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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

81–90 of 438 posts

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#81
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.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#82
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI" Do you mean like... HN?

Could you point to specific deficiencies of HN?

It doesn't support proper pagination for comments, and has been promised as an upcoming feature for years.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#83
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?

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#84
post #44
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI" Do you mean like... HN?

Despite it's flaws, HN has a far superior user experience compared to Reddit. It's not even comparable.

So? I wan't comparing HN with Reddit.

I meant that HN is very popular without having an amazing user experience, specially on mobile.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#85
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is missing lots of features. That's not UI. The HN UI is pretty good.

Do you use HN on mobile?

I do, and it's fine. Not ideal (things like the vote arrows are hard to hit with fingers, as the most egregious example), but still vastly better than the average "mobile" website.

I'm typing this comment on a third-party app (Hacki) I'm trying out for the first time, so that's another option.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#88
post #48
post #17

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 for…

They recently killed the .compact view on mobile. The default is unreadable, i don't spend much time on the site anymore.

I found out recently (not sure where) you can still append ".i" instead of ".compact", and it works. Annoyingly all links then go to ".compact", so you need some browser magic to actually make it usable.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#89

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

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…

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.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#90
post #8

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.

Coding a reddit-like website must not be too difficult, even if you need mobile apps, but if you're expected to host images and videos while combating GPT bots the infrastructure needs and cost are at a high level right from the start.
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