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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

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

#231

Post by stemlord »

jerpint wrote: post #189
lawn wrote: 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?

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

I think teens and young adults merely tolerate it because it's what they've been given. Any seemingly positive embrace of such drivel is actually an adaptation of it into something more culturally meaningful and better coded to elude boomer advertisers' prying eyes.

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

#232

Post by jerry_tk »

lawn wrote: post #108
jlokier wrote: 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?

Not OP, but I can recommend Glider: https://github.com/Mosc/Glider It is a nice replacement of Materialistic.

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

#233

Post by whamlastxmas »

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.

If you’re on android you can use Firefox with ublock. It’s my biggest loss switching to iPhone, to the point that HN comments are literally the only web page I will visit on my phone. Anything else I wait for laptop access.

Supposedly supposed to get side loading later this year which hope to god means Firefox with extensions on iOS

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

#234

Post by michaelrpeskin »

zeroego wrote: post #181
lawn wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha! I’m a staff engineer now, but many many years ago when I was a junior I got the same type of project. It was the CTOs pet project to reimagine the core processing framework. I still feel bad for the folks maintaining it now. I was an expert in the kind of thing that the CTO wanted so it was a good project for me, but I should have had a senior to guide the process and tests and things like that.

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

#235

Post by whamlastxmas »

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.

Also ad buyers don’t mind, and often prefer, deceptive or discrete advertising. Product placement and “native advertising” has been around for decades or maybe even a century.

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

#236

Post by azangru »

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…

> There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.

It's called modern frontend, I'm afraid :-)

By the way the next iteration of Reddit web UI, which this time is based on web components with Lit rather than on React, is less garbage — at least in terms of raw performance. Design-wise it may still be horrible; but at least technologically, it feels like a definite improvement. You can check it out if you browse Reddit without logging in.

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

#237

Post by 35997279 »

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…

I suspect that the people who “matter” (frequent, registered, trackable users) are using third party apps or scripts over the service itself, so there hasn’t been a reason to invest in the interface.

It feels like Reddit is in the same place Twitter was pre-Musk. Kind of lost in terms of purpose/trajectory for monetization. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s where Twitter will be in a few years, stagnated because it was bought to be part of a larger portfolio, a bauble that sits on the shelf and doesn’t really have anything innovative going for it.

To me there isn’t anything interesting about Reddit anymore. I only use it to hear from people who claim to live in a place I’m living or visiting, or to get very specific troubleshooting advice, where I find a specific post using an external search engine. Mostly I think the culture of the site itself is annoying. Any time I stray outside of regional or technical subreddits it feels like I’ve accidentally landed in a middle school cafeteria.

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

#238

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

lawn wrote: post #78
jollofricepeas wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand that some people think that these changes will "make them more money", but I don't think that you have to destroy the UI to do that. In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users and will make them less money in the long-run, or maybe even run the company into the ground if people starts to migrate to some alternative with non-sucky UI. There's also nothing about the UI that's related to AI.

If the two options are:

1. Make money while preserving the UI

2. Make money while destroying the UI

... then why would anyone bother to preserve the UI? It's completely irrelevant even in the best case scenario. But allow me to present another more cynical:

They both hate anything good/competent/well-made, and the users too, and also want to make money.

> In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users

When I first started reading reddit in early 2006, the web was a larger place with many thousands of fora. But reddit's growth was at their expense, most are dead or dying. It's depressing when you're looking for something specific, and you end up on one of the old phpbbs... no one's bothered to post a comment in months. If they have, no one ever replied. But in their archives, it shows that just 15 or even 10 years ago, an hour wouldn't go by without someone saying something.

They've solved the "chasing away users" problem by making certain there's nowhere to flee to. Some small fraction might just cut that sort of internet use out of their lives entirely out of spite, but not enough to matter.

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

#239

Post by MSFT_Edging »

dageshi wrote: post #191
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with AI. Making your site less usable isn't going to make you more profitable in the long run.

Nah, it has a lot to do with AI. Give it another 12 months when the rest of the web has been gunked up with AI written crap and reddit will be one of the few reliable sources of useful opinion out there. Hell, it is right now given how frequently I and others append "reddit" to our google queries.

What you're describing is in a really rough spot already.

You need to append "reddit" to get any useful result, but unless you're on desktop, the mobile site is essentially broken if you're looking for answers. The app nag is omnipresent and the comment section is always broken after 2 or 3 comments with a "show more" button and lists of other posts.

If information is hard to glean from reddit, and the rest of the internet is AI blogspam, what is to be done?

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

#240

Post by MSFT_Edging »

rchaud wrote: post #138
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…

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.

Its sorta funny, when I'm looking for opinions on a new tech stack or a language comparison, I add the "hackernews" at the end of my query.
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