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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

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

#91

Post by Levitz »

lawn wrote: post #35
jerpint wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

The kind of user that has browsed the web primarily through a smartphone has completely different standards from anyone who has grown with the web.

Tiktok and Instagram is the kind of design they are used to.

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

#92

Post by 1over137 »

candiodari wrote: post #67
exitb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it enables endless scrolling, serving an ad once in a while.

It enables making ads indistinguishable from real content, to get more clicks through deception. That's another interpretation. You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this, but I guess not. I've begun dragging a small "ultraportable" laptop with me, because it makes a lot of things bearable again: youtube, reddit, stackoverflow ... I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.

>You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this...

Alas, no, I wouldn't think that. :(

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

#93

Post by uw_rob »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #60
lawn wrote: 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…

1. Reddit isn’t a non-profit. I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions. 2. The AI threat is real. It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and G…

What's the connection between Apollo and getting data from scrapping. Wouldn't issuing a license to the Apollo dev that forbids persisting the data solve this concern? They could also require that users login if they want to use a third party client and then rate limit the number of posts the user can fetch.

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

#94

Post by interestica »

lapcat wrote: post #71
interestica wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That submission is very different. This story looks at wider effects and implications.

Subtracting external quoted links, the entire story is 4 paragraphs. It's just a wrapper around those links.

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?

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

#95

Post by jaegerpicker »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #60
lawn wrote: 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…

1. Reddit isn’t a non-profit. I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions. 2. The AI threat is real. It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and G…

Except Reddit doesn't have a product if they don't have people reading it. The TERRIBLE UI and user experience means that a percentage of users will only use reddit via 3rd-party apps. Apollo is BY FAR the best client. This isn't capitalism, it's self-harm by stupidity. Reddit's only value is the user eyes and data. Remove the users and Reddit dies a quick death. Maybe they will still pull in users but having less value but charging more to drive away your Users sure seems like a dumb plan capitalism or not.

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

#96

Post by ransom1538 »

paradoxyl wrote: post #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, whi…

This post seriously changed my life. I had no idea old was working. Thanks.

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

#97

Post by jlokier »

interestica wrote: post #58
zulban wrote: 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, using a 3rd party app which has an excellent user-friendly UI.

Due in part to the excellent UI and user-friendly reading experience, both on that mobile app and in a browser on my laptop, HN is the site I visit most often every day for a pleasant break to learn new things.

Reddit on the other hand is something I look at maybe once a month, where I'm reminded each time it's disorienting and hard work to use, so it's not somewhere I go to enjoy a calm read. So for me Reddit is just for finding specific information from a search result then leaving.

The Reddit UI has a lot to do with that. It ties to the "randomness" of the content. HN content also has randomness but because of its UI you can skim a lot in seconds so it's easier to pick out things of interest with low stress and just enjoy them.

Typically I glance through the top 100 to 150 headlines of HN to pick a few of interest, several times a day. It takes about 10-20 seconds to read those headlines, and to know I'm done - which is very different from scrolling-oriented sites which deprive the reader of perspective. I can see how this might be different for people who cannot skim text quickly or who find that difficult, or who are trained to infiniscroll through things showing only a tiny number of large cards on the screen at a time. The latter is how you destroy perspective.

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

#98

Post by jelder »

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.

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

#99

Post by rashkov »

spacephysics wrote: post #7

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…

Which app? The iPhone one is pretty good in my experience, but I’m open to hearing about what makes it bad

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

#100

Post by veidr »

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.

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