rhaksw 3y ago
    There is so much they don't understand about their own product. Their motto "dive into anything" means go deep. Yet logged out viewers are only shown a depth of one or two levels of comments, and they recently toyed with dropping the maximum depth of comments from 10 to 5 on both the redesign and old reddit. Basically, they are copying other social media comment sections because they forgot their niche and they think the other model is more successful. I expect what will happen is existing users will leave, and nobody will come from other platforms to fill the gap. One of their most popular draws has been AMAs from public figures, and they haven't done much else in this vein. They could be hosting written debates from well known figures. Constrain their responses in length and number, say one comment per day, max 500 words, on controversial subjects like DEI [1]. Instead they want to lock it all down (to sanitize for advertisers? Or perceived popular viewpoints?). Meanwhile the only metric they consistently report, number of upvotes, is down 48% YoY! It was 46 billion in 2021 [2] and 24 billion in 2022 [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g [2] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2021 https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2021 [3] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2022-global https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2022-global
larrymyers 3y ago
It looks like Apollo is going to have to go paid only as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit. It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjulius 3y ago
  >To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients. They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  From the Apollo post: > For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer (later clarifying that with NSFW content they're talking about sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons), but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit. I wonder if this is the real impetus to do this now. It feels like there's increasing pressure coming from somewhere (payment processors? advertisers? politicians?) to push NSFW content to the margins. Edit: Another commenter mentioned them going public soon. That seems more likely.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients. Can’t, or more likely in my opinion don’t want to. What users want is pretty simple: a feed of posts from subscribed subreddits that’s sorted by post score and recency. The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer much room to twiddle with UI, algorithms, etc to drive ad impressions, feature adoption, etc.
pierat 3y ago
This looks like time to bring back the original reddit: Usenet. The people make content. The people post content to groups they're on. The people are the moderators of those groups. But reddit profits. Seems like the old federated solution is better. Capitalizing on people socializing and doing stuff just seems wrong, and I'd say IS wrong. I wonder what it'd take to rebuild Usenet and get easy access for the masses, like Mastodon has done?
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  I don't think Reddit is profitable? I can't find any sources indicating it is and several indicating it is not. That isn't to say they can't squeeze a profit out once they IPO, but it's been fairly altruistic up to this point.
ggm 3y ago
Yet to see a definitive statement for my choice of reddit browser, "joey for reddit" It has a "hold for popover" feature which makes skim reading and image preview much easier. I find myself doing it in browsers, wishing they did the same thing: thumbnail of an image? Just hold to see full size. It's a remarkably useful gui shortcut.
- yrral 3y ago
  I use a chrome extension called Imagus that will load any linked image on mouseover (either instantly or after a configurable delay). The image can be shown as large as your current browser window and it will even load links to albums in such a way where scrolling while mouse-overed or pressing left and right on the keyboard will advance between images. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgappgfkkfieppnmlhakdmaab https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgap...
  - ggm 3y ago
    Thanks. This may be exactly what I need!
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  iOS safari does this
lethologica 3y ago
In a way I’m thankful that Reddit has made using their site so inhospitable to mobile browsers. I’ve simply stopped using it. Though it seems they’ve at least brought back old.reddit.com but i.reddit.com still seems to redirect to the incredibly unusable www.reddit.com on mobile. Now, in its place, I load up a .epub book in the iOS Books app and set it to continuous scroll mode. This way I’m getting the dopamine hit from the continuous scrolling AND I’m actually reading something worth my time, energy, and effort rather than outrage bait, astroturfing posts, or karma farm threads.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Practically the same, except books on a tablet instead.
- dbtc 3y ago
  I've been using the space bar more and more in the browser (and less (and c-f/c-v in vi/emacs)), and am beginning to find it annoying when I have to scroll any other way. I wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  >astroturfing I guarantee you Reddit makes most of it's money from astroturfing. It's why they'll never go public, they don't want to open their books. You can't look at r/Politics, WPT, etc and tell me those posters are human.
