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Reddit is Fun will shut down on June 30th in response to Reddit API changes
- sikhnerd 3y agoRelated HN thread on Apollo shutting down has a lot of good discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245435
- sota4077 3y agoApollo is shutting down too. I will probably continue to use Reddit, but exclusively on browser where I can block their ads and scripts. The moment they shut down old.reddit then I am gone for good.
- ecommerceguy 3y agoNot sure how long it will last but Brave Browser on IOS redirects reddit urls to old.reddit
- amlib 3y agoI really like old.reddit but is there any stylesheet trickery that makes it more bearable on a small portable screen? I used to use i.reddit.com which was a very stripped down mobile friendly version of the site but it has been shutdown in the last year or so...
- rngname22 3y agoWould you pay a subscription model for access to Reddit? If you're unwilling to pay in any way whether its watching ads, API fees, or a subscription, my guess is they'd be happy you're done for good. (If your answer is yes: well, I think they are dumb for not offering a paid, ad-free version).
- detaro 3y ago> (If your answer is yes: well, I think they are dumb for not offering a paid, ad-free version). ... they do offer exactly that.
- 1270018080 3y agoI would pay for an Apollo app subscription model since the main reddit site and app are comically bad in UI/UX. But as we've seen in the last month reddit is not interested in that kind of option.
- JohnBooty 3y agoI was absolutely willing to pay for it, and I did (Reddit Gold subscription) for a few years! And then I was banned for no apparent reason. A 9-year Reddit account, Reddit Gold for several years, moderator of a moderately sized community. I had never posted anything controversial, never gotten conduct warnings or subreddit bans. Never got an explanation despite multiple appeals. A few months ago they unbanned me. Still no explanation. My theory is that maybe somebody at Reddit saw me complaining on HN a few months back. I've moderated communities, and mistakes happen. I recognize how difficult Reddit's job is. And I realize it's just impractical for them to provide personalized customer service. However, I will never give them my money again unless I get some transparency about why I was banned. Otherwise I'm not willing to become invested (emotionally or financially) in Reddit again because I am thinking to myself: "I could probably be randomly banned again at any moment."
- greenhatman 3y agoMy 11 year account was just banned as well. I don't remember posting anything terrible recently. So not sure what's going on, but I won't be appealing or making a new account or going to the site anymore.
- abdullahkhalids 3y agoOne of the core features of reddit is that far too many people use it with anonymous accounts. Its a good way of saying things that they don't want their families/friends/work/governments to know. So a paid ad-free version simply doesn't work for these people.
- kristopolous 3y agoI bounced after i.reddit.com went away. The value proposition of the site has descended into the negatives IMHO. The halcyon days were really about 15 years ago before subreddits came in and well before it became just a swamp of children, memes, and trolls. Nothing wrong with children par se I just don't come to the internet to engage with them. Then again, Twitter at night is just a bunch of drunk people rambling and I still scroll that.
- sota4077 3y agoI just wanted to tell you I had to google "Halcyon" and I learned a new word thanks to you. :) Thank you.
- DigitallyFidget 3y agoThat's how I already use reddit. I tried their mobile app and it was so garbage I just use it in browser in desktop mode to avoid the annoying "Reddit is better on mobile" lie that I had to click past every time. I really don't understand the difference and obsession of using old.reddit vs regular. As far as I can tell, it functions exactly the same only with a bit of UI uplift. As for adblock, the modern internet is virtually unusable without it. I don't care about how much it hurts webhosts, ads are intrusive, obnoxious, sometimes/often a security risk, and I'm never-ever-ever-ever going to click on one anyway.
- anoonmoose 3y agoOne thing I've been a little surprised by is the idea that, even if the API pricing was reasonable and these apps weren't shutting down, that they wouldn't be heavily and severely impacted by the fact that 3rd party apps will not be able to access NSFW content. Reddit has a LOT of porn on it. Preventing 3rd party apps from accessing that content is a pretty good indicator to me that they're going to completely get rid of that content, eventually. People keep making Digg references, but I'm not sure the real answer won't actually be Tumblr.
- kredd 3y agoSide question, how did twitter survive through its porn filled timelines and advertisers being ok with it?
- Retr0id 3y agoThey recently made it impossible to view NSFW-flagged content from a logged-out session, which makes me wonder if they're struggling with it too (this may also be a geo-restricted thing, I'm visiting from a UK IP address).
- kredd 3y agoAh, interesting. To be fair, super-majority of users on mobile are already authenticated in the app, so I don’t think it would be any loss. I guess, maybe for people who don’t want to be tracked about their NSFW browsing. Still curious how Twitter was a pass, but Tumblr/maybe Reddit are no go. Maybe the way ads are being shows when there’s NSFW content?
