16 ms·

Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

410 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago
Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.
- wahahah 3y ago
  AFAIK it's generally not a thing because of fraud / lack of metribility.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.
  - chwilson 3y ago
    app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Wasn't that $50? That was kindof a silly amount of money for the state of the internet and the size of the platform.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        The amount doesn't really matter. As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access? The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
        plagiarist 3y ago
        If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network. I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
        rglullis 3y ago
        See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in. Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
        plagiarist 3y ago
        Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works? Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Unfortunately, this shows how much the people that keep complaining about Elon Musk or Zuckerberg really should not be listened to. People suddenly do not care that much about privacy if it costs them anything or brings some inconvenience. I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
      - piaste 3y ago
        > I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves. I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves. The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be. But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
        rglullis 3y ago
        We can do that since the late 90's. Skype was p2p and worked very well. The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith. I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      If you post the n-word on reddit it gets removed immediately - no matter what the context was.
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        Oh, good, that will fix all of it. The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist. There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.
- pantulis 3y ago
  The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads. If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
  - ryanmercer 3y ago
    >would be paying around 2,5$/month, Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      I used to pay for Reddit, but they kept getting more and more user-hostile to the point that the use I got out of it was accidental. To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated. Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
    - pierat 3y ago
      That's only part of the problem. All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme. Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
      - ryanmercer 3y ago
        Yeah I don't do the whole "boo hoo unpaid worker" nonsense. I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities. I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  This is basically lose/lose for everyone. API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them. Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it. Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    > Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
  - toyg 3y ago
    > API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - m-p-3 3y ago
    Or skip the ads problem on third-party apps altogether by requiring the use of Reddit Premium to use third-party apps. That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  I thought the point was that third party sites purposely didn’t want to show ads
chayesfss 3y ago
[dead]
spacephysics 3y ago
The app is complete garbage, and the dark patterns on their mobile webpage are insidious. If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great. But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit. Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance of a scraper that pulls the data for each page you’d like to see, kind of like a proxy between your client and reddit? Would be a fun project to try out.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It would just be "better" to call the private/internal APIs that reddit's clients use themselves. This is more or less what Nitter does for providing alternate twitter frontend https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
  - sphars 3y ago
    Like nitter, there is Teddit and Libreddit, which are both alternative (read-only) frontends for reddit Teddit: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit Libreddit: https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit
    - Macha 3y ago
      Both however use the public Reddit API, unlike Nitter which does page scraping. So they'll need significant updates to work past July 1st.
      - sphars 3y ago
        This is true, both will be SOL come July. There is some discussion going on in Libreddit for solutions in https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785 https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785
- rashkov 3y ago
tremere 3y ago
Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
- amykhar 3y ago
  It would be good for users - not sure it would make sense for a company though. The third party apps stripped ads. You have to be able to make money. I think the actual mistake was having it open in the first place. You can't give away things for free from the start and then take it away. A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US. I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul. If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself
  - fathyb 3y ago
    > understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board? > invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss. > try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that. I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.
llampx 3y ago
Every social network goes through this. You used to be able to access Facebook via other front-ends as well, same with Twitter. This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.
- mywacaday 3y ago
  I have tried the official reddit android app and always go back to reddit is fun. A drop in my usage will be no bad thing!
- slantaclaus 3y ago
  Reddit has become toxic. Deleting the app off my phone has really helped with my emotional health
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    I have trouble remembering a time when it wasn't.
  - tasty_freeze 3y ago
    Reddit is sprawling. There are thousands of non-political subreddits. Yeah, if you are following the default feed and reading r/politics, or any of the drama subreddits, you are going to have a bad time. Are you curious about what information is being sent through your house between 10KHz and 6GHz? Curious what your water meter is broadcasting to the neighborhood? https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ Feel like some short videos of animals being adorable? https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ (or any of the related subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/wiki/relatedsubreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/wiki/relatedsubreddits/) Want to find out about things in your city? eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/ Into plants? https://www.reddit.com/r/plants/ https://www.reddit.com/r/plants/ Play guitar or are thinking about it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/
bazmattaz 3y ago
I’m a bit hesitant to admit that I use the official app for Reddit and have used for years. I’ve used the browser extensions before and have tried Apollo app but I never got hooked. I don’t understand all the hate the official app gets. I understand there is telemetry but i have pi hole to block most of that. It has ads sure but I don’t really see them anymore, your adjust adjust around them. One thing that annoys me is that notifications can be buggy. Sometimes you have to reload to see the activity in your inbox.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  "Really, once you get distracted, the pain of sitting on a nail just goes away!" Spying on users, injecting ads, and dark patterns. Or you could just uh.. not have any of that?
  - xeromal 3y ago
    Users will be spied upon in any app if they're authenticated. The ads thing is silly. How else do you get free content.
    - account42 3y ago
      Reddit isn't providing free content, the users (or whoever the users got the content from) are the ones providing the content. None of them are paid. Reddit is only a host and would ideally be replaced by a public utility or community-run alternative.
      - xeromal 3y ago
        People miss the forest from the trees when it comes to social media claiming the users make the community. While it is completely true, it's not the complete picture. The communities have to be fostered. I'd be willing to make a bet that any alternative websites and/or communities will not rise up to replace Reddit because it's hard to foster a social network. Way harder than the individual parts of moderation per subreddit. The people who think otherwise are most likely living in a fantasy Utopia