  - stiltzkin 3y ago
    Is kind of crazy how some comments can be confused as humans.
  - urda 3y ago
    The top 100 subs are controlled by a handful of mods who abuse their position. Reddit being a good place for discussion died a long time ago.
koolba 3y ago
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else. Can you imagine the horror if users were allowed to control what and how a website displays on their own device?! I’m curious the ratio of ad-block users. It’s got to be higher than the average internet user. Probably even more so for the ones that are logged in. > Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage. The word is “user agent”. A web browser is just one such program. You can even name it whatever you want because like all web standards from that era, it’s just a line of text with implicit trust of the sender.
- weaksauce 3y ago
  I don't understand why they don't just serve up ads that are indistinguishable from the normal content? I get a lot of ads it seems in facebook even with an adblocker. not that i use facebook much anymore but still... there are ways around it
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    They kind of try. But they legally have to be marked as ads, so it'll always be possible to filter them out.
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      "legally"? Do you have a citation for that claim?
    - weaksauce 3y ago
      if that's the case why doesn't ublock origin cull out those?
corobo 3y ago
I realise nothing has changed yet but with the news of this a couple weeks ago I deleted the Apollo app. Nothing against it, great app, I just wanted to wean myself off Reddit ahead of the big switch off. I've actually found my mood to be much happier in general. I'm not saying Reddit is entirely a horrible place full of grouchy people but there is a lot of it. Maybe it's that, maybe it's getting rid of the doomscroll dopamine overload. Whatever it is, it's good times. I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. Continuing to use "site:reddit.com" in some searches but I reckon I'm done with general use forums for the foreseeable. Thank you for doing a digg, Reddit! I might not have realised I don't need you without this :D
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  > I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. My belief/hope about Twitter is that it won't be replaced by any single competitor, it will be replaced by a combination of people being a bit less online and spreading out their traffic and attention to multiple sites rather than making any one their home. If Reddit spends the next 5 years slowly dying because it's too big to die quickly, that's the best we can realistically hope for.
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    I was going to say that if they kill RiF, I will most likely just never browse reddit, save from the odd web search that lands me in a thread. But the truth is that I seldom visit Reddit right now. It grew worse over time to the point of being nearly intolerable to me. I suspect that is the fate of any network that grows to the point of becoming ubiquitous. I don't think that Reddit will die, but I certainly won't be there to see what happened to it.
  - corobo 3y ago
    Twitter is definitely being side eyed for sure. Currently keeping a check of how much I'm using it, but I do use that partially for marketing and keeping an eye on new tech HN also has a pass for now for the same new tech reason
zb1plus 3y ago
Given how simple Reddit's API is to replicate, I'd love to see somebody build their own federated version of Reddit that the reader apps could consume alongside or in lieu of the main API.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  Reddits value isnt in their code or API. Its in their userbase. Reddit used to be completely opensource. As in you could clone reddit and deploy it for your own use back in the day. But it made no sense to do so other than research since the content, which is all user generated, is whats in the value.
icehawk 3y ago
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority Wow, an amazing example of "missing the point." If the use of 3rd party apps is increasing over time versus the official app, there is something wrong with the official app and the proper thing to do is fix that. Restricting 3rd party access is just delaying the inevitable.
- crote 3y ago
  The problem is that Reddit's incentives are directly opposed to their users. Advertisers demand a lot of ads, a continuous drive for "engagement", and bland cookie-cutter content. Users want to hang around in their own weird little subreddits - without being bothered with ads or "useful" recommendations. It is impossible to combine the two, so the official Reddit app can never satisfy the user base.
  - icehawk 3y ago
    But, additionally, advertisers aren't going to play for a platform that has no users. You have to cater to them in some way shape or form or they're going to find a platform that does. That's how reddit got popular in the first place.
  - rhaksw 3y ago
    I'm not sure how ads and eyeballs are incompatible. The internet has been running on ads since forever. Yeah I don't like them but I understand why they're there.
