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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

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181–190 of 438 posts

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

#181
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the person who was in charge of the redesign. This may sound unbelievable, but she was not a reddit user prior to working at reddit or being put in charge of the redesign. Really nice person, but they did a terrible job.

Unfortunately it's not that unbelievable... At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases. This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague di…

Oof, my condolences. As someone who was a junior somewhat recently I narrowly avoided a couple of projects like that. The desire to push off important work to cheap labor blows my mind.

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

#182
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, Reddit is one of the most useful sites out there. With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory. None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.

On mobile you can’t read reddit comment threads unless you install their official app. I hate that Google surfaces reddit threads since the site itself often doesn’t contain the information indexed by the search.

That's not true, for me at least. I use mobile browser reddit and can see comment threads just fine.

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

#183
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.

People are paying 5x that much for Spotify, and they have never made a cent of profit.

If companies can be profitable with just subscriptions, they wouldn't need to sell ads. And yet the NYT, FT and WSJ blanket their subscribers with just as many ads as they do for non-subs.

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

#184
So I've recently gotten super interested in the idea of building a webapp that can seamlessly interact with social network/link aggregator protocols through bridging, and I'm working one that does that with a focus more on following topics vs following people.

It's technically a nostr client, but it allows you to search for and follow posts about topics from Twitter (through Nitter RSS feeds), Mastodon (through the native Mastodon RSS feeds), Reddit (through subreddit RSS feeds), and Bluesky (through a bridged RSS feed).

This way, you can focus on following the topics you're interested in, and not have to think about what platform/protocol holds those posts.

https://agorasocial.app

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

#185
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, Reddit is one of the most useful sites out there. With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory. None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.

On mobile you can’t read reddit comment threads unless you install their official app. I hate that Google surfaces reddit threads since the site itself often doesn’t contain the information indexed by the search.

[deleted]

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

#186
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, Reddit is one of the most useful sites out there. With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory. None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.

On mobile you can’t read reddit comment threads unless you install their official app. I hate that Google surfaces reddit threads since the site itself often doesn’t contain the information indexed by the search.

Firefox > Menu > Desktop Site

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

#187
post #69
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app. Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's…

ITYM Damp squib.

All squids are already damp.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I imagine that requires a level of effort that volunteer mods just don't have the time or inclination for.

Then why are they mods? They literally volunteered to do that exact thing.

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

#189
post #35
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?

We are biased , as HN users, to prefer text-based, minimal, UIs that lead to (mostly) insightful conversations. Reddit on the other hand caters to a hivemind type mentality that loves things like emojis, karma, dramatic posts, etc. The current UI definitely favours that, and I think generally teens/young adults prefer that as well

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

#190
post #154
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are extensions that will automatically redirect you. I use this one [0] for Firefox and haven't had any issues. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...

Interesting. I don’t think it’s a big enough annoyance for me to install yet another extension. Moreover, since I use old Reddit on my phone, I’d still have to change it back.

For things like this a userscript is better solution than a full-on extension. It is definitely worth it though, especially for mobile.
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