lawn 3y ago
I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI. The site itself is just garbage and the difference between the redesign and old.reddit is just so jarring, and the Android client is also garbage. Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage. Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.
- fabian_shipamax 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - stavros 3y ago
    I think it's not, calm down.
  - standing_user 3y ago
    It depends on the definition of fine tho
- stavros 3y ago
  I agree, whenever I hit the new site I just close the tab. I never figured out how to get more than 2-3 comments on it, so I don't even bother these days.
- jerpint 3y ago
  If you go to the front page without logging in, you’ll quickly notice the target demographic is teens/young adults. The redesign makes a lot more sense with that context
  - lawn 3y ago
    Do you imply that teens/young adults don't care about usability? Or that they don't have the attention span to read comments and just want to endlessly scroll through crap?
lapcat 3y ago
Dupe with multiple submissions, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 (1279 comments) Please submitters, check before you submit.
- interestica 3y ago
  That submission is very different. This story looks at wider effects and implications.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    Subtracting external quoted links, the entire story is 4 paragraphs. It's just a wrapper around those links.
    - interestica 3y ago
      Ok? That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context. A really great way to get a handle on the wider implications. And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content?
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context. You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36150373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36150373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159487 > And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content? It's literally the link quoted by "The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says"
kgwxd 3y ago
You can append .rss to any sub e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss you’ll never need to reskim over headlines to find things you haven’t seen and by using the “old” subdomain every item will open it a useable UI. I’m sure they’ll kill this too eventually but I don’t think I’ll miss Reddit much once it goes full Digg.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
branon 3y ago
Kotaku does not really belong on HN. They didn't even mention teddit or libreddit.
ryanmercer 3y ago
Best way to read the site is, and always has been, old.reddit on a proper computer.
- pixelpoet 3y ago
  It never ceases to amaze me how much people actually like using these godawful passive consumption / walled garden devices, to say nothing of all the apps over simply using a browser. I truly hate the direction all this is going (electron apps, mobile first/only, vertical videos, TikTok, social media, ...) and seemingly everyone else just can't get enough of it :(
- p_j_w 3y ago
  I give it about 6 months before old.reddit goes away.
xvilka 3y ago
Despite my doubts about Mastodon being able to become popular Twitter alternative, I wish there was the same wave of migrating to the Fediverse-based open source Reddit alternative. So far I don't see them very popular.
- 4ggr0 3y ago
  Maybe we should all push to use Lemmy[0] :D [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- PenguinCoder 3y ago
  There's been a small migration happening that I see on Lemmy instance https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org
nottorp 3y ago
Isn't the best way to open old.reddit.com in a desktop browser?
- kevincox 3y ago
  When you are at a computer yes. But sometimes I am on my phone and neither the old UI or the new UI are acceptable. I slightly prefer the new UI on mobile but it definitely sucks.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Well, I generally don't read anything on mobile unless I need a piece of info right now. Besides the screen having either too much or too little info, depending on if it's designed for the desktop or for mobile, it's usually unsafe since you can't run uBlock Origin on the Apple browser...
    - distances 3y ago
      Well, Android has uBlock Origin. I admit that I read almost everything on mobile these days, including 100% of my Reddit and HN usage. I sit in front of the computer all day for work, so I have little appetite to continue sitting for leisure reading.
    - Zak 3y ago
      You can, however use DNS-based adblocking. Mullvad has a free service at adblock.doh.mullvad.net.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
As much as I hate the new design on web and never use it, I don't really have a problem with the app and I found the alternatives I tried to be sub-par. What's everyone's deal with the app? Beside the removal of ads of course, which is understandable but undefendable.
- bwat49 3y ago
  what apps did you try? I use RIF (reddit is fun) and it's much better than the official app. The UI is much cleaner (looks like a proper mobile version of the 'old' reddit) with much better information density.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    I tried Apollo for a few days before going back and probably tried one or two others but only for a couple of hours (I'm on iOS btw). Overall what I disliked was that they didn't have the same polish in the navigation. On the official app I feel like everything that is going from a list of thread to the comments, to collapsing a comment, to going back to the subreddit, etc. is super natural and polished and I didn't feel the same on the others.
random_upvoter 3y ago
Every day I manage to stay away from Reddit is a day I end up a bit happier and less angry.
- lom 3y ago
  Every day I stay away from r/popular and large subreddits is a day I end up a bit happier and less angry.
flenserboy 3y ago
Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.
- eddieroger 3y ago
  I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab. I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would have to discover other kinds of content on USENET, but rule one forbids talking about it. So barring that, what is the best way to discover interesting newsgroups and participate in them?
  - tallanvor 3y ago
    Usenet isn't really a thing anymore, sadly. Don't get me wrong, it's going strong for file sharing, but most ISPs don't provide access anymore, so it's not really a place you find discussions.
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    I had newsgroups access over twenty years ago with my university, and even then it felt like a ghost town.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    You can just download the list of newsgroups. If you find one that looks interesting you can just post to it. The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality. Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.
paradoxyl 3y ago
As long as old.reddit.com still exists for desktop, the site is semi-usable, although the insane moderation policies and narrow ideology makes the site basically useless except for niche reddits. Though I have gone from a daily user years back to maybe once a month. It's that bad. On mobile, I can still read direct links to reddit posts that crop up on HN using Firefox for Android. Can't say same for the Twitter, which just says, "You need to enable javascript." Well, I won't.
- ransom1538 3y ago
  This post seriously changed my life. I had no idea old was working. Thanks.
  - executive 3y ago
    Wait till you discover teddit.
    - kevviiinn 3y ago
      Its always slow loafing for me, old loads way faster
      - astronads 3y ago
        Try https://teddit.adminforge.de/ https://teddit.adminforge.de/
        kevviiinn 3y ago
        Nice and quick, thank you! I was using teddit.net
  - jonatron 3y ago
    The Old Reddit Redirect browser extension is good because old links to new a lot.
  - 3y ago
sickcodebruh 3y ago
Serious question, possibly naive: how many of Reddit’s UX decisions come back to pressure from investors to make good on the $1.3B they’ve raised? Is every web product with users and influence obligated to raise as much as possible and grow to a size where they start chasing ad revenue no matter what it does to their product and its users? I’m sure that running a product at Reddit’s scale requires serious money, money must come from somewhere, investment capital gets you there… But was this really the only path?
- kevincox 3y ago
  Yes. Reddit's only goal is to make money. If you think they care about the users you are a fool. The only really question is will they aim to make long-term sustainable money by creating a great product or will they try to cash out now by wringing every cent they can from users? It looks like they are going full-tilt towards option 2.
- 23B1 3y ago