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    Advertisers need to select subreddits that fit their niche better. Yes there is porn on reddit, but that shouldn't stop amazon from advertising on /r/books. Not all subreddits are equally suited for ads, but some of the subreddits are going to get people to stay. So if you come for /r/gonewild, you might end up going to /r/books and buy a nice e-reader. Now if advertisers don't, or can't, target their ads to nices, then those ads don't need to be on reddit in the first place, and the people making those campaigns should not work in marketing.
Reptur 3y ago
> Reddit will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. (Note: This change should not impact any current moderator bots or extensions.) This seems to be a common theme. Tumblr, Imgur, Onlyfans (tried and walked it back). I am betting this has to do with their credit card processors. They tend to enforce their values/morals on others. It is unfortunate sites just immediately obey and do not fight it.
- deminature 3y ago
  I doubt the reason is morality, it's to hamstring 3rd party apps so they are baseline inferior to the official client. It's sabotaging the competition so anyone seeking a 'full' reddit experience is forced to use the official client, regardless of whether it is the best app or not.
  - Reptur 3y ago
    Found more info: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bvbv/anti-porn-lobbyists-pressure-reddit-to-shut-down-its-nsfw-communities https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bvbv/anti-porn-lobbyists-p...
BeefySwain 3y ago
> ...it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. I find this to be a particularly cogent point. What is stopping someone from making an app that just displaying the normal site, ad free with extensions such as RES?
SeanAnderson 3y ago
These changes seem to be in preparation for Reddit going public later this year, right? They're trying to make their financials look as strong as possible in the short-term even if long-term it fatally injures the website. It will be interesting to watch! I see a lot of people saying they'll go to alternatives, but what alternatives are there to Reddit? Back to Digg? Voat? Here? I'm not aware of a good replacement.
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  Reading a book.
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  r/redditalternatives Some people fine Lemmy a good decentralized alternative, there is also tildes.net but they are more left inclined. There was a nostr alternative called nvote but the development is stopped, kind of dissapointed.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  There isn't going to be an alternative. Nobody can shoulder the burden of several tens of millions of Redditors except for another company, who'll be compelled to act in a similar way to preserve the cash cows. What already has been happening is that communities in the crosshairs of administration have set up their own sites that very few people know of, and the rest continue to be farmed for ad revenue.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deminature 3y ago
The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years. Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?
- brokenmachine 3y ago
  I'm not going to tolerate ads. Signed, third party app reddit viewer.
  - aldarisbm 3y ago
    coming from a place of curiosity. Do you expect the website to be free of ads for you, and how do they sustain themselves? engineering work? cost of infra? r&d? Would you pay to browser reddits ad free?
    - brokenmachine 3y ago
      I would probably pay $1 per month. I feel that's fair considering I (we) provide 100% of the content and 99% of the moderation. I can take it or leave it to be honest. If it's free or very cheap I will use it. If it's not, I won't. But I won't tolerate ads. Also I really should doomscroll less for my own mental health and productivity anyway. The internet was great before reddit and it'll still be great long after reddit has shittified itself into irrelevance in the pursuit of shareholder returns. Most forums never need a paid subscription and have very minimal ads, if any at all. Usenet was/is free on your ISP with no ads. Computing power and network bandwidth have never been cheaper. There's so much more content out there for free than I could ever consume. I'm so sorry their dream of becoming millionaires on the back of others content only worked for a limited time. >r&d HAHAHA that's a laugh. I guess they need to pay the enshittification engineers. What has actually improved on reddit over the last 5 years? Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.
brokenmachine 3y ago
If I can't use a good app (Relay for Reddit), and/or old.reddit.com, I'm done with Reddit.
sorenjan 3y ago
> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free. This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money? There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
lumb63 3y ago
Reddit can’t possibly have much time left. Talk about a space ripe for the taking - Reddit seems hellbent on driving away as many users as possible.
easton 3y ago
Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth and then pay for Reddit gold to get access? Then the apps can keep letting users call the API directly without a proxy server, and they still get paid. (Yes, I’d like the API to remain free. But if it doesn’t that seems like the next best option rather than losing any and all open source clients.)
- mdaniel 3y ago
  > Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth It does: https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/main/java/org/quantumbadger/redreader/reddit/api/RedditOAuth.java#L59 https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/ma... but the OAuth client-id is issued to RedReader, meaning that when QuantumBadger's api access gets nuked, there goes RedReader The alternative is for every single user to register as a developer to get their own OAuth2 client-id, or if Reddit switches to some kind of API token (thus collapsing the distinction between an _application_ and the _user authed through it_)
snwfog 3y ago
For those looking for alternative, try https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com - works well on mobile and desktop.
- clowd 3y ago
  Will this not be subject to the same limitations reddit is imposing on RedReader and others? I guess I don't know enough about how they distinguish a "third-party app" versus a website hooking into their API.
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    Exactly the same limitations
AlexandrB 3y ago
Reddit is fairly unique among large internet properties in that even as their "default" design has gotten shittier and shittier (in my opinion), it was possible to go back to older iterations via old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com. I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork. Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.
- x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
  When old.reddit.com goes away, so will I. The new UI is such trash that I can't stand looking at it for any extended period of time. That and the RedditIsFun app are the only things keeping me on reddit, UI-wise.
  - rjbwork 3y ago
    Ditto. I have been using both old.reddit.com and RedditIsFun for 17 and 10 years, respectively. I can't imagine I'll stick around if either, and especially both, are removed. Certainly the removal of either will drastically lower my usage. Probably a good thing.
- sofixa 3y ago
  > I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork. I've seen a couple of subreddits publish their stats on user agents (moderators get access to this), and even on highly technical ones IIRC the old design and third-party apps are miniscule compared to the vast majority being the official app and current website. I'm fairly sure r/homelab was one of them, but Google seems to indicate that isn't the case.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    How much do you think these numbers are impacted by people who arrive at posts via search engine versus active subscribers to a community? We all know that adding "reddit" to the end of your search query is a quick path to getting human-authored (and reasonably decent) results, which I'd imagine applies double to the topics covered by technical subs. Probably safe to assume that people hitting Reddit via Google aren't opening those search results in a third-party app, and then there's the fact that the site defaults to the new layout for logged-out users. (In other words, I'd be curious to see breakdowns between subscriber traffic and non-subscriber traffic and doesn't-even-have-a-Reddit-account traffic, if those breakdowns even exist.)
ehPReth 3y ago
The "no NSFW content over the API no matter what" thing is pretty fucking bullshit.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
Reddit is a cesspool I find hard to avoid due to its position, but that was my same take on Twitter and losing my client was the thing that got me to break that habit. I'd welcome it for Reddit to do the same and then I'd be free of both.
brokenmachine 3y ago
And so the enshittification begins...
rektide 3y ago
We are definitely entering a bold new shitty age where each user will start to have to register & upload their API key to their various apps. Pax Intertwingularity was great & good, but everyone is shutting down, closing shop, removing access. The great disconnecting is upon us. No more internetworking, it's just endless silos & walled gardens forever in Internet 4.0.
stiltzkin 3y ago
I seriously believe their censoring and bad mods is going to make the decline faster, just try to comment on subs as wallstreetsilver and you can get autobanned of some subs as justiceserved.
- DoItToMe81 3y ago
  They've been doing this kind of shit since 2013. Reddit is a site for passive consumers to be advertised to and datamined. Its users do not care.
Euphorbium 3y ago
I am happy about the reddits suicide, it is long overdue for us to move to something new.
politelemon 3y ago
It is an interesting time in internet history that we'll be looking back on. Twitter is eroding itself. Reddit closes itself off. Fb lost focus. It's a ripe time for something new, or somethings new, to emerge, where people can go to discuss 'things'. But I'm not sure if it's going to take the forum like form we're expecting.
villgax 3y ago
Tomorrow Reddit will release a browser for the web users & then we'll do nothing about it. Instagram will follow as well.
sebazzz 3y ago
I've never developed a mobile app that talks to an API. How do you even store API keys, open source or not? On a jailbreaked iPhone someone could just extract the IPA file and then decompile the API key. If you proxy through your own server, then you replace the problem with that anyone can try to talk to your own server.
- tuananh 3y ago
  it's user's token. you register an app with reddit .that app ask for permissions to act on your behalf.
devinprater 3y ago
RedReader is one of the most accessible apps for blind people on any platform. If that breaks, and all the other apps with it, I'm done using Reddit.
3000 3y ago
I don't think this is the product Aaron envisioned.

