12 ms·

I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, th

by gaudat 3y ago

I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language. About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market. Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue. Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth. The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it. I hope to see Apollo go down this route. Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships. One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.

SSLy 3y ago
was it taptalk?
- m-p-3 3y ago
  It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.
sockaddr 3y ago
Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.
- popcalc 3y ago
  You could always co-opt Dread ;)
- foo1024 3y ago
  I have recently searched for some open source alternative to reddit. Lemmy.ml seems to be a fediverse alternative, and have a nice web UI and apps, though the site is pretty much empty. If popular 3rd party app could join force and migrating to lemmy because of reddit's brain-dead pricing. It will be interesting.
  - wswope 3y ago
    If you’re talking about a self-hostable Reddit-like service, Tildes’ platform might be a good option if it suits your taste. https://docs.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/
  - spurgu 3y ago
    I tried out Lemmy a year or two ago (it seemed nice) but found that they had a hard-coded list of "bad words" that automatically got censored, some of them quite soft (and with dual meaning), like "bitch". So yeah, I quickly uninstalled it once I realized that. How the fuck are you going to run, say, a dog breeding node? Or just have any kind of semi-normal adult discussion where people aren't bothered by cursing? No thanks - as a moderator I (my community) would want to choose what to censor myself. It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem. Edit: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
    - dugite-code 3y ago
      Lemmy's devs have a long history of questionable actions and opinions that goes beyond the slur filter. I'm afraid it will forever be condemned to be a low traffic fringe project.
      - 3y ago
ziziyO 3y ago
This Tapatalk by chance? I only remember it because it would sign your posts with a little ad.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  That was the one that I thought of too. I didn't understand why every Invision forum would pop that up as the client to use. Seemed like they were giving away the keys to the castle for free. Crazy.
- gaudat 3y ago
  Nope, the forums are not in English. The new forum's app/favicon is a yellow smiley face. I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...
HDThoreaun 3y ago
This is sort of just the cycle of social media though. Facebook has the same stigma, it's unavoidable as the first wave ages.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ipaddr 3y ago
Soon another 3rd party client will be made that hammers the new site. That gets blocked and the circle goes on
- gaudat 3y ago
  You get it. Or unless you outdo the 3rd party ones in making a good client. Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.
armchairhacker 3y ago
This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now. - "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit. - "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality. - Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.
- gaudat 3y ago
  >prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
  - celim307 3y ago
    Something awful?
m3kw9 3y ago
Back then you didn’t have to moderate much, now it’s a major moat for Reddit
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
a_c 3y ago
An asian one I'm guessing
- gaudat 3y ago
  Send me a PM and I will give you a beer #hoho#
Devasta 3y ago
The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.
- gaudat 3y ago
  What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
  - witchesindublin 3y ago
    I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
    - Levitz 3y ago
      There is admin intervention for sure, but I'm not sure if it's ideological or just advertiser appeasement. The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
      - gsinclair 3y ago
        Why on earth was there a sub about staying hydrated? Just drink some water, for crying out loud.
    - pokerface_86 3y ago
      don’t a couple power mods control the vast majority of the popular subreddits?
  - 3y ago
dom96 3y ago
This was precisely my first thought when I read this. For the price that Reddit will charge, Apollo's author could easily recreate Reddit and take advantage of Apollo's user base to seed that community.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Hiring a few hundred competent mods, plus management, can easily triple that figure, so it would likely need some serious backing.
  - rusticpenn 3y ago
    Mods work for free on reddit
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      They work, for free as it appears from the company's accounting department, but they are earning money through other means. My hunch is that the Apollo founder would be unwilling to participate in the same schemes.
      - velcrovan 3y ago
        As a moderator on reddit, I can assure you it is in no way lucrative. It is just another thankless chore with no monetary upsides.
        dmonitor 3y ago
        on a default subreddit or a niche hobby forum?
        velcrovan 3y ago
        not a default one, but does it matter? what's the play here?
naru_s 3y ago
Sounds familiar to me :o)
- gaudat 3y ago
  #good#
ekanes 3y ago
Apollo. Let's go.
Casteil 3y ago
Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.
- krabizzwainch 3y ago
  I forgot about Digg and just went to look at it. Not a single thing is recognizable about it.
  - utdoctor 3y ago
    I left Digg for Reddit after V4 dropped. It’s kind of surprising what Digg has turned into. I would have expected it would just continue course as it was (still maintaining comment sections & voting etc) but surprised it’s now just staff picked content from other sites.
    - krabizzwainch 3y ago
      Is it even that at this point? It looked kinda like Gizmodo now where its a few authors rewriting content from other pages, and then a ton of ads. I will say I scrolled for a little bit and my take away was generic tech blog, nothing too egregious but it doesn't do what it once did.
  - pokerface_86 3y ago
    i feel similarly about reddit, the site is completely unrecognizable from when i first joined in 2013 looking for a way to keep up with the gaming industry without clickbait youtubers.
- holler 3y ago
  Building a public chat network / alternative to Reddit/Twitter/Discord at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)
lost_tourist 3y ago
I would definitely 100% join Apollit if that happened. but only if they allowed 3rd party clients.
gogopuppygogo 3y ago
Reddit initially monetized using Adzerk. Apollo should do exactly what you are pitching and just use the same engine to sell ads.
- uw_rob 3y ago
  My understanding is that Apollo isn't allowed to show ads based on reddit's new TOS. The only monetization strategy open to Apollo is a premium subscription.
pabs3 3y ago
Which forums is this story about? Are they public?
Nifty3929 3y ago
This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.
- rgbgraph 3y ago
  All reddit is doing is storing text and serving it to people. This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly. No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to. Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day. Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company). I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material. Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
  - Maxion 3y ago
    > I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material. > Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem. Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered. Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.
ornornor 3y ago
Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either. The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter. I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.
- kkarakk 3y ago
  This is everyone on the apple ecosystem now - they all want you to subscribe to their app
- monocularvision 3y ago
  Oh please. I paid for ad-free Apollo a long time ago and the prompts to upgrade to the subscription client are extremely rare and not obtrusive.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    That's the thing with opinions: they're personal. I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday) These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app) If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits. Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")
holahola1234 3y ago
Mmm. Sound like LIHKG
habi 3y ago
> I hope to see Apollo go down this route. Make it work with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy would be one idea. I have absolutely no clue how hard this would be though.
actuator 3y ago
There is also one more story on the other side of it. Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently. The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Twitter official app learned a lot about these 3rd party clients, also they didn't think their default experience should be alienating to most users
- dmonitor 3y ago
  twitter experience is a lot simpler. at the end of the day, twitter power users just need to tweet. reddit power users are moderating a forum.
ymolodtsov 3y ago
Unfortunately, the value of Reddit is in all the existing communities and the content. It'd be hard to move it, and while this might be a big news on Hacker News, most Reddit users probably have never heard about alternative clients. Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.
pokerface_86 3y ago
browsing any major, big subreddit will reveal that it’s users are no better than the average facebook, twitter, or tiktok user. have you looked at /r/all or /r/popular in the past… 3-4 years? it’s all garbage. i think the reality is that an extremely small percentage of people bother setting up a real home page, unsubbing from all the default subreddits, and having a tailored experience more akin to forums is just not what people want anymore- they want a black box “algorithm” to push rage bait and ads at them.