  It’s not the only path it’s just the easiest in the short term. One concept that tech companies seem to have completely forgotten is brand equity. They will squander long-term reputation for short term gains due to, as you said, downward pressure from investors - which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but they’re sacrificing long term gains for short term ones. The solution here would be to have mature/smarter/more savvy CXOs/founders who know how to manage expectations for growth. There’s plenty of organizations who are capable of setting multi-year growth plans in place and getting their investors in line. This is probably nigh on impossible if you’re venture-backed because most of these guys are looking for sugar, not complex carbs.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >which in itself isn’t a bad thing, How is that not a bad thing in and of itself? Squandering reputation is accomplished by doing bad things.
    - 23B1 3y ago
jelder 3y ago
I've been a reddit user since 2010. I have over 40k karma points (whatever that means) and I've never once bothered to try any 3rd party app. I was only briefly cognizant of the "old.reddit.com" thing because some subs sidebars hadn't been updated. The official site is fine. I have one or two small gripes about the UI. The official iOS app is also fine. I have a few small gripes about the UI there, too. I guess I wish it didn't have ads but hey, shit's not free.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I used the official app for a while but got tired of being advertised literal scams, and found the app just a bit slow. Switching to Apollo was transformational in my usage and engagement, a far better product, and would be great even with ads. As for the site, the new redesign seems to have improved a little in the last few months, but for years it has been nearly unusable. On an Intel Mac JS was just far too slow and my fans would spin up on any Reddit page. It was like this for years. The Reddit UX might be good enough on mobile, and might have gotten better on web, but users have been burnt hard. I know so many regular users who use alternative apps or the old site.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  I used the official app for years until I started getting curious about which of my iPhone apps was using like 15 GB of data per month. Deleted the Reddit app and downloaded Apollo and haven’t had that issue since. When I can’t use Apollo anymore I guess I’ll look at HN or some other site more but not interested in going back to the official app.
veidr 3y ago
Unsurprising, but as with twitter, the idea of a corporation running these kinds of sites always eventually fails. People "don't want to deal with" the messy world of open standards, of different web forums for different things, federation... I mean, I get it, but that just ends up meaning they fall for the same twitter/myspace/facebook/walmart.com trick again, over and over and over. Somebody else posted the enshittification link — that's what is happening here. Like it always does. The AI thing is an obvious red herring anyway. Plenty of ways they could address that without harming third party clients for human readers, but they want to strangle those clients. As twitter did before them, as they all do eventually. They tend to do it as soon as they feel they've tricked enough people to investing enough of their attention in them that the users won't just leave. Which in reddit's case they probably have, considering how often search engines propose adding "reddit" to whatever my search string is.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Agreed on AI being a red herring. Social apps have been cutting off third parties for years. As it is on most things, Reddit is just very slow to get on board.
ape4 3y ago
As a compromise reddit could require that 3rd party apps to show ads from reddit (so they get the money from clicks)
- munchler 3y ago
  How could this be enforced?
- Terretta 3y ago
  Or they could have users be members of Gold to use third party apps. It's ridiculous to claim that "Apollo" generates reddit traffic. Reddit users generate traffic, via web client of choice.
  - FinnKuhn 3y ago
    this feels like a fair middle ground. Reddit doesn't loose out on ad revenue and the App developer doesn't have to pay anything directly. I assume they calculated their current price at least somewhat on how many Gold members they loose to these Apps that don't show any adds...
- rchaud 3y ago
  Ads are dynamically served via client-side scripts (on the web). An API endpoint contains static data (post text, image URLs, etc) that's the same for everyone, so it cannot serve individual ads to users in that way.
bcraven 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343748 This HN thread a few months ago about the removal of i.reddit feels prophetic.
ape4 3y ago
I use the Offline Reader app. It downloads a few subreddits on wifi and I can read them on my commute without using expensive cell data and underground where there is none. I suppose that app will be killed too :(
jerf 3y ago
Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already have to log in to them anyhow so it's not like you'd need an extra API key or anything. $20/year is probably an order of magnitude more then they make on ads served to me. The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on before, that the companies will cling to it even when people are begging to pay money to get rid of them. These companies make virtually nothing per year in ads and make up for it in scale. Latest easy stat I can find [1] is $350 million of ad revenue in 2021. Certainly this is less than $2/year from most active users. I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money. I don't understand why these companies are so insistent on bending their entire platforms around ad revenue to the exclusion of all else, when "all else" is so much money for someone already scraping pennies from people. Besides, a lot of ad spend was tied to ZIRP; I would think that while the ad business as a whole is certainly in no danger of disappearing, now is a great time for any ad-focused business to be diversifying because spends are very likely to go down in the medium-term, if not the short term. A lot of economic signals are flashing "recession" and ad spend tends to get hit pretty hard in that context. A solid base of subscribers paying real money for your service is a better foundation to go into that sort of economic environment than being solely dependent on ads. (Obviously, a recession will hit your subscriber base too, but that's stickier than ad spend I expect.) (And an obligatory observation that they are shoving ads in your face, tracking your every move, crafting something you spend hours a week on to increase your advertiser profile value in your every interaction, deploying every addictive psychological trick they can think of to keep you active, and fundamentally polluting at a deep and profound level the entire social sphere of damned near the entire species... for pennies a month. That's all. Pennies a month. They're not even making the money you think they are. They're doing all this to you and the collective social sphere for a few pennies a month.) [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/
- eddieroger 3y ago
  That idea came up in the massive thread created by the author of the iOS app Apollo. A compelling reason it wouldn't work is it creates confusion and tension between Reddit, Apollo and the user when things don't work, as well as with regards to who's paying for what. If I have to pay Reddit $10/mo to use it, why do I also have to pay this app developer $1 to use their app? When it fails, is it Reddit who owes me support or Apollo? What about outages? Just a lot of moving parts. Not that I don't think it's worth it, but it does get confusing for average users.
ghusto 3y ago
> It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium. Given how aggressively they push you to use the app when you visit the site, this is likely accurate. However, I have Firefox (and therefore proper ad-blocking) on my phone, so nah, I'm still good, thanks.
KoftaBob 3y ago
So I've recently gotten super interested in the idea of building a webapp that can seamlessly interact with social network/link aggregator protocols through bridging, and I'm working one that does that with a focus more on following topics vs following people. It's technically a nostr client, but it allows you to search for and follow posts about topics from Twitter (through Nitter RSS feeds), Mastodon (through the native Mastodon RSS feeds), Reddit (through subreddit RSS feeds), and Bluesky (through a bridged RSS feed). This way, you can focus on following the topics you're interested in, and not have to think about what platform/protocol holds those posts. https://agorasocial.app https://agorasocial.app
nkotov 3y ago
I don't use the new experience or the app intentionally. It's just clunkier and feels slow. Been an Apollo user for years now. If this means the end of Apollo, I just wont use reddit on my phone. It's that bad.
Narushia 3y ago
So, basically any kind of customization to the Reddit experience is now limited to browser extensions and userscripts that scrape and modify the website itself. On Android, this means using Firefox. On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. Unless someone creates a Reddit app that is actually just a web view wrapper bundled with the necessary client-side scripts.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. iOS has a standard browser extension system, and other iOS browsers support their own extension system. https://insightbrowser.com/ https://insightbrowser.com/
