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The question I’d like to see asked of Steve is why solo developers were able to make more reliable, faster, less buggy Reddit mobile apps than Reddit itself? T
by dangus 2y ago
The question I’d like to see asked of Steve is why solo developers were able to make more reliable, faster, less buggy Reddit mobile apps than Reddit itself?
To this day I have strange bugs on the Reddit app. The logo disappears sometimes, and it’s critical for navigation. The interface sometimes stops responding to presses of certain on-screen elements.
And yet this company pushed out third party app developers in an incredibly shitty way rather than hiring them.
I’ll never forgive Steve for the loss of Apollo on iOS and the way Reddit handled the situation.
I actually understand the API restrictions and even believe that they may lead to better privacy for Reddit users. Free API access meant lots of archiving and cloning services out there when ideally the users should be able to delete their comments and posts to be forgotten if they choose. However, I think that better developer communication could have meant that we still have Apollo around, even if it meant a shift to a paid subscription.
- randomdata 2y ago> The question I’d like to see asked of Steve is why solo developers were able to make more reliable, faster, less buggy Reddit mobile apps than Reddit itself? Seems the answer is already in the title: Reddit is so busy trying to chase the future that it can't see what's in front of them.
- throwaway48476 2y agoApp devs sell quality apps. Reddit sells eyeballs. Incentives aren't aligned. Also a lot of incompetence.
- BizarroLand 2y agoWell, if they had offered to buy Apollo and rebrand that as the official app, the world would be a different place to the tens of thousands of people their actions offended enough for them to permanently quit reddit and delete their accounts.
- hellohello2 2y agoHow profitable is selling user comments as AI training data? At first glance the practice seems less misaligned than advertising
- bigfatkitten 2y agoReddit somehow employs in the order of 2000 people, and yet everything that they build, from their mobile apps to their new web UI is unusable. Until Reddit showed it to be possible, I could never have imagined that a business could employ so many people, and incinerate so much cash but yet have so little to show for it in terms of either profit or a usable product.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoNot "forgiving" them is academic if you remain on a platform despite its hostility to its users. I deleted a history of over 10,000 comments and moved on rather than stay and use their crappy official app. (And generally worsening user experience.) If everyone did that, we'd no longer have platforms that mandate using first party apps. A platform would have to answer the question you asked, whereas now they're free to ignore it.
- goatlover 2y agoMajority of redditors didn't care and saw it as a moderator fight against admins, where moderators are lot more unpopular.
- heyoni 2y agoYea but I can tell you based on experience that there’s definitely that top tier of people who care about this stuff and comment very thoughtfully that has disappeared from the platform. I routinely see wrong answers or just bad comments bubble up to the top of a thread.
- codetrotter 2y ago> I deleted a history of over 10,000 comments and moved on rather than stay and use their crappy official app. When did you delete your comments, and have you checked to see if they are still deleted? In June last year, Reddit was “undeleting” a bunch of comments that users had deleted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36399883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36396404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36359213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36359213
- darklion 2y agoI still use Reddit, but I gave up on productively contributing to it. The only account I use now is purely for NSFW reddits, which Reddit will not display advertising for, and I don’t post questions or write comments. They serve me media they host, incurring the costs of storage and data transfer, and get nothing from me in return.
- dialup_sounds 2y agospez when killing 3rd party apps, banning moderators, and alienating users: "We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive." spez when licensing user content to OpenAI and Google for millions of dollars: "A lot of how I think about Reddit, it comes not from the numbers, but from the feel of using the app."
- cedws 2y agoThe website (post redesign) is absolutely awful too, I have no idea how they ever thought it was good to roll out. Feels like a hacked together college project.
- Scaevolus 2y agoThe same team that poorly assembled the redesign was then tasked with fixing its horrible performance, to results as bad as you'd expect.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]