125 points by gibspaulding 3y ago

Without RedReader I would not use Reddit. It's understandable that they would want to capitalize off third-party app users -- this approach is pretty disappointing though. Been on the site over 15 years but looks like things are coming to an end.

monksy 3y ago

Honestly, this is a great call for setting up Lemmy and getting the environment sutable for people to move off of reddit. It looks like this is going to kill RedditSync.

brokenmachine 3y ago
Lemmy?
- monksy 3y ago
  https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/

jjulius 3y ago

>[Reddit says] that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. [Reddit] raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else. I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it. Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".

fphhotchips 3y ago
Reddit continues to forget what made them successful: the collapse of Digg when they pulled the same shit that Reddit keeps trying on now. I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord. And this is frustrating to me as a user, because Discord is much more of a pain to try to search and navigate.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Yeah, I was gonna say—Reddit's UX has been getting steadily worse for years now, but Discord is a poor replacement. No hate to Discord's own UX, it's just a totally different kind of experience for what Reddit is (supposed to be).
- rhaksw 3y ago
  There is so much they don't understand about their own product. Their motto "dive into anything" means go deep. Yet logged out viewers are only shown a depth of one or two levels of comments, and they recently toyed with dropping the maximum depth of comments from 10 to 5 on both the redesign and old reddit. Basically, they are copying other social media comment sections because they forgot their niche and they think the other model is more successful. I expect what will happen is existing users will leave, and nobody will come from other platforms to fill the gap. One of their most popular draws has been AMAs from public figures, and they haven't done much else in this vein. They could be hosting written debates from well known figures. Constrain their responses in length and number, say one comment per day, max 500 words, on controversial subjects like DEI [1]. Instead they want to lock it all down (to sanitize for advertisers? Or perceived popular viewpoints?). Meanwhile the only metric they consistently report, number of upvotes, is down 48% YoY! It was 46 billion in 2021 [2] and 24 billion in 2022 [3]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g [2] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2021 https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2021 [3] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2022-global https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-recap-2022-global

larrymyers 3y ago

It looks like Apollo is going to have to go paid only as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_with_reddit_today_about_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit. It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjulius 3y ago
>To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients. They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
AlexandrB 3y ago
From the Apollo post: > For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer (later clarifying that with NSFW content they're talking about sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons), but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit. I wonder if this is the real impetus to do this now. It feels like there's increasing pressure coming from somewhere (payment processors? advertisers? politicians?) to push NSFW content to the margins. Edit: Another commenter mentioned them going public soon. That seems more likely.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
> To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients. Can’t, or more likely in my opinion don’t want to. What users want is pretty simple: a feed of posts from subscribed subreddits that’s sorted by post score and recency. The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer much room to twiddle with UI, algorithms, etc to drive ad impressions, feature adoption, etc.

pierat 3y ago

This looks like time to bring back the original reddit: Usenet. The people make content. The people post content to groups they're on. The people are the moderators of those groups. But reddit profits. Seems like the old federated solution is better. Capitalizing on people socializing and doing stuff just seems wrong, and I'd say IS wrong. I wonder what it'd take to rebuild Usenet and get easy access for the masses, like Mastodon has done?

SeanAnderson 3y ago
I don't think Reddit is profitable? I can't find any sources indicating it is and several indicating it is not. That isn't to say they can't squeeze a profit out once they IPO, but it's been fairly altruistic up to this point.

ggm 3y ago

Yet to see a definitive statement for my choice of reddit browser, "joey for reddit" It has a "hold for popover" feature which makes skim reading and image preview much easier. I find myself doing it in browsers, wishing they did the same thing: thumbnail of an image? Just hold to see full size. It's a remarkably useful gui shortcut.

yrral 3y ago
I use a chrome extension called Imagus that will load any linked image on mouseover (either instantly or after a configurable delay). The image can be shown as large as your current browser window and it will even load links to albums in such a way where scrolling while mouse-overed or pressing left and right on the keyboard will advance between images. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgappgfkkfieppnmlhakdmaab https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgap...
- ggm 3y ago
  Thanks. This may be exactly what I need!
salad-tycoon 3y ago
iOS safari does this

lethologica 3y ago

In a way I’m thankful that Reddit has made using their site so inhospitable to mobile browsers. I’ve simply stopped using it. Though it seems they’ve at least brought back old.reddit.com but i.reddit.com still seems to redirect to the incredibly unusable www.reddit.com on mobile. Now, in its place, I load up a .epub book in the iOS Books app and set it to continuous scroll mode. This way I’m getting the dopamine hit from the continuous scrolling AND I’m actually reading something worth my time, energy, and effort rather than outrage bait, astroturfing posts, or karma farm threads.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Practically the same, except books on a tablet instead.
dbtc 3y ago
I've been using the space bar more and more in the browser (and less (and c-f/c-v in vi/emacs)), and am beginning to find it annoying when I have to scroll any other way. I wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
>astroturfing I guarantee you Reddit makes most of it's money from astroturfing. It's why they'll never go public, they don't want to open their books. You can't look at r/Politics, WPT, etc and tell me those posters are human.
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  Is kind of crazy how some comments can be confused as humans.
- urda 3y ago
  The top 100 subs are controlled by a handful of mods who abuse their position. Reddit being a good place for discussion died a long time ago.