  - caditinpiscinam 3y ago
    It looks like that's only true as of Feb of this year: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/ I think all of the major iOS browser competitors (chromi, firefox, etc) still use webkit for now, and are pretty limited as a result
    - SSLy 3y ago
      iOS Safari addons are about 1.5 years old at this point. https://www.theverge.com/22722886/safari-extensions-ios-15-iphone-how-to https://www.theverge.com/22722886/safari-extensions-ios-15-i...
- Narushia 3y ago
  Oh, and I forgot: on Android, app patching is also a possibility. For example, the ReVanced project offers patches for the official Reddit app: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage&s=reddit https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage&s=redd...
interestica 3y ago
The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.) There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a minority who you are free to exploit for as long as you're useful, and then crush once you're done with them. I seriously think this is just reddit finally thinking "yup - we've won - time to start acting with impunity for anything that cuts costs (like not maintaining a public API) or increases even the smallest bit of revenue (like managing to convert 1% of apollo users to first-party-app users while alienating (no pun intended) the rest).
  - danudey 3y ago
    I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.
    - pierat 3y ago
      Control of the narrative is worth more than just money. So instead of just removing it, they just set the price to be laughable high so few, if any actually pay. Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one. I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.
pontiacbandit8 3y ago
This is a deliberate move by Reddit to force the use of their failed acquisition. I believe this pushback combined with slashing of valuation will make them rethink their decision.
deleted 3y ago
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- Chronoyes 3y ago
  [dead]
sevenf0ur 3y ago
The Apollo app lets me use Reddit while signed out. I can favorite some subreddits and browse through them with no fuss. The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Apollo also has a bunch of life improvement features that the Reddit app will never see such as auto collapsing pinned / auto mod comments, icons that identify newer accounts, and showing who deleted posts.
- hbn 3y ago
  > The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Oh don't worry, that's by no means an oversight.
Roark66 3y ago
Come on, it's web we're talking about here. How difficult is it going to be to scrape the data and present it in a nice format to the user? I bet apps will show up that do just that very quickly.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  It's true. Especially because Reddit is public. (I think new Reddit isn't public for NSFW?)
- louhike 3y ago
  There’s documentation usually with an API and you have changelogs. If you scrape the website, if there is a change in the UI, it will break your product. So it is feasible, but it will make all products worse and harder to maintain.
neilv 3y ago
> but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not What's the official public rationale for that move? And what's the corporate-internal rationale, if anyone who knows can say? (I can imagine a few reasons other than simply to take away more user base of third-party apps, but I'm curious what the truth is.) (Aside: Both openness and NSFW seemed to be significant parts of Reddit from early on. I recall very early on, briefly looking at Reddit, and I noted with amusement that they seemed to be slying using NSFW to help boost adoption. That might've even been before subreddits, or maybe it was an early subreddit.)
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  another aside: the nsfw subreddits that I enjoyed have all been recently banned
- mgbmtl 3y ago
  I wonder if advertisers get to chose if they can include/exclude nsfw content? After all, the bottom line is monetization.
alexp2021 3y ago
There is no credible Reddit alternative as we speak, is there?
- sogen 3y ago
  a lot of consumer-generated content websites are around us: from YouTube back in 2006 - based around videos to - Twitter - Instagram and the newer ones such as - Discord - TikTok - Mastodon etc. even HN
- Rudism 3y ago
  Is a credible Reddit alternative (that operates on the same extremely broad scope and large scale) even possible without eventually going down the same road?
phreack 3y ago
The only app I use to browse Reddit is old.reddit.com. It's still great on mobile if you have a browser with proper text reflow (ie. Opera on Android, since all others can't be bothered). But everytime I end up seeing the "new" design it's instantly repelling, I can't browse it even once. This is Digg all over again!
- bedobi 3y ago
  thanks, you just saved my procrastinating on reddit on mobile (it's fine in Firefox for Android btw)
- dicknuckle 3y ago
  Word is they're going to take down old.reddit as well.
  - phreack 3y ago
    Soon as they do, I'm out. I actually like a lot of Reddit but it's literally unusable for me without a clean UI, just like Twitter. Every time I get a Twitter link I brace for a million requests before even getting to the short Tweet. It's enough to not even bother most of the time, I can't even imagine being a user.
    - dicknuckle 3y ago
      I'm right there with you. Twitter is almost as bad as TikTok and I don't have an account for either. My solution was to spin up Nitter and Proxitok on my docker host and set the appropriate redirects on my laptop browsers and Kiwi browser on Android devices. A total of 15mins of work and now I can look at all the links my friends send like browsing in 2006 again.
      - phreack 3y ago
        That's actually an incredible idea, I'll do something similar, thanks!
- 3y ago
macrael 3y ago
It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users, and leaner than ever which is better for the company. There was a short learning curve for all involved (those who were left and those who were brought on), but they've ironed out those kinks long ago.
  - Daishiman 3y ago
    Every time I see a blue check mark on a contentious topic it’s never good. Good writers have left the platform or participate far less. Things break all the time. The only good thing is it’s helped me drastically reduce the time I spend mindlessly scrolling.
  - mdeeks 3y ago
    Hm I have quite the opposite experience. I've never had so many bugs with Twitter as I do right now. The feed random refresh bug never went away and somehow managed to get worse. Right as I'm reading something it'll vanish without a trace. I probably see this five times per day. Sometimes I'll find my app on the "Following" feed even though I never actually switched to it (I'm weird, I actually enjoy the For You feed a lot). Sometimes the content clearly hasn't refreshed because I see new things on my desktop that aren't on my mobile app. The quality of the content has taken a sharp nose dive too. Almost everything is useless threads from "thought influencers", memes, or completely random posts that I have never interacted with ever in my life (anime memes? a thousand posts about the barbie movie) The quality of the replies is awful now that blue check users are all at the top. It essentially made it "pay to be seen" rather than having the more interesting replies at the top. This makes me the most sad I think :( Aside from that though, it feels like roughly the same app but with some small tweaks here and there.
  - 3y ago
wedoitall 3y ago
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wedoitall 3y ago
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gymbeaux 3y ago
I don’t mind Reddit committing suicide because the volunteer moderation system is absolute, total, complete garbage. There are subreddits where mods have programmed any DMs to be reported to Reddit, that’s how unpopular they are, yet they continue to own subreddits representing companies who should care more about such things. One example is CardinalMember on the Robinhood subreddit. Then there’s the issue of getting permanent “zero tolerance” bans for comments less than racism or other discrimination or hate speech. Honestly I kind of appreciate where Elon Musk is coming from lifting bans on people like Donald Trump… of course in typical human fashion, he bans people on Twitter for MUCH less than hate speech- like tracking his private jet or being critical of his thoughts or actions. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe anyone with authority who A) advocates for free speech and B) doesn’t restrict it when it’s content they don’t like.
junky228 3y ago
the only way I use reddit is through rif (reddit is fun). I'm going to be quite unhappy if that goes away
fastglass 3y ago
why not do the same thing with reddit api as people do with Netflix accounts though
yung_steezy 3y ago
Does this affect teddit.net or does that circumvent the API like nitter does with twitter?

