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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

121–130 of 438 posts

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

#121
post #84
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me HN is nearly unusable on mobile without a client

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

#122
post #108
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What app do you use?

I'm also interested. I'm still using Materialistic, but it's not even in the Play Store any more so I would like to find something maintained.

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

#123
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.

Coding it is easy, getting traction with users is the hard part. I'm honestly tempted to build one but I dread building it and having it be a ghost town because getting people to adopt sites like this is tough.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The vote arrows -- if that's an essential part of the UI, why is it so bad? And text sizing for mobile varies greatly by mobile device -- why?

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

#125
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As I understand it teens/young adults generally have more free time and less responsibilities (housework, kids, family, etc.). I'd be surprised if that didn't drive a different type of engagement model.

I generally praised Reddit, as the opposite of endless service. I can check updates from couple niche subreddits that interest me and I'm done, there's nothing more to get until later.

I guess there's no money in that.

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

#126
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…

It's because it's not optimised for users, it's for ads.

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

#127
post #84
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HN is popular within certain demographics and tends to have somewhat circular discussions as a result. As someone who works in finance in NYC, I know nobody else who reads it. I imagine if I worked in tech in Redwood City, I might think differently.

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

#128
post #101

As a compromise reddit could require that 3rd party apps to show ads from reddit (so they get the money from clicks)

Or they could have users be members of Gold to use third party apps.

It's ridiculous to claim that "Apollo" generates reddit traffic. Reddit users generate traffic, via web client of choice.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahem, the original link is here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Could you apply this to Discord currently? As in they are in the beginning phase of the enshittifcation metamorphism? With the new soundboards, change of usernames and the likes, it's feels like it's starting the cycle.

Yes.

The first warning shot for me was when they pushed stages really invasively in the UI to compete with clubhouse. I'd thought the high rate of nitro subscribership might have stalled it longer, but no.

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

#130
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…

It's on purpose. The new UI places each post inside a "card". The intent is having you scroll past cards. This makes even text-only posts be similar to image ads posts, and while you scroll you are not aware if the next card is an ad or not. Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.

The problem isn’t really the cards. It’s the implementation.

If you just reshape shape old.Reddit.com it wouldn’t be a horrible UI/UX. Maybe not great either.

Back button is effectively broken with constant reload of front page. 2 links you wanna read? You need to click around carefully especially on mobile if you don’t want the page to reload and show you a different set of stuff.

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