Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Dear Reddit, have you forgotten that I switched to you from Digg when they pulled this kind of bullshit?"
Yes, the people who built Reddit no longer run Reddit.
Spez started Reddit and he’s the ceo currently.
"This community is available in the app"
181–190 of 234 posts
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#182What a strange thing to be this user hostile. When stuff like this happens, people look for alternatives, and even if they don’t switch immediately, this really erodes any loyalty they have to your brand/service. I think Facebook is experiencing a similar thing. A frustrating amount of my network has quit, which makes planning events more difficult (and is frustrating). The difference for Facebook is that they have e…
This is what always happens with SNSs, isn't it? The company starts small, and user-centric. People likes the website, a community starts to grow. And then, the company starts to find ways to be profitable. But at this point, most people won't leave, they will stay for the community.
Think about Facebook, Twitter, Quora and now Reddit.
I am not saying the company is doing anything _bad_ per se. A company has to be profitable, otherwise it would die. So, it seems to me that for a SNS to stay "good", it cannot be backed by a for profit company.
I don't know how that would work. Maybe things like WT.Social and Mastodon are the answer.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#183What a strange thing to be this user hostile. When stuff like this happens, people look for alternatives, and even if they don’t switch immediately, this really erodes any loyalty they have to your brand/service. I think Facebook is experiencing a similar thing. A frustrating amount of my network has quit, which makes planning events more difficult (and is frustrating). The difference for Facebook is that they have e…
I left Reddit years ago due to the “community” getting weird, I feel some schadenfreude every time I see people complain about the site. I think it will be an interesting case. Reddit seems more entrenched than Digg and the internet is different now. They obviously have metrics affirming their choices, so we’re probably in the minority with this mindset. All kinds of shitty companies regularly force us to accept bull…
>I left Reddit years ago due to the “community” getting weird,
Yeah, one thing is that Reddit the company is getting shady, but the community has gotten rather toxic the last few years. I closed my account two years ago, roughly, because the community started be rather exclusive. If you're not an overly political correct leftish American city dweller you're opinions aren't welcome. There are Reddit approved opinions, any deviation from these opinions will result in you having a bad time.
I'm honestly surprised that the NSFW subreddit haven't been killed off yet, but I suppose Reddit see a business opportunity in all the cam-girls hanging around.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
A website cannot silently read a phone number and list of nearby WiFi access points for geolocation, scan local drive for interesting files, show annoying notifications every hour to return user back to the app.
Neither can an app without the relevant permissions. Which of those things can the official Reddit app do currently? If you're saying "the Reddit app will slowly change to do bad things" then say that and don't imply it already does those things.
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Re: "This community is available in the app"
#185Whenever Reddit, or any other website, tells me to install their app, I make sure that I never install their app. In fact other than maybe 5 or less apps, I only use a browser.
The problem is that you and I are in the minority on this. Most people install the app, and all the tracking and data collection and geolocation that comes with it. Soon, almost all mass media will be consumed this way. This is just the latest installment of the mounting assault on the free and open web. Mark my words: the web is in danger.
> Mark my words: the web is in danger.
Is it? The protocols and the technologies are open and standardized. You're perfectly capable of registering a DNS name, hooking up a server to the network and starting a HTTP daemon. Big companies can't stop you from doing that.
"But nobody is doing that today! Too much hassle!", I hear you saying.
Ah! You have a point... but that's based on a bias. You're switching cause and effect. Why are billions able to post content on the Web? Because that's what big platforms allow them to do. There implementation simply has lowered the bar for a huge influx of non-technical people to start publishing content.
The trade-off these millions are making is giving up on their privacy, or having to endure the rules and weird quirks, towards those that own and operate the platforms that they are using.
Publishing content on the Web never was easy to begin with. Tim Berners-Lee originally invented HTTP because he simply wanted to connect researchers and share scientific knowledge. Most of the tools that power the Web were never designed for end users. They are designed for robustness, performance, security and so on.
The only merit of Zuckerberg and Jack is that they used to tools in such a way to abstract that complexity away for end users. Exactly like what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did by providing windowing systems with a visual language that was easy to understand for end users.
Yelling "the Web is in danger" would be like yelling "computers are in danger" because billions of users never learned to use command line tools, don't know what a kernel is, let alone understand what a file system is.
The free and open Web was and always will be an affair of people who have an understanding of open, standardized technologies such as HTML, CSS, HTTP, URL's, TCP/IP and so on. You can't have one without the other, really. Freedom and openness are a function of the distribution of knowledge to implement and enforce them.
Now, the real problem, at this point, isn't technological. It's regulatory. The real problem is that these platforms don't have a proper paid offering for users who want to share and publish content. Because end users, like you and me, aren't the customer, they are the product for advertisers. And so consumer and - at this point - civil rights don't seem to apply to them. That's what really matters here.
But that problem is only a problem caused because those very same platforms allowed millions to enter this virtual world. Equally, expecting that anyone - including your grandparents - learns HTML and how to set up an Apache webserver, well, that might equally a bridge too far, no?
If ISP's decided to stop supporting open standards and switched to proprietary protocols to link computers, that's when you need to ask questions. And this has been tried... and failed already in a different form some 30 to 40 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#186I gave up on read Quora when they forced logins I will give up on reddit if they do the same. Isn't visits a valid criteria? Why force a mobile app?
Browsers are agents of the user, apps are agents of the company behind the app. With a browser the user can install extensions and do things that benefit them, in an app you get exactly what the app owner gives you. If monetization is your only purpose, you would choose apps exclusively if your users are willing to accept it.
> Browsers are agents of the user
The most-used browsers, too, are agents of the company making them.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#187The day they stop supporting the old ui is the day I stop using Reddit.
I still can't use their new desktop design on my laptop. Apparently a 7 years old MacBook Pro isn't powerful enough to run neither Reddit nor Imgur particular well. I can do development, run an AppleTV emulator, VM's, a ton of Firefox tabs, and a stack of Python virtualenv's, just not the redesigned Reddit at a reasonable speed.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which of those things can the official Reddit app do currently? Looking at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reddit.fro... , scroll down and click the 'View Details' under Permissions. It shows that the app can read your contacts, network connections, approximate location, contents of your USB storage plus much more which would cover all of codedokode's points adequately I think? (I'm not sure of th…
Many (though certainly not all) of those things require explicit permission from the user (particularly the storage, location, and camera related stuff).
The only ones that require user interaction are contacts, location, storage, microphone, camera.
Microphone is granted along camera. Camera is needed if you want to upload photos.(I might be wrong about the microphone)
Storage is always necessary for apps that cache anything from the web.
That leaves contacts and location.
So you can disable contacts and location, but all your metadata including device and network information is read and probably transmitted. In most cases it's good enough as location information as well.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#189Apollo is the best app to browse Reddit.
Re: "This community is available in the app"
#190Reddit has been a/b testing behavior like this for months. Multiple different popups with variations on "view this in the app"; in some cases the popup is on every single page load, sometimes only once. They started blurring images on select subreddits with a message that you could only view the sub in their app. Okay, I know they're chasing one of two things here: a higher level of revenue from the advertising they…
I worked for a company that did something similar (and is mentioned elsewhere in these threads). We a/b tested it, and just from the metrics, getting someone to download the app was so valuable from a stickiness perspective that it _looked_ like it was worth the negative effects.
You're right though, from a user trust perspective it's pretty horrendous. Regardless of whether that was measurable or not, there are things that are just so infuriating to users that you shouldn't do them. I'd argue the cost in terms of internal morale and employees' trust that we're doing the right thing for our users, and their sense of pride in their work, way more than offset any metrics gains.