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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

241–250 of 438 posts

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

#241
post #10

Every social network goes through this. You used to be able to access Facebook via other front-ends as well, same with Twitter. This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.

Reddit has become toxic. Deleting the app off my phone has really helped with my emotional health

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

#242
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone here is shitting on it, but to me it looks like it accomplished exactly what reddit wanted, and was wildly successful at doing so. Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic. So hiring someone who probably lov…

That is news to me ( i still use the old site but i dont see a lot of old people) I think reddit's demographic still is young , and has always been so .

I'm not convinced, but that's anecdotal from being a millennial and frequent Reddit user myself, and seeing lots of "As a 40/50/60/70 some year old" comments.

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

#243
post #177
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.

It never works like that in practice. It is cheaper and easier to deal with one customer paying $10,000 than 1000 customers paying $10. In any case, Reddit has no interest in pivoting their business model away from ads to paid subscriptions. This is a dog and pony show they're holding prior to "making the difficult decision" to eliminate 3rd party competitors.

Reddit already has an infrastructure dealing with 1000s of customers paying small amounts. It seems absurd to outsource part of that to very small 3rd party businesses, especially since that then would be two routes where payment processors and presumably mobile app store vendors get additional cuts from the money streams.

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

#244
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…

This happened to me. Uber-qualified graduate came in as a decision maker, fucked a load of stuff up, then left. Then the tenured devs gradually started leaving in revolt. Then the product died.

Sounds familiar. I worked at a bank once that had the brilliant idea of swapping out Angular with Polymer, because an early 30s guy with Google in his CV became the new CTO and Decided that it should be Polymer / web components.

They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.

I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t know what the inevitable pre-enshittified competition to Discord is. Do they exist yet? Discord is still at the beginning of the endhittification path so I guess it is not a super pressing issue.

it's probably either matrix or revolt, however I'd say matrix is the more mature/stable of the two

Funny how this reply also makes sense if you don't know that "discord", "matrix" and "revolt" are used as brand names here.

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

#246
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.

I think the problem is really that we need platforms such as reddit on the internet, they are kind of part of its essential infrastructure. But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction. They are making enough money, they can easily go on keeping the API open, but there is no such thing as a sustainable business, they are forced to make more profit than the…

>But running any infrastructure under the profit maximization scheme will always end up in self destruction.

That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).

Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.

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

#247
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is news to me ( i still use the old site but i dont see a lot of old people) I think reddit's demographic still is young , and has always been so .

I'm not convinced, but that's anecdotal from being a millennial and frequent Reddit user myself, and seeing lots of "As a 40/50/60/70 some year old" comments.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261766/share-of-us-inter...

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

#248

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.

Many of the moderators get paid. Just not by reddit.

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

#249
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…

Products like reddit are complete. They do everything they need to do and there’s very little you can really add.

That’s a big problem when you have thousands of employees. It’s like youtube or google. What can you really do with all these people?

A rational person would say fire them. But firing people feels wrong because growth is good and big is good. So the only solution is to make a project for them to work on.

The natural project for them is a UI change because it won’t break the product and it caters for their lack of ability. So that’s why finished products like reddit and youtube have a new worse UI every year for seemingly no reason.

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

#250
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.

There is a compact mode on the new design since day one, even the classic mode doesn't have the "card" design. This is never mentioned by people who complain (you included).

In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit.

I would agree that the lack of link colors make it slightly more annoying to read compact mode on the new one though, compared directly.

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