by gaudat 3y ago

SSLy 3y ago

was it taptalk?

m-p-3 3y ago
It is (or was) a kind of proprietary addon that forum admins could install which would act as an API that let a the Tapatalk client interacts with the server. It mostly showed up at a time when web forums weren't responsive or a mobile UI and phones weren't as powerful as today and struggled to render complex webpages.

sockaddr 3y ago

Yup. I'd join Apollo if it was substantially similar. They could not possibly make a worse UI than the current "new" reddit web UI so the bar is pretty low.

popcalc 3y ago
You could always co-opt Dread ;)
foo1024 3y ago
I have recently searched for some open source alternative to reddit. Lemmy.ml seems to be a fediverse alternative, and have a nice web UI and apps, though the site is pretty much empty. If popular 3rd party app could join force and migrating to lemmy because of reddit's brain-dead pricing. It will be interesting.
- wswope 3y ago
  If you’re talking about a self-hostable Reddit-like service, Tildes’ platform might be a good option if it suits your taste. https://docs.tildes.net/ https://docs.tildes.net/
- spurgu 3y ago
  I tried out Lemmy a year or two ago (it seemed nice) but found that they had a hard-coded list of "bad words" that automatically got censored, some of them quite soft (and with dual meaning), like "bitch". So yeah, I quickly uninstalled it once I realized that. How the fuck are you going to run, say, a dog breeding node? Or just have any kind of semi-normal adult discussion where people aren't bothered by cursing? No thanks - as a moderator I (my community) would want to choose what to censor myself. It might have changed since then but from what I remember of reading through the lead devs reasoning behind the "feature" I want no part of that ecosystem. Edit: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622 https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
  - dugite-code 3y ago
    Lemmy's devs have a long history of questionable actions and opinions that goes beyond the slur filter. I'm afraid it will forever be condemned to be a low traffic fringe project.
    - 3y ago

ziziyO 3y ago

This Tapatalk by chance? I only remember it because it would sign your posts with a little ad.

renewiltord 3y ago
That was the one that I thought of too. I didn't understand why every Invision forum would pop that up as the client to use. Seemed like they were giving away the keys to the castle for free. Crazy.
gaudat 3y ago
Nope, the forums are not in English. The new forum's app/favicon is a yellow smiley face. I thought Tapatalk is more like a generic mobile client addon to forum wares than being a forum itself. I remember that nagging banner when I was on XDA years ago...