- jstarfish 3y agoI'm not convinced it has anything to do with ads. The redirect isn't necessary to just not show ads for Kibbles N Bits on bestiality porn subreddits. It does have two other effects though: - Inflates registered user count, which is useful ahead of an IPO - Maps very niche porn habits to individuals, to way finer degree than your PornHub favorites/history. I don't know of anybody reselling this sort of data, but also don't work in this space.
- throw7 3y agorif is what i use on mobile. once old.reddit.com goes away then i'll be officially shutdown also. :D
- iamawacko 3y agoI'm moving to Lemmy thanks to all this.
- sschueller 3y agoLemmy seems like the right alternative but it needs work. The docs to setup your own server are all wrong and outdated (docker). I just went through it a day ago and I had to fix half of what it said in order to get it working correctly. (Yes I will do a pull-req to improve this once I am satisfied with my setup) The other issue with federation is picking an instance. There needs to be more initial connection between instances. By this I mean it needs to be much easier to subscribe to a community on another instance. Right now you have to copy paste parts of the URL into your instances url. Some sort of shared authentication across the fediverse that identified your instance would enable something like this.
- garbagecoder 3y agoYou need users to have a social network and users, at most, want to enter an email address and password to get an account. And then they want it to work normally. I you want a site for hackers, you can just write it in your own lisp dialect (; but if you want a social network you have to make it much, much easier. Not sure the decentralizers understand just how critical that is. Also users, aside from a few loud ones, really do want at least some minimal moderation.
- sschueller 3y agoExactly, barrier to entry is way high at the moment.
- JohnBooty 3y agoAbsolutely. It's why I haven't really cared about Mastodon. I'm an engineer and it absolutely seems like a correct approach to me but it's never going to appeal to the general public outside of engineering-adjacent crowds.
- gnoop 3y ago
- _fs 3y ago17 year reddit member. Went from fark to digg to reddit. I guess its on to the next thing. The APi changes seem to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
- JohnBooty 3y agoWill there be a next thing? I mean, obviously folks will move on to something. But it seems like nobody has ever been able to make money off of huge Fark/Digg/Reddit style "big, public, multi-community" sites. I can't imagine anybody ever trying it again. I feel like the overall trend is just moving back to smaller independent communities. Kind of like the webforum days but with Discord instances instead of webforums.
- EA-3167 3y agoThere's always a next thing, there's too much VC money to siphon by promising the next big thing.
- IshKebab 3y agoReddit reportedly made $350m in revenue in 2021. If you don't know how to make a profit from that with a site that was basically finished a decade ago and outsources all its moderation to volunteers... There will absolutely be a next thing.
- fho 3y agoI mean, they tried ... Ads, premium memberships, microtransactions ... If you have an idea how to monetize a reddit clone ... go for it.
- skeaker 3y agoThis is the part I don't get. Those things worked. They were successful and making millions. Why get greedy like this? I'll never understand it.
- ZacnyLos 3y agoJoin Reddit alternatives - Lemmy (i.e. beehaw.org) or Kbin (kbin.social).
- rocky_raccoon 3y agoTildes (tildes.net) for thoughtful discussion like the good ole' days. The move has been a breath of fresh air. To request an invite to Tildes, email invites@tildes.net
- ZacnyLos 3y agoAre tildes federated? Can I engage with tildes from my mastodon account as I do currently with lemmy's or kbin forums?
- gnoop 3y agoTildes is centralized. There's no federation.
- gaius_baltar 3y agoI would say federation is a must as it will spare us from the next migration (there is a rule: centralized or proprietary services *always* get worse as time goes by).
- makin 3y agoI think Tildes is pretty good, but their subreddit-equivalent policy is bizarre—only admins can make them, and they will only make them if they see demand. This is a chicken-and-egg problem that will prevent many niche topics from finding a community, the way they did on Reddit. I hope it's just marketing talk covering a technical limitation instead of a genuinely permanent flaw.
- stiltzkin 3y agoWhat I know Tildes does not want to be a full Reddit replacement. I do find their model of moderation better than Reddit. I have already seen some Reddit mods asking about moderating communities in Tildes.
- hubraumhugo 3y agoThe official Reddit app is getting hammered with 1 star play store reviews: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reddit.frontpage&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reddit.fro... I think by now this is totally out of control for them and the damage is only getting worse.
- the_shivers 3y agoI remember when this happened for Robinhood during the Gamestop debacle, Google decided to simply remove all the one star reviews. I expect something similar here.
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- solarkraft 3y agoIt's still at 4.7 stars on the Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/en/app/reddit/id1064216828 https://apps.apple.com/en/app/reddit/id1064216828 We can all do our part, of course.