410 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

andrewstuart 3y ago

Probably they should have found a way to require third party apps to display their ads.

wahahah 3y ago
AFAIK it's generally not a thing because of fraud / lack of metribility.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mrtksn 3y ago
Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.
- chwilson 3y ago
  app.net[1] tried this in the early 2010s, unfortunately most people (i.e. enough people to justify running the service) wouldn't pony up. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Wasn't that $50? That was kindof a silly amount of money for the state of the internet and the size of the platform.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      The amount doesn't really matter. As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access? The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network. I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
        rglullis 3y ago
        See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in. Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
        plagiarist 3y ago
        Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works? Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Unfortunately, this shows how much the people that keep complaining about Elon Musk or Zuckerberg really should not be listened to. People suddenly do not care that much about privacy if it costs them anything or brings some inconvenience. I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
    - piaste 3y ago
      > I keep running https://communick.com https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves. I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves. The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be. But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        We can do that since the late 90's. Skype was p2p and worked very well. The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith. I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    If you post the n-word on reddit it gets removed immediately - no matter what the context was.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Oh, good, that will fix all of it. The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist. There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.
pantulis 3y ago
The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads. If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
- ryanmercer 3y ago
  >would be paying around 2,5$/month, Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I used to pay for Reddit, but they kept getting more and more user-hostile to the point that the use I got out of it was accidental. To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated. Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
  - pierat 3y ago
    That's only part of the problem. All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme. Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
    - ryanmercer 3y ago
      Yeah I don't do the whole "boo hoo unpaid worker" nonsense. I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities. I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
madeofpalk 3y ago
This is basically lose/lose for everyone. API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them. Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it. Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
- toyg 3y ago
  > API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- m-p-3 3y ago
  Or skip the ads problem on third-party apps altogether by requiring the use of Reddit Premium to use third-party apps. That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
bazmattaz 3y ago
I thought the point was that third party sites purposely didn’t want to show ads

chayesfss 3y ago

[dead]

spacephysics 3y ago

The app is complete garbage, and the dark patterns on their mobile webpage are insidious. If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great. But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit. Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance of a scraper that pulls the data for each page you’d like to see, kind of like a proxy between your client and reddit? Would be a fun project to try out.

madeofpalk 3y ago
It would just be "better" to call the private/internal APIs that reddit's clients use themselves. This is more or less what Nitter does for providing alternate twitter frontend https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
- sphars 3y ago
  Like nitter, there is Teddit and Libreddit, which are both alternative (read-only) frontends for reddit Teddit: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit Libreddit: https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit
  - Macha 3y ago
    Both however use the public Reddit API, unlike Nitter which does page scraping. So they'll need significant updates to work past July 1st.
    - sphars 3y ago
      This is true, both will be SOL come July. There is some discussion going on in Libreddit for solutions in https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785 https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit/issues/785
rashkov 3y ago

tremere 3y ago

Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

amykhar 3y ago
It would be good for users - not sure it would make sense for a company though. The third party apps stripped ads. You have to be able to make money. I think the actual mistake was having it open in the first place. You can't give away things for free from the start and then take it away. A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.
bazmattaz 3y ago
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US. I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul. If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself
- fathyb 3y ago
  > understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board? > invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss. > try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that. I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.

llampx 3y ago

Every social network goes through this. You used to be able to access Facebook via other front-ends as well, same with Twitter. This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.

mywacaday 3y ago
I have tried the official reddit android app and always go back to reddit is fun. A drop in my usage will be no bad thing!
slantaclaus 3y ago
Reddit has become toxic. Deleting the app off my phone has really helped with my emotional health
- Pxtl 3y ago
  I have trouble remembering a time when it wasn't.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  Reddit is sprawling. There are thousands of non-political subreddits. Yeah, if you are following the default feed and reading r/politics, or any of the drama subreddits, you are going to have a bad time. Are you curious about what information is being sent through your house between 10KHz and 6GHz? Curious what your water meter is broadcasting to the neighborhood? https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ Feel like some short videos of animals being adorable? https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ (or any of the related subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/wiki/relatedsubreddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/wiki/relatedsubreddits/) Want to find out about things in your city? eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/ Into plants? https://www.reddit.com/r/plants/ https://www.reddit.com/r/plants/ Play guitar or are thinking about it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/

bazmattaz 3y ago

I’m a bit hesitant to admit that I use the official app for Reddit and have used for years. I’ve used the browser extensions before and have tried Apollo app but I never got hooked. I don’t understand all the hate the official app gets. I understand there is telemetry but i have pi hole to block most of that. It has ads sure but I don’t really see them anymore, your adjust adjust around them. One thing that annoys me is that notifications can be buggy. Sometimes you have to reload to see the activity in your inbox.

vorpalhex 3y ago
"Really, once you get distracted, the pain of sitting on a nail just goes away!" Spying on users, injecting ads, and dark patterns. Or you could just uh.. not have any of that?
- xeromal 3y ago
  Users will be spied upon in any app if they're authenticated. The ads thing is silly. How else do you get free content.
  - account42 3y ago
    Reddit isn't providing free content, the users (or whoever the users got the content from) are the ones providing the content. None of them are paid. Reddit is only a host and would ideally be replaced by a public utility or community-run alternative.
    - xeromal 3y ago
      People miss the forest from the trees when it comes to social media claiming the users make the community. While it is completely true, it's not the complete picture. The communities have to be fostered. I'd be willing to make a bet that any alternative websites and/or communities will not rise up to replace Reddit because it's hard to foster a social network. Way harder than the individual parts of moderation per subreddit. The people who think otherwise are most likely living in a fantasy Utopia

lawn 3y ago

I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI. The site itself is just garbage and the difference between the redesign and old.reddit is just so jarring, and the Android client is also garbage. Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage. Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.

fabian_shipamax 3y ago
[flagged]
- stavros 3y ago
  I think it's not, calm down.
- standing_user 3y ago
  It depends on the definition of fine tho
stavros 3y ago
I agree, whenever I hit the new site I just close the tab. I never figured out how to get more than 2-3 comments on it, so I don't even bother these days.
jerpint 3y ago
If you go to the front page without logging in, you’ll quickly notice the target demographic is teens/young adults. The redesign makes a lot more sense with that context
- lawn 3y ago
  Do you imply that teens/young adults don't care about usability? Or that they don't have the attention span to read comments and just want to endlessly scroll through crap?

lapcat 3y ago

Dupe with multiple submissions, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083 (1279 comments) Please submitters, check before you submit.