HDThoreaun 3y ago

This is sort of just the cycle of social media though. Facebook has the same stigma, it's unavoidable as the first wave ages.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ipaddr 3y ago

Soon another 3rd party client will be made that hammers the new site. That gets blocked and the circle goes on

gaudat 3y ago
You get it. Or unless you outdo the 3rd party ones in making a good client. Nothing online is forever unless you attact the data hoarders.

armchairhacker 3y ago

This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now. - "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit. - "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality. - Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.

gaudat 3y ago
>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
- celim307 3y ago
  Something awful?

m3kw9 3y ago

Back then you didn’t have to moderate much, now it’s a major moat for Reddit

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

a_c 3y ago

An asian one I'm guessing

gaudat 3y ago
Send me a PM and I will give you a beer #hoho#

Devasta 3y ago

The tech isn't the challenge with something like Reddit, even the comically inept Reddit leadership could figure it out after all. The difficult part is finding a few hundred mods willing to work for you for free, filtering all the filth that tries to be posted. Only if they have a solution for that can try going their own way.

gaudat 3y ago
What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
- witchesindublin 3y ago
  I really doubt that the entire moderation team of all the subreddits were capable of sweeping the entire right wing and most moderates of Reddit independently, and without pushback from international users who knew the moderation wouldn't be culturally sensitive. It had to have been centrally planned.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    There is admin intervention for sure, but I'm not sure if it's ideological or just advertiser appeasement. The removal of r/waterniggas (a sub about staying hydrated) seems absurd ideologically, even with that name.
    - gsinclair 3y ago
      Why on earth was there a sub about staying hydrated? Just drink some water, for crying out loud.
  - pokerface_86 3y ago
    don’t a couple power mods control the vast majority of the popular subreddits?
- 3y ago

dom96 3y ago

This was precisely my first thought when I read this. For the price that Reddit will charge, Apollo's author could easily recreate Reddit and take advantage of Apollo's user base to seed that community.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
Hiring a few hundred competent mods, plus management, can easily triple that figure, so it would likely need some serious backing.
- rusticpenn 3y ago
  Mods work for free on reddit
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    They work, for free as it appears from the company's accounting department, but they are earning money through other means. My hunch is that the Apollo founder would be unwilling to participate in the same schemes.
    - velcrovan 3y ago
      As a moderator on reddit, I can assure you it is in no way lucrative. It is just another thankless chore with no monetary upsides.
      - dmonitor 3y ago
        on a default subreddit or a niche hobby forum?
        velcrovan 3y ago
        not a default one, but does it matter? what's the play here?

naru_s 3y ago

Sounds familiar to me :o)

gaudat 3y ago
#good#

ekanes 3y ago

Apollo. Let's go.

Casteil 3y ago

Yes, please! We need alternatives to the social media giants that are now obviously bent on monetization and other, shadier motives. Moves like this are what caused the huge Digg -> Reddit exodus that significantly boosted Reddit's popularity. People need other places to go when their favorite platform takes this seemingly inevitable path.

krabizzwainch 3y ago
I forgot about Digg and just went to look at it. Not a single thing is recognizable about it.
- utdoctor 3y ago
  I left Digg for Reddit after V4 dropped. It’s kind of surprising what Digg has turned into. I would have expected it would just continue course as it was (still maintaining comment sections & voting etc) but surprised it’s now just staff picked content from other sites.
  - krabizzwainch 3y ago
    Is it even that at this point? It looked kinda like Gizmodo now where its a few authors rewriting content from other pages, and then a ton of ads. I will say I scrolled for a little bit and my take away was generic tech blog, nothing too egregious but it doesn't do what it once did.
- pokerface_86 3y ago
  i feel similarly about reddit, the site is completely unrecognizable from when i first joined in 2013 looking for a way to keep up with the gaming industry without clickbait youtubers.
holler 3y ago
Building a public chat network / alternative to Reddit/Twitter/Discord at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im Create post -> share url -> instant chatroom based around the topic -> live chat with anyone on the net in seconds (hopefully have fun). Open to feedback :)

lost_tourist 3y ago

I would definitely 100% join Apollit if that happened. but only if they allowed 3rd party clients.

gogopuppygogo 3y ago

Reddit initially monetized using Adzerk. Apollo should do exactly what you are pitching and just use the same engine to sell ads.

uw_rob 3y ago
My understanding is that Apollo isn't allowed to show ads based on reddit's new TOS. The only monetization strategy open to Apollo is a premium subscription.

pabs3 3y ago

Which forums is this story about? Are they public?