- http-teapot 3y agoIf you sort the reviews by Most Recent, you'll see many one-star reviews. Perhaps not enough to skew the main score, it is cached or some other reason.
- foxyv 3y agoI just uninstalled it, the dang app was horrible anyways. If I want to browse Reddit I'll do it on a computer using old.reddit
- popey 3y agospez is doing an API AMA on the subject tomorrow... https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ceo_tomorrow_to_discuss_the_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
- eclipticplane 3y agoWill he edit questions in the database to only ask questions he wants to answer?
- Cub3 3y agoExactly this, can you even trust this as a source of truth anymore? He should host it on livestream
- monkeywork 3y agogee I wonder how selective he's going to be on answering questions in that one.
- joshuamarksmith 3y agoDamage control, maybe too little too late.
- rebolek 3y agothat would be great /r/AMAdisaters material
- orbz 3y agoI think my big takeaway here is the absolutely horrific way spez has handled this situation down to outright lying about his interactions with third-party app maintainers.
- activiation 3y agoNo wonder that post is locked
- kossTKR 3y agoI don't use reddit much anymore, the problem is that most interesting communities i know have moved to discord that is a garbage alternative in my eyes. You can't find the best posts for any given time range, you can't discuss one thing at a time, everything just disappears after everyone has paid very little effort to write something because its gone quickly. It's fragmented, low-effort, digital dementia and i hate it. I don't understand the appeal of discord and really hope someone creates an actual alternative to Reddit.
- ssimpson 3y agothe appeal of reddit is that you get a bunch of discussion on one topic, vs discord, my discussion on a topic is spread out over one or many discords. i really just use discord for communicating with groups of people that might all know each other under some interest. i wouldn't say that discord is an alternative to reddit, more of an alternative to slack.
- gnoop 3y agoWe're in the chat cycle of the internet. We went through this with AOL chatrooms and IRC in the 90s as well. I'm not the most massive fan of chat in place of forums either but that seems the trend lately. Even on Reddit, a bunch of communities have Discords you can join. Maybe some new web forums will spin up, though it looks like much the software remains the same as it has been for a while.
- kossTKR 3y agoTrue, it's probably also closer to a feed, and creates more engagement with less thoughts involved. The problem i think is it massively lowers quality, searchability and generally just creates this fogged-out state of mind when looking for or researching something besides plain "relaxing in a groupchat".
- BlueTemplar 3y agoBut then in the 90s forums didn't exist yet ? Also forum software has been evolving too, for instance even phpBB has drag and drop image insertion these days.
- mynameishere 3y agoReddit pushes its own app so hard--so obnoxiously hard--that I can't imagine they are terribly concerned about any of this. And, come on. They can charge what they want for their dogs-squeezed-into-guitar-cases library of content. We all can.
- gorjusborg 3y agoI have been on reddit for a long time, and have watched the steady beat of their user hostility drum. The only thing keeping me there now is old.reddit.com. I'll never install the app.
- greenhatman 3y agoAnd their app is so bad compared to the 3rd party ones. I quite liked RIF.
- optimalsolver 3y agoPeople loudly announcing their departure from Reddit aren't going anywhere. yourehereforever.jpg
- Zetice 3y agoI only dabble in reverse engineering web apis these days, but wouldn't it be exceedingly possible to write an unofficial API and run an app off of that? It's not pleasant work, but especially with LLM advances, I feel like keeping up with the shifting DOM would for sure be doable, and in fact one of the main reasons Reddit started out with an API: better to provide a path for programmatic access than make the only option outside of your control...
- crabbone 3y agoDOM is not very "shifting" in projects like these... The longer the project lives, the more tests it accumulates. A "good" practice is to rely on element ids for automation (i.e. clicking, finding form inputs etc), but often times it's not possible / hard to know in advance what the id will be, especially with all the HTML generation going on... so, tests would often use XPath to find where to click. And nobody really wants to change those tests... I mean, yeah, there will be changes ever now and then, but not a lot and not enough to render out-of-date scrappers completely useless.
- djbusby 3y agoIts a cat-mouse game doing it that way. Its a crappy path for any dev.
- birracerveza 3y agoWell, yeah, but the problem is the content and the users. Can't code those.
- sigmoid10 3y agoPossible? Yes. Reasonable? Almost certainly no. It's not just that you'd have to constantly keep up with changing content (which might even be hidden through endless obscure javascript) and all sorts of possible filtering mechanisms on reddit's server side, you'd also make yourself vulnerable to a boatload of issues if you want to publish your app in official channels, since you are violating reddit's TOS. The cost to benefit ratio is exceedingly unfavourable. Since reddit has a huge following, some people might try, but I wouldn't bet on anyone succeeding in a big way.