interestica 3y ago
That submission is very different. This story looks at wider effects and implications.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Subtracting external quoted links, the entire story is 4 paragraphs. It's just a wrapper around those links.
  - interestica 3y ago
    Ok? That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context. A really great way to get a handle on the wider implications. And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content?
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > That's the point though. It collects a bunch of external sources in one spot that are all related to the same issue -- and provides the context. You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36150373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36150373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159487 > And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content? It's literally the link quoted by "The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says"

kgwxd 3y ago

You can append .rss to any sub e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss https://old.reddit.com/r/popular.rss you’ll never need to reskim over headlines to find things you haven’t seen and by using the “old” subdomain every item will open it a useable UI. I’m sure they’ll kill this too eventually but I don’t think I’ll miss Reddit much once it goes full Digg.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

branon 3y ago

Kotaku does not really belong on HN. They didn't even mention teddit or libreddit.

ryanmercer 3y ago

Best way to read the site is, and always has been, old.reddit on a proper computer.

pixelpoet 3y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how much people actually like using these godawful passive consumption / walled garden devices, to say nothing of all the apps over simply using a browser. I truly hate the direction all this is going (electron apps, mobile first/only, vertical videos, TikTok, social media, ...) and seemingly everyone else just can't get enough of it :(
p_j_w 3y ago
I give it about 6 months before old.reddit goes away.

xvilka 3y ago

Despite my doubts about Mastodon being able to become popular Twitter alternative, I wish there was the same wave of migrating to the Fediverse-based open source Reddit alternative. So far I don't see them very popular.

4ggr0 3y ago
Maybe we should all push to use Lemmy[0] :D [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
PenguinCoder 3y ago
There's been a small migration happening that I see on Lemmy instance https://beehaw.org https://beehaw.org

nottorp 3y ago

Isn't the best way to open old.reddit.com in a desktop browser?

kevincox 3y ago
When you are at a computer yes. But sometimes I am on my phone and neither the old UI or the new UI are acceptable. I slightly prefer the new UI on mobile but it definitely sucks.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Well, I generally don't read anything on mobile unless I need a piece of info right now. Besides the screen having either too much or too little info, depending on if it's designed for the desktop or for mobile, it's usually unsafe since you can't run uBlock Origin on the Apple browser...
  - distances 3y ago
    Well, Android has uBlock Origin. I admit that I read almost everything on mobile these days, including 100% of my Reddit and HN usage. I sit in front of the computer all day for work, so I have little appetite to continue sitting for leisure reading.
  - Zak 3y ago
    You can, however use DNS-based adblocking. Mullvad has a free service at adblock.doh.mullvad.net.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

As much as I hate the new design on web and never use it, I don't really have a problem with the app and I found the alternatives I tried to be sub-par. What's everyone's deal with the app? Beside the removal of ads of course, which is understandable but undefendable.

bwat49 3y ago
what apps did you try? I use RIF (reddit is fun) and it's much better than the official app. The UI is much cleaner (looks like a proper mobile version of the 'old' reddit) with much better information density.
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  I tried Apollo for a few days before going back and probably tried one or two others but only for a couple of hours (I'm on iOS btw). Overall what I disliked was that they didn't have the same polish in the navigation. On the official app I feel like everything that is going from a list of thread to the comments, to collapsing a comment, to going back to the subreddit, etc. is super natural and polished and I didn't feel the same on the others.

random_upvoter 3y ago

Every day I manage to stay away from Reddit is a day I end up a bit happier and less angry.

lom 3y ago
Every day I stay away from r/popular and large subreddits is a day I end up a bit happier and less angry.

flenserboy 3y ago

Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.

eddieroger 3y ago
I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab. I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would have to discover other kinds of content on USENET, but rule one forbids talking about it. So barring that, what is the best way to discover interesting newsgroups and participate in them?
- tallanvor 3y ago
  Usenet isn't really a thing anymore, sadly. Don't get me wrong, it's going strong for file sharing, but most ISPs don't provide access anymore, so it's not really a place you find discussions.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  I had newsgroups access over twenty years ago with my university, and even then it felt like a ghost town.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  You can just download the list of newsgroups. If you find one that looks interesting you can just post to it. The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality. Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.

paradoxyl 3y ago

As long as old.reddit.com still exists for desktop, the site is semi-usable, although the insane moderation policies and narrow ideology makes the site basically useless except for niche reddits. Though I have gone from a daily user years back to maybe once a month. It's that bad. On mobile, I can still read direct links to reddit posts that crop up on HN using Firefox for Android. Can't say same for the Twitter, which just says, "You need to enable javascript." Well, I won't.

ransom1538 3y ago
This post seriously changed my life. I had no idea old was working. Thanks.
- executive 3y ago
  Wait till you discover teddit.
  - kevviiinn 3y ago
    Its always slow loafing for me, old loads way faster
    - astronads 3y ago
      Try https://teddit.adminforge.de/ https://teddit.adminforge.de/
      - kevviiinn 3y ago
        Nice and quick, thank you! I was using teddit.net
- jonatron 3y ago
  The Old Reddit Redirect browser extension is good because old links to new a lot.
- 3y ago

sickcodebruh 3y ago

Serious question, possibly naive: how many of Reddit’s UX decisions come back to pressure from investors to make good on the $1.3B they’ve raised? Is every web product with users and influence obligated to raise as much as possible and grow to a size where they start chasing ad revenue no matter what it does to their product and its users? I’m sure that running a product at Reddit’s scale requires serious money, money must come from somewhere, investment capital gets you there… But was this really the only path?

kevincox 3y ago
Yes. Reddit's only goal is to make money. If you think they care about the users you are a fool. The only really question is will they aim to make long-term sustainable money by creating a great product or will they try to cash out now by wringing every cent they can from users? It looks like they are going full-tilt towards option 2.
23B1 3y ago
It’s not the only path it’s just the easiest in the short term. One concept that tech companies seem to have completely forgotten is brand equity. They will squander long-term reputation for short term gains due to, as you said, downward pressure from investors - which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but they’re sacrificing long term gains for short term ones. The solution here would be to have mature/smarter/more savvy CXOs/founders who know how to manage expectations for growth. There’s plenty of organizations who are capable of setting multi-year growth plans in place and getting their investors in line. This is probably nigh on impossible if you’re venture-backed because most of these guys are looking for sugar, not complex carbs.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >which in itself isn’t a bad thing, How is that not a bad thing in and of itself? Squandering reputation is accomplished by doing bad things.
  - 23B1 3y ago

jelder 3y ago

I've been a reddit user since 2010. I have over 40k karma points (whatever that means) and I've never once bothered to try any 3rd party app. I was only briefly cognizant of the "old.reddit.com" thing because some subs sidebars hadn't been updated. The official site is fine. I have one or two small gripes about the UI. The official iOS app is also fine. I have a few small gripes about the UI there, too. I guess I wish it didn't have ads but hey, shit's not free.

