Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by skizm » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

p3rls wrote: post #133

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…

What apps do you think do UI well that you would hold up as a counterpoint here? Just curious

The old “I.Reddit.com” (which was just completely turned off) was very good IMO. Just titles and up/downvote buttons basically. Gear icon to expand for more options per post. My only real gripe was infinite scrolling. I don’t like it in general, but in this case there was also an issue with either the implementation or mobile safari where clicking a link and going back completely borked progress.

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

#142

Post by zirgs » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

plagiarist wrote: post #13

mrtksn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or sell influence? Pick brands or politics and curate what people see by manipulating the rankings. However this is worse than regular ads. Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosh…

I would not be willing to pay reddit for the opposite reason. They are not doing an adequate job giving moderators proper tools or removing bigoted commenters who are participating in bad faith. I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their r…

If you post the n-word on reddit it gets removed immediately - no matter what the context was.

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

#143

Post by Pxtl » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

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…

> insane moderation policies and narrow ideology

What, did you prefer the site in the days of the Chimpire? Jailbait? Reddit's history has been the perfect case-study in the downsides of a libertarian approach to moderation. They've come to where they are now because every other approach resulted in horrifying racism, sexual exploitation, disinformation, and abuse.

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

#144

Post by bitcharmer » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

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…

> Are there people who even thinks these designs are good?

Yes, the greedy idiot MBA's whose idea this was.

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

#145

Post by marginalia_nu » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

fathyb wrote: post #37

bazmattaz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US. I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul. If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in s…

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board? > invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss. > try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddi…

> Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?

Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.

It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.

The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.

It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1

The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

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

#146

Post by pierat » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

ryanmercer wrote: post #86

pierat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

Then I think you're missing my actual point.

You gave anecdotes about volunteering at non-profit, like your church. I don't attend church myself, but doing non-profit things to help a community is definitely laudable. And I think the more we all do activities like that, we'd have a better community and eventually a better country.

But there is definitely a difference between non-profit volunteering labor (where the sum of your labor is enjoyed by everyone attending), and being a subreddit moderator.

Reddit is a for-profit company, where they derive their profit from 2 different areas: people contributing their personal content, and people moderating for free the areas of a topic. And real paid moderators get real money on other platforms. Why doesn't reddit? Cause they were able to get users to "make-believe" that their subreddit was theirs.

You're there to make the admins profit. And when your subreddit no longer does that, "ownership" is transferred rather quickly. Or your mod accounts will be mass-reported and banned. Or a whole host of other issues. Earlier on, seeing banned subreddits wasn't a thing. Now, I can stumble in from a Google search and hit a banned sub. And we're talking technical subreddits, not porn or violence.

And just how long have bigger subreddits been requesting better automod tooling, and never materializes?

Reddit sucks the oxygen out of the "community" to feed its profit, and provides scraps to make people think they're getting a good deal.

We're now seeing the furtherance of this with this laughable API bill. And it's not targeted at Apollo, btw. Head over to Youtube shorts or Tiktok and witness just how many "bot reads a reddit post with top 2 comments, with unrelated minecraft video". "Scrape-add video-upload" is the big thing I would bet that reddit's trying to stop without paying a pound of flesh.

But still, I'd start looking for other platforms to move your userbase to. Just casually set up offsite operations along with your subreddit, and steer users to all non-reddit areas. (Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, even Facebook) Cause when Reddit finally goes Digg v4, it's going to be crazy.

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

#147

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

ryanmercer wrote: post #41

pantulis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is only allowing 3rd party access to Reddit subscribers, to avoid the need to monetize through ads. If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.

>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.

I could almost stomach paying for reddit premium IF they allowed unfettered API access (within reason I guess) AND if they actually supported their API for all new features. As it stands the API is woefully behind what their site/apps allows and I trust them about as much as I trust Twitter's whole "now that you are paying it's going to get better".

The shitty thing here is iOS/Android devs that do find a way to pass through to cost might price themselves out of the 15% tier even when 90%+ of the money they collect (after the Apple/Google tax) is going to just be handed to Reddit. That might screw up the economics of any other IAP they have (to unlock features or what not).

They can raise prices to account for the extra 15% loss but still sucks. Apollo alone would hit Apple/Google's 15% rate limit in less than a month and even if it lost 19/20th of it's users it'd still hit it for the year given his estimates.

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

#148

Post by justaman » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #143

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…

> insane moderation policies and narrow ideology What, did you prefer the site in the days of the Chimpire? Jailbait? Reddit's history has been the perfect case-study in the downsides of a libertarian approach to moderation. They've come to where they are now because every other approach resulted in horrifying racism, sexual exploitation, disinformation, and abuse.

The moderators of major subreddits are extremely authoritarian. There must be a middle ground between free-for-all and thought police.

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

#149

Post by rhdunn » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

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…

My biggest gripe with the Reddit UI is having to continually click expand to see nested/additional comments. It makes it difficult to read comments on a topic. I much prefer the HN approach of open by default with a collapse/expand button.

It used to be that clicking outside the central border of comments would navigate you back to the subreddit, but it looks like they have fixed that.

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

#150

Post by reddtastic » Fri, Jun 02, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #102

ransom1538 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's also teddit.net

And https://reddtastic.com (NSFW!). You can browse any subreddit with it (use the search) and Reddit’s front page https://reddtastic.com/r/