- endisneigh 3y agoSeems dumb not to allow premium members to generate keys that could then be put into these apps. Then, Reddit could either get money or the same outcome. Foolish
- Zetice 3y agoI'm not sure I understand why you can't do this. I, a user of Reddit, will be able to generate an API key. Obviously I'll have to associate a CC with it (or whatever their new process is), but I can generate one for free. Why can't I use that for my local Apollo or RIF client on my phone? Why must Apollo or RIF be involved on that end at all?
- numbsafari 3y agoI think it's interesting that subreddits and things are shutting down or going dark collectively, but I haven't heard of a concerted effort on the part of users to stage a massive "log out" and "day off" from using Reddit. If a significant chunk of the userbase logged out and didn't use the website for a day or two, that would actually impact the bottom line. So why not organize a "users union"?
- gigel82 3y agoI use reddit exclusively though Apollo, so that will happen whether I like it or not starting June 30th... have no intention of installing the Reddit app.
- eterm 3y agoIt's mods, not users, that hold a lot of the power. The mods are small enough in number to coordinate. Indeed for many of the popular subs, the mods are all the same people since some mod mod dozens of the most popular subs. That's actually a problem, but for action like this, it's an enabler compared trying to coordinate reddit users, who are a disparate bunch.
- surgical_fire 3y ago> concerted effort These things never work. What works is if people genuinely lose interest on the service. From 2013 to 2020 I used Reddit on a daily basis. Ever since then, my hatred and mistrust for the platform only grew, and I lost interest on it. I still have RiF installed, but truth is I seldon go there to see anything. I won't even bother doing anything. I'll probably just not ever going to log back.
- peoplearepeople 3y agoGiven the API issues, sure seems like a bad idea to buy at IPO time
- Zetice 3y agoAlternative question: why aren't these apps asking for API keys from their users, and operate off of that? Seems like that'd shift the burden from them to the individual user, who would then pay whatever rates Reddit wants to charge.
- Falell 3y agoThis is such an obviously good solution to covering API costs that it becomes clear that the actual goal is not to cover API costs, but something else - probably to kill third party apps.
- 1123581321 3y agoIf they follow the twitter playbook, they will detect and ban apps using the user's own key.
- cobertos 3y agoHas anyone found new places for their communities? I'm curious where people are going, if anywhere
- stiltzkin 3y agoBest I found is Tildes, it is invite only and a small community as Reddit used to be years ago focusing on quality conversations. There has been a high influx of new users there. People also recommend Lemmy but UX I do not like it and it lacks a good client.
- yuck39 3y agoTildes is quite pleasant from what I've seen, I understand why but the invitation only nature is limiting at the moment. I've yet to be able to register.
- taubek 3y agoReddit CEO will have AMA tomorrow https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ceo_tomorrow_to_discuss_the_api/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
- activiation 3y agoPost locked ... Typical for speZ
- swayvil 3y agoReddit is my first resort for unbiased product reviews, various kinds of technical advice, book recommendations. They are the gatekeepers for all that. And now they've decided to go full sith. Can we scrape reddit and reproduce it?
- activiation 3y agoYou can... It's not their content afterall
- surgical_fire 3y agoWell, I'll just uninstall RiF. I'll replace it with nothing.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoReddit isn't fun anymore. It's recycled stuff, heavily curated, things stay up a lot longer than they should, you can't even use vote counts to gauge popularity of something, everything even remotely contentious gets manipulated to hell, substantiative discussion gets drowned out by low grade witticisms that aren't even witty, or dumb answers all to get a vote or two, that's if you ever even get a good answer to anything. And that's not even including the corporate problems such as this API thing and deliberate destruction of UX. The site sucks, the only reason anyone uses it is because you need critical mass to move communities. It will happen, and it can't come soon enough.
- indrora 3y agoDefinitely depends on where you look. I find that HN is similar to one of the slower subreddits. There's a handful of subreddits that I read regularly, most of which are quite slow. Most of the "Local" subreddits (e.g. /r/seattleWA, /r/Albuquerque, /r/houston) have their own flavor. On the other hand, places like /r/mechanicalkeyboards are fairly authoritative sources on their topics. Once you leave the "Defaults", you find a much less frantic and much higher signal to noise ratio.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoYeah, and I'm stuck in a couple of niche communities there because that's where they are, but even then the bleedover from elsewhere is suffocating. I was excited about federating community sites, but now I'm actually convinced that requiring an account for a particular community prevents drive by and low effort interaction. One site for all communities is a bad idea.
- alex7734 3y agoWith all these protests and shutdowns it seems there's a decent chance of reddit dying very soon. It's a shame because adding "site:reddit.com" to my Google queries was the only way to avoid (most of the) SEO bullshit and get opinions by real people. Hopefully it gets replaced soon...