Nifty3929 3y ago

This is what everybody thinks, until they grow large enough to care about the amount of money they’re burning and get tired of it. Then they try to not lose so much money, and their loyal users turn out not to be so loyal.

rgbgraph 3y ago
All reddit is doing is storing text and serving it to people. This not expensive or a hard problem. You grab a bunch of servers, you set them up properly, and then you write your app properly. No resume-driven bullshit; no hype-driven bullshit; no “we need to be galaxy scale now” bullshit. No email notifications, besides basic “thanks for registering, here is your login” and “here’s a password reset link.” No cloud-based bullshit. Don’t use fucking python. Use a real systems language to eek out as much performance as you can from the hardware. Actually understand databases and how your specific databases work. Use Postgres unless you have a very good reason not to. Just a few thousand dollars a month, and a brief reprieve from short-term mania to actually think, and you too can literally serve 1 billion pages a day. Why does everyone run into problems with this? Because they have personal hang-ups and delude themselves (or simply don’t care). This path has been tread numerous times before. The mistakes have been made thousands of times. The people who made those mistakes are available to help you out (for the right price, or if you’re good enough company). I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material. Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem.
- Maxion 3y ago
  > I am sick and tired of systems engineering being grandized, when all you have to do is sit down somewhere quiet and think about the problem — with a bit of tea, and some way to access reference material. > Reddit is not a hard or interesting problem. Exactly, tech is full of this weird hubris that everything has to be super complicated and over-engineered. Heck, while you exclaim disdain for Python, I've seen large web services run on Django and a few servers behind load balancers with very few problems.

ornornor 3y ago

Christian (Apollo’s author, the Reddit app in question) isn’t a paragon of virtue either. The app has been regularly nagging existing paid users, who paid to remove ads in the app, about “amazing” deals to “upgrade” to a monthly subscription to the app to get some virtual stickers and other silly things of dubious value over and over. People complain about it every time they come up on the Apollo subreddit, directly mention the app’s author, who has yet to ever respond on this matter. I think Reddit is being greedy, but I’m only sad if Apollo goes away because the Reddit client is so shitty; not because I love Apollo.

kkarakk 3y ago
This is everyone on the apple ecosystem now - they all want you to subscribe to their app
monocularvision 3y ago
Oh please. I paid for ad-free Apollo a long time ago and the prompts to upgrade to the subscription client are extremely rare and not obtrusive.
- ornornor 3y ago
  That's the thing with opinions: they're personal. I get nags to upgrade to something I couldn't care less about, in an app I paid to avoid these ads and nags, every time I open the app (i.e. multiple times per day) on "promo" days (i.e. any US holiday) These nags have also been disingenuous, because the price will usually go up on "promo" days so that Apollo advertises a "special deal" that is basically the price it's always been before. It's advertised with a full-screen popup upon opening the app (or while using the app) If it was no big deal and nobody minded, there wouldn't be a slew of posts complaining about it every time, and the app's author wouldn't consistently ignore these posts and comments as he has done every time while always answering praise and positive comments in the same threads and subreddits. Selling me something to remove all ads and then showing me your own ads anyway is dishonest. Either mention this at the time of payment, or make it opt-in like virtually every other company I deal with (aka "do you want our marketing material?")

holahola1234 3y ago

Mmm. Sound like LIHKG

habi 3y ago

> I hope to see Apollo go down this route. Make it work with https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy would be one idea. I have absolutely no clue how hard this would be though.

actuator 3y ago

There is also one more story on the other side of it. Twitter used to have a vibrant ecosystem of clients, most of them working better than the official app both on web and mobile. Twitter was able to kill their third party app ecosystem with their paid API changes and lived to thrive as a company till recently. The reality is, you need a good cohort of content and users to move who can sustain the content, moderation and discussion. Just moving Apollo users doesn't ensure that. There are other good third party clients like Relay etc as well

raverbashing 3y ago
Twitter official app learned a lot about these 3rd party clients, also they didn't think their default experience should be alienating to most users
dmonitor 3y ago
twitter experience is a lot simpler. at the end of the day, twitter power users just need to tweet. reddit power users are moderating a forum.

ymolodtsov 3y ago

Unfortunately, the value of Reddit is in all the existing communities and the content. It'd be hard to move it, and while this might be a big news on Hacker News, most Reddit users probably have never heard about alternative clients. Most forum have gone into demise, unless they focus on some very small niche (so they're small already). People prefer apps, otherwise they forget about things unless they're enormous.

pokerface_86 3y ago

browsing any major, big subreddit will reveal that it’s users are no better than the average facebook, twitter, or tiktok user. have you looked at /r/all or /r/popular in the past… 3-4 years? it’s all garbage. i think the reality is that an extremely small percentage of people bother setting up a real home page, unsubbing from all the default subreddits, and having a tailored experience more akin to forums is just not what people want anymore- they want a black box “algorithm” to push rage bait and ads at them.