danpalmer 3y ago
I used the official app for a while but got tired of being advertised literal scams, and found the app just a bit slow. Switching to Apollo was transformational in my usage and engagement, a far better product, and would be great even with ads. As for the site, the new redesign seems to have improved a little in the last few months, but for years it has been nearly unusable. On an Intel Mac JS was just far too slow and my fans would spin up on any Reddit page. It was like this for years. The Reddit UX might be good enough on mobile, and might have gotten better on web, but users have been burnt hard. I know so many regular users who use alternative apps or the old site.
lotsoweiners 3y ago
I used the official app for years until I started getting curious about which of my iPhone apps was using like 15 GB of data per month. Deleted the Reddit app and downloaded Apollo and haven’t had that issue since. When I can’t use Apollo anymore I guess I’ll look at HN or some other site more but not interested in going back to the official app.

veidr 3y ago

Unsurprising, but as with twitter, the idea of a corporation running these kinds of sites always eventually fails. People "don't want to deal with" the messy world of open standards, of different web forums for different things, federation... I mean, I get it, but that just ends up meaning they fall for the same twitter/myspace/facebook/walmart.com trick again, over and over and over. Somebody else posted the enshittification link — that's what is happening here. Like it always does. The AI thing is an obvious red herring anyway. Plenty of ways they could address that without harming third party clients for human readers, but they want to strangle those clients. As twitter did before them, as they all do eventually. They tend to do it as soon as they feel they've tricked enough people to investing enough of their attention in them that the users won't just leave. Which in reddit's case they probably have, considering how often search engines propose adding "reddit" to whatever my search string is.

rchaud 3y ago
Agreed on AI being a red herring. Social apps have been cutting off third parties for years. As it is on most things, Reddit is just very slow to get on board.

ape4 3y ago

As a compromise reddit could require that 3rd party apps to show ads from reddit (so they get the money from clicks)

munchler 3y ago
How could this be enforced?
Terretta 3y ago
Or they could have users be members of Gold to use third party apps. It's ridiculous to claim that "Apollo" generates reddit traffic. Reddit users generate traffic, via web client of choice.
- FinnKuhn 3y ago
  this feels like a fair middle ground. Reddit doesn't loose out on ad revenue and the App developer doesn't have to pay anything directly. I assume they calculated their current price at least somewhat on how many Gold members they loose to these Apps that don't show any adds...
rchaud 3y ago
Ads are dynamically served via client-side scripts (on the web). An API endpoint contains static data (post text, image URLs, etc) that's the same for everyone, so it cannot serve individual ads to users in that way.

bcraven 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343748 This HN thread a few months ago about the removal of i.reddit feels prophetic.

ape4 3y ago

I use the Offline Reader app. It downloads a few subreddits on wifi and I can read them on my commute without using expensive cell data and underground where there is none. I suppose that app will be killed too :(

jerf 3y ago

Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already have to log in to them anyhow so it's not like you'd need an extra API key or anything. $20/year is probably an order of magnitude more then they make on ads served to me. The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on before, that the companies will cling to it even when people are begging to pay money to get rid of them. These companies make virtually nothing per year in ads and make up for it in scale. Latest easy stat I can find [1] is $350 million of ad revenue in 2021. Certainly this is less than $2/year from most active users. I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money. I don't understand why these companies are so insistent on bending their entire platforms around ad revenue to the exclusion of all else, when "all else" is so much money for someone already scraping pennies from people. Besides, a lot of ad spend was tied to ZIRP; I would think that while the ad business as a whole is certainly in no danger of disappearing, now is a great time for any ad-focused business to be diversifying because spends are very likely to go down in the medium-term, if not the short term. A lot of economic signals are flashing "recession" and ad spend tends to get hit pretty hard in that context. A solid base of subscribers paying real money for your service is a better foundation to go into that sort of economic environment than being solely dependent on ads. (Obviously, a recession will hit your subscriber base too, but that's stickier than ad spend I expect.) (And an obligatory observation that they are shoving ads in your face, tracking your every move, crafting something you spend hours a week on to increase your advertiser profile value in your every interaction, deploying every addictive psychological trick they can think of to keep you active, and fundamentally polluting at a deep and profound level the entire social sphere of damned near the entire species... for pennies a month. That's all. Pennies a month. They're not even making the money you think they are. They're doing all this to you and the collective social sphere for a few pennies a month.) [1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/reddit-statistics/

eddieroger 3y ago
That idea came up in the massive thread created by the author of the iOS app Apollo. A compelling reason it wouldn't work is it creates confusion and tension between Reddit, Apollo and the user when things don't work, as well as with regards to who's paying for what. If I have to pay Reddit $10/mo to use it, why do I also have to pay this app developer $1 to use their app? When it fails, is it Reddit who owes me support or Apollo? What about outages? Just a lot of moving parts. Not that I don't think it's worth it, but it does get confusing for average users.

ghusto 3y ago

> It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium. Given how aggressively they push you to use the app when you visit the site, this is likely accurate. However, I have Firefox (and therefore proper ad-blocking) on my phone, so nah, I'm still good, thanks.

KoftaBob 3y ago

So I've recently gotten super interested in the idea of building a webapp that can seamlessly interact with social network/link aggregator protocols through bridging, and I'm working one that does that with a focus more on following topics vs following people. It's technically a nostr client, but it allows you to search for and follow posts about topics from Twitter (through Nitter RSS feeds), Mastodon (through the native Mastodon RSS feeds), Reddit (through subreddit RSS feeds), and Bluesky (through a bridged RSS feed). This way, you can focus on following the topics you're interested in, and not have to think about what platform/protocol holds those posts. https://agorasocial.app https://agorasocial.app

nkotov 3y ago

I don't use the new experience or the app intentionally. It's just clunkier and feels slow. Been an Apollo user for years now. If this means the end of Apollo, I just wont use reddit on my phone. It's that bad.

Narushia 3y ago

So, basically any kind of customization to the Reddit experience is now limited to browser extensions and userscripts that scrape and modify the website itself. On Android, this means using Firefox. On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. Unless someone creates a Reddit app that is actually just a web view wrapper bundled with the necessary client-side scripts.