koolba 3y ago

> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else. Can you imagine the horror if users were allowed to control what and how a website displays on their own device?! I’m curious the ratio of ad-block users. It’s got to be higher than the average internet user. Probably even more so for the ones that are logged in. > Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage. The word is “user agent”. A web browser is just one such program. You can even name it whatever you want because like all web standards from that era, it’s just a line of text with implicit trust of the sender.

weaksauce 3y ago
I don't understand why they don't just serve up ads that are indistinguishable from the normal content? I get a lot of ads it seems in facebook even with an adblocker. not that i use facebook much anymore but still... there are ways around it
- solarkraft 3y ago
  They kind of try. But they legally have to be marked as ads, so it'll always be possible to filter them out.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    "legally"? Do you have a citation for that claim?
  - weaksauce 3y ago
    if that's the case why doesn't ublock origin cull out those?

corobo 3y ago

I realise nothing has changed yet but with the news of this a couple weeks ago I deleted the Apollo app. Nothing against it, great app, I just wanted to wean myself off Reddit ahead of the big switch off. I've actually found my mood to be much happier in general. I'm not saying Reddit is entirely a horrible place full of grouchy people but there is a lot of it. Maybe it's that, maybe it's getting rid of the doomscroll dopamine overload. Whatever it is, it's good times. I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. Continuing to use "site:reddit.com" in some searches but I reckon I'm done with general use forums for the foreseeable. Thank you for doing a digg, Reddit! I might not have realised I don't need you without this :D

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
> I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. My belief/hope about Twitter is that it won't be replaced by any single competitor, it will be replaced by a combination of people being a bit less online and spreading out their traffic and attention to multiple sites rather than making any one their home. If Reddit spends the next 5 years slowly dying because it's too big to die quickly, that's the best we can realistically hope for.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  I was going to say that if they kill RiF, I will most likely just never browse reddit, save from the odd web search that lands me in a thread. But the truth is that I seldom visit Reddit right now. It grew worse over time to the point of being nearly intolerable to me. I suspect that is the fate of any network that grows to the point of becoming ubiquitous. I don't think that Reddit will die, but I certainly won't be there to see what happened to it.
- corobo 3y ago
  Twitter is definitely being side eyed for sure. Currently keeping a check of how much I'm using it, but I do use that partially for marketing and keeping an eye on new tech HN also has a pass for now for the same new tech reason

zb1plus 3y ago

Given how simple Reddit's API is to replicate, I'd love to see somebody build their own federated version of Reddit that the reader apps could consume alongside or in lieu of the main API.

croutonwagon 3y ago
Reddits value isnt in their code or API. Its in their userbase. Reddit used to be completely opensource. As in you could clone reddit and deploy it for your own use back in the day. But it made no sense to do so other than research since the content, which is all user generated, is whats in the value.

icehawk 3y ago

crote 3y ago
The problem is that Reddit's incentives are directly opposed to their users. Advertisers demand a lot of ads, a continuous drive for "engagement", and bland cookie-cutter content. Users want to hang around in their own weird little subreddits - without being bothered with ads or "useful" recommendations. It is impossible to combine the two, so the official Reddit app can never satisfy the user base.
- icehawk 3y ago
  But, additionally, advertisers aren't going to play for a platform that has no users. You have to cater to them in some way shape or form or they're going to find a platform that does. That's how reddit got popular in the first place.
- rhaksw 3y ago
  I'm not sure how ads and eyeballs are incompatible. The internet has been running on ads since forever. Yeah I don't like them but I understand why they're there.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Advertisers need to select subreddits that fit their niche better. Yes there is porn on reddit, but that shouldn't stop amazon from advertising on /r/books. Not all subreddits are equally suited for ads, but some of the subreddits are going to get people to stay. So if you come for /r/gonewild, you might end up going to /r/books and buy a nice e-reader. Now if advertisers don't, or can't, target their ads to nices, then those ads don't need to be on reddit in the first place, and the people making those campaigns should not work in marketing.

