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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

#161

Post by tallanvor »

eddieroger wrote: post #109
flenserboy wrote: post #76

Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.

I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab. I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would…

Usenet isn't really a thing anymore, sadly. Don't get me wrong, it's going strong for file sharing, but most ISPs don't provide access anymore, so it's not really a place you find discussions.

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

#162

Post by rchaud »

veidr wrote: post #100

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 enshitt…

Agreed on AI being a red herring. Social apps have been cutting off third parties for years. As it is on most things, Reddit is just very slow to get on board.

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

#163

Post by zirgs »

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.

Many people don't want to associate their opinions with their real world identities. This is why I don't want to give social networks my payment info or my work/school/isp email. Especially social networks that are as politically charged as reddit.

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

#164

Post by justaman »

dom96 wrote: post #123
conradfr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trick seems to be keeping it targeted towards one unique and tight nit community. Then opening the doors for those users to branch out. Like if you had a "subreddit" for an MMORPG where community is already a key attribute.

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

#165

Post by lelanthran »

atyppo wrote: post #117
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…

Reddit conveniently unchecks the “redirect me to old Reddit” button every ~6 months. Quite annoying. I’ve been using Reddit for ~8-9 years and it’s gotten palpably worse. I knew it was dying the first time I saw an emoji on there. Seems they want to go the way Digg did.

I notice it only do that when I browse on the phone sometimes.

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

#166

Post by bwat49 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #57

As much as I hate the new design on web and never use it, I don't really have a problem with the app and I found the alternatives I tried to be sub-par. What's everyone's deal with the app? Beside the removal of ads of course, which is understandable but undefendable.

what apps did you try? I use RIF (reddit is fun) and it's much better than the official app. The UI is much cleaner (looks like a proper mobile version of the 'old' reddit) with much better information density.

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

#167

Post by rchaud »

ape4 wrote: post #101

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

Ads are dynamically served via client-side scripts (on the web). An API endpoint contains static data (post text, image URLs, etc) that's the same for everyone, so it cannot serve individual ads to users in that way.

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

#168

Post by ykonstant »

wodenokoto wrote: post #130
frozenlettuce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are looking for a threaded forum where posts contain dense information with code segments, quotes and decorated text, the cards are definitely a core problem. The implementation is very bad, too.

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

#169

Post by chapium »

atyppo wrote: post #117
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…

Reddit conveniently unchecks the “redirect me to old Reddit” button every ~6 months. Quite annoying. I’ve been using Reddit for ~8-9 years and it’s gotten palpably worse. I knew it was dying the first time I saw an emoji on there. Seems they want to go the way Digg did.

This might be your browser settings because this never happens for me.

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

#170

Post by wkat4242 »

doublerabbit wrote: post #110
xdavidliu wrote: post #72

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.

Go for something really open and free like Matrix. That's the only way to protect against eventual enshittification.
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