CharlesW 3y ago
> On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. iOS has a standard browser extension system, and other iOS browsers support their own extension system. https://insightbrowser.com/ https://insightbrowser.com/
- caditinpiscinam 3y ago
  It looks like that's only true as of Feb of this year: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/ https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/ I think all of the major iOS browser competitors (chromi, firefox, etc) still use webkit for now, and are pretty limited as a result
  - SSLy 3y ago
    iOS Safari addons are about 1.5 years old at this point. https://www.theverge.com/22722886/safari-extensions-ios-15-iphone-how-to https://www.theverge.com/22722886/safari-extensions-ios-15-i...
Narushia 3y ago
Oh, and I forgot: on Android, app patching is also a possibility. For example, the ReVanced project offers patches for the official Reddit app: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage&s=reddit https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage&s=redd...

interestica 3y ago

The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.) There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.

atomicnumber3 3y ago
Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a minority who you are free to exploit for as long as you're useful, and then crush once you're done with them. I seriously think this is just reddit finally thinking "yup - we've won - time to start acting with impunity for anything that cuts costs (like not maintaining a public API) or increases even the smallest bit of revenue (like managing to convert 1% of apollo users to first-party-app users while alienating (no pun intended) the rest).
- danudey 3y ago
  I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Control of the narrative is worth more than just money. So instead of just removing it, they just set the price to be laughable high so few, if any actually pay. Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one. I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.

pontiacbandit8 3y ago

This is a deliberate move by Reddit to force the use of their failed acquisition. I believe this pushback combined with slashing of valuation will make them rethink their decision.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Chronoyes 3y ago
[dead]

sevenf0ur 3y ago

The Apollo app lets me use Reddit while signed out. I can favorite some subreddits and browse through them with no fuss. The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Apollo also has a bunch of life improvement features that the Reddit app will never see such as auto collapsing pinned / auto mod comments, icons that identify newer accounts, and showing who deleted posts.

hbn 3y ago
> The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Oh don't worry, that's by no means an oversight.

Roark66 3y ago

Come on, it's web we're talking about here. How difficult is it going to be to scrape the data and present it in a nice format to the user? I bet apps will show up that do just that very quickly.

paulddraper 3y ago
It's true. Especially because Reddit is public. (I think new Reddit isn't public for NSFW?)
louhike 3y ago
There’s documentation usually with an API and you have changelogs. If you scrape the website, if there is a change in the UI, it will break your product. So it is feasible, but it will make all products worse and harder to maintain.

neilv 3y ago

> but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not What's the official public rationale for that move? And what's the corporate-internal rationale, if anyone who knows can say? (I can imagine a few reasons other than simply to take away more user base of third-party apps, but I'm curious what the truth is.) (Aside: Both openness and NSFW seemed to be significant parts of Reddit from early on. I recall very early on, briefly looking at Reddit, and I noted with amusement that they seemed to be slying using NSFW to help boost adoption. That might've even been before subreddits, or maybe it was an early subreddit.)

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
another aside: the nsfw subreddits that I enjoyed have all been recently banned
mgbmtl 3y ago
I wonder if advertisers get to chose if they can include/exclude nsfw content? After all, the bottom line is monetization.

alexp2021 3y ago

There is no credible Reddit alternative as we speak, is there?

sogen 3y ago
a lot of consumer-generated content websites are around us: from YouTube back in 2006 - based around videos to - Twitter - Instagram and the newer ones such as - Discord - TikTok - Mastodon etc. even HN
Rudism 3y ago
Is a credible Reddit alternative (that operates on the same extremely broad scope and large scale) even possible without eventually going down the same road?

phreack 3y ago

The only app I use to browse Reddit is old.reddit.com. It's still great on mobile if you have a browser with proper text reflow (ie. Opera on Android, since all others can't be bothered). But everytime I end up seeing the "new" design it's instantly repelling, I can't browse it even once. This is Digg all over again!

bedobi 3y ago
thanks, you just saved my procrastinating on reddit on mobile (it's fine in Firefox for Android btw)
dicknuckle 3y ago
Word is they're going to take down old.reddit as well.
- phreack 3y ago
  Soon as they do, I'm out. I actually like a lot of Reddit but it's literally unusable for me without a clean UI, just like Twitter. Every time I get a Twitter link I brace for a million requests before even getting to the short Tweet. It's enough to not even bother most of the time, I can't even imagine being a user.
  - dicknuckle 3y ago
    I'm right there with you. Twitter is almost as bad as TikTok and I don't have an account for either. My solution was to spin up Nitter and Proxitok on my docker host and set the appropriate redirects on my laptop browsers and Kiwi browser on Android devices. A total of 15mins of work and now I can look at all the links my friends send like browsing in 2006 again.
    - phreack 3y ago
      That's actually an incredible idea, I'll do something similar, thanks!
3y ago

macrael 3y ago

It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.

stronglikedan 3y ago
Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users, and leaner than ever which is better for the company. There was a short learning curve for all involved (those who were left and those who were brought on), but they've ironed out those kinks long ago.
- Daishiman 3y ago
  Every time I see a blue check mark on a contentious topic it’s never good. Good writers have left the platform or participate far less. Things break all the time. The only good thing is it’s helped me drastically reduce the time I spend mindlessly scrolling.
- mdeeks 3y ago
  Hm I have quite the opposite experience. I've never had so many bugs with Twitter as I do right now. The feed random refresh bug never went away and somehow managed to get worse. Right as I'm reading something it'll vanish without a trace. I probably see this five times per day. Sometimes I'll find my app on the "Following" feed even though I never actually switched to it (I'm weird, I actually enjoy the For You feed a lot). Sometimes the content clearly hasn't refreshed because I see new things on my desktop that aren't on my mobile app. The quality of the content has taken a sharp nose dive too. Almost everything is useless threads from "thought influencers", memes, or completely random posts that I have never interacted with ever in my life (anime memes? a thousand posts about the barbie movie) The quality of the replies is awful now that blue check users are all at the top. It essentially made it "pay to be seen" rather than having the more interesting replies at the top. This makes me the most sad I think :( Aside from that though, it feels like roughly the same app but with some small tweaks here and there.
- 3y ago

wedoitall 3y ago

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wedoitall 3y ago

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gymbeaux 3y ago

I don’t mind Reddit committing suicide because the volunteer moderation system is absolute, total, complete garbage. There are subreddits where mods have programmed any DMs to be reported to Reddit, that’s how unpopular they are, yet they continue to own subreddits representing companies who should care more about such things. One example is CardinalMember on the Robinhood subreddit. Then there’s the issue of getting permanent “zero tolerance” bans for comments less than racism or other discrimination or hate speech. Honestly I kind of appreciate where Elon Musk is coming from lifting bans on people like Donald Trump… of course in typical human fashion, he bans people on Twitter for MUCH less than hate speech- like tracking his private jet or being critical of his thoughts or actions. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe anyone with authority who A) advocates for free speech and B) doesn’t restrict it when it’s content they don’t like.

junky228 3y ago

the only way I use reddit is through rif (reddit is fun). I'm going to be quite unhappy if that goes away

fastglass 3y ago

why not do the same thing with reddit api as people do with Netflix accounts though

yung_steezy 3y ago

Does this affect teddit.net or does that circumvent the API like nitter does with twitter?