Reptur 3y ago

> Reddit will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. (Note: This change should not impact any current moderator bots or extensions.) This seems to be a common theme. Tumblr, Imgur, Onlyfans (tried and walked it back). I am betting this has to do with their credit card processors. They tend to enforce their values/morals on others. It is unfortunate sites just immediately obey and do not fight it.

deminature 3y ago
I doubt the reason is morality, it's to hamstring 3rd party apps so they are baseline inferior to the official client. It's sabotaging the competition so anyone seeking a 'full' reddit experience is forced to use the official client, regardless of whether it is the best app or not.
- Reptur 3y ago
  Found more info: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bvbv/anti-porn-lobbyists-pressure-reddit-to-shut-down-its-nsfw-communities https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7bvbv/anti-porn-lobbyists-p...

BeefySwain 3y ago

> ...it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. I find this to be a particularly cogent point. What is stopping someone from making an app that just displaying the normal site, ad free with extensions such as RES?

SeanAnderson 3y ago

These changes seem to be in preparation for Reddit going public later this year, right? They're trying to make their financials look as strong as possible in the short-term even if long-term it fatally injures the website. It will be interesting to watch! I see a lot of people saying they'll go to alternatives, but what alternatives are there to Reddit? Back to Digg? Voat? Here? I'm not aware of a good replacement.

brokenmachine 3y ago
Reading a book.
stiltzkin 3y ago
r/redditalternatives Some people fine Lemmy a good decentralized alternative, there is also tildes.net but they are more left inclined. There was a nostr alternative called nvote but the development is stopped, kind of dissapointed.
DoItToMe81 3y ago
There isn't going to be an alternative. Nobody can shoulder the burden of several tens of millions of Redditors except for another company, who'll be compelled to act in a similar way to preserve the cash cows. What already has been happening is that communities in the crosshairs of administration have set up their own sites that very few people know of, and the rest continue to be farmed for ad revenue.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deminature 3y ago

The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years. Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?

brokenmachine 3y ago
I'm not going to tolerate ads. Signed, third party app reddit viewer.
- aldarisbm 3y ago
  coming from a place of curiosity. Do you expect the website to be free of ads for you, and how do they sustain themselves? engineering work? cost of infra? r&d? Would you pay to browser reddits ad free?
  - brokenmachine 3y ago
    I would probably pay $1 per month. I feel that's fair considering I (we) provide 100% of the content and 99% of the moderation. I can take it or leave it to be honest. If it's free or very cheap I will use it. If it's not, I won't. But I won't tolerate ads. Also I really should doomscroll less for my own mental health and productivity anyway. The internet was great before reddit and it'll still be great long after reddit has shittified itself into irrelevance in the pursuit of shareholder returns. Most forums never need a paid subscription and have very minimal ads, if any at all. Usenet was/is free on your ISP with no ads. Computing power and network bandwidth have never been cheaper. There's so much more content out there for free than I could ever consume. I'm so sorry their dream of becoming millionaires on the back of others content only worked for a limited time. >r&d HAHAHA that's a laugh. I guess they need to pay the enshittification engineers. What has actually improved on reddit over the last 5 years? Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.

brokenmachine 3y ago

If I can't use a good app (Relay for Reddit), and/or old.reddit.com, I'm done with Reddit.

sorenjan 3y ago

> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free. This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money? There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.

lumb63 3y ago

Reddit can’t possibly have much time left. Talk about a space ripe for the taking - Reddit seems hellbent on driving away as many users as possible.

easton 3y ago

Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth and then pay for Reddit gold to get access? Then the apps can keep letting users call the API directly without a proxy server, and they still get paid. (Yes, I’d like the API to remain free. But if it doesn’t that seems like the next best option rather than losing any and all open source clients.)

mdaniel 3y ago
> Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth It does: https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/main/java/org/quantumbadger/redreader/reddit/api/RedditOAuth.java#L59 https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/ma... but the OAuth client-id is issued to RedReader, meaning that when QuantumBadger's api access gets nuked, there goes RedReader The alternative is for every single user to register as a developer to get their own OAuth2 client-id, or if Reddit switches to some kind of API token (thus collapsing the distinction between an _application_ and the _user authed through it_)

snwfog 3y ago

For those looking for alternative, try https://rdddeck.com https://rdddeck.com - works well on mobile and desktop.

clowd 3y ago
Will this not be subject to the same limitations reddit is imposing on RedReader and others? I guess I don't know enough about how they distinguish a "third-party app" versus a website hooking into their API.
- Grimburger 3y ago
  Exactly the same limitations

AlexandrB 3y ago

Reddit is fairly unique among large internet properties in that even as their "default" design has gotten shittier and shittier (in my opinion), it was possible to go back to older iterations via old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com. I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork. Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.

x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
When old.reddit.com goes away, so will I. The new UI is such trash that I can't stand looking at it for any extended period of time. That and the RedditIsFun app are the only things keeping me on reddit, UI-wise.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  Ditto. I have been using both old.reddit.com and RedditIsFun for 17 and 10 years, respectively. I can't imagine I'll stick around if either, and especially both, are removed. Certainly the removal of either will drastically lower my usage. Probably a good thing.
sofixa 3y ago
> I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork. I've seen a couple of subreddits publish their stats on user agents (moderators get access to this), and even on highly technical ones IIRC the old design and third-party apps are miniscule compared to the vast majority being the official app and current website. I'm fairly sure r/homelab was one of them, but Google seems to indicate that isn't the case.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  How much do you think these numbers are impacted by people who arrive at posts via search engine versus active subscribers to a community? We all know that adding "reddit" to the end of your search query is a quick path to getting human-authored (and reasonably decent) results, which I'd imagine applies double to the topics covered by technical subs. Probably safe to assume that people hitting Reddit via Google aren't opening those search results in a third-party app, and then there's the fact that the site defaults to the new layout for logged-out users. (In other words, I'd be curious to see breakdowns between subscriber traffic and non-subscriber traffic and doesn't-even-have-a-Reddit-account traffic, if those breakdowns even exist.)

ehPReth 3y ago

The "no NSFW content over the API no matter what" thing is pretty fucking bullshit.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

Reddit is a cesspool I find hard to avoid due to its position, but that was my same take on Twitter and losing my client was the thing that got me to break that habit. I'd welcome it for Reddit to do the same and then I'd be free of both.

brokenmachine 3y ago

And so the enshittification begins...

rektide 3y ago

We are definitely entering a bold new shitty age where each user will start to have to register & upload their API key to their various apps. Pax Intertwingularity was great & good, but everyone is shutting down, closing shop, removing access. The great disconnecting is upon us. No more internetworking, it's just endless silos & walled gardens forever in Internet 4.0.

stiltzkin 3y ago

I seriously believe their censoring and bad mods is going to make the decline faster, just try to comment on subs as wallstreetsilver and you can get autobanned of some subs as justiceserved.

DoItToMe81 3y ago
They've been doing this kind of shit since 2013. Reddit is a site for passive consumers to be advertised to and datamined. Its users do not care.

Euphorbium 3y ago

I am happy about the reddits suicide, it is long overdue for us to move to something new.

politelemon 3y ago

It is an interesting time in internet history that we'll be looking back on. Twitter is eroding itself. Reddit closes itself off. Fb lost focus. It's a ripe time for something new, or somethings new, to emerge, where people can go to discuss 'things'. But I'm not sure if it's going to take the forum like form we're expecting.

villgax 3y ago

Tomorrow Reddit will release a browser for the web users & then we'll do nothing about it. Instagram will follow as well.

sebazzz 3y ago

I've never developed a mobile app that talks to an API. How do you even store API keys, open source or not? On a jailbreaked iPhone someone could just extract the IPA file and then decompile the API key. If you proxy through your own server, then you replace the problem with that anyone can try to talk to your own server.

tuananh 3y ago
it's user's token. you register an app with reddit .that app ask for permissions to act on your behalf.

devinprater 3y ago

RedReader is one of the most accessible apps for blind people on any platform. If that breaks, and all the other apps with it, I'm done using Reddit.

3000 3y ago

I don't think this is the product Aaron envisioned.