The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.)
There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.
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
#262As 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.
> With Google search nearing total uselessness for local information, using "site:reddit.com" is almost obligatory.
Only if you use Google to search! ;)
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#263This is a deliberate move by Reddit to force the use of their failed acquisition. I believe this pushback combined with slashing of valuation will make them rethink their decision.
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#264Serious question, possibly naive: how many of Reddit’s UX decisions come back to pressure from investors to make good on the $1.3B they’ve raised? Is every web product with users and influence obligated to raise as much as possible and grow to a size where they start chasing ad revenue no matter what it does to their product and its users? I’m sure that running a product at Reddit’s scale requires serious money, mone…
Unfortunately the companies who take VC money have a huge advantage over the ones that don't. After they capture their users and market, they have to make good on their promises to turn a profit and make the money back for those investors.
It's a trend you see across most internet companies. We've seen it with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Discord has been going down that path now for the past year or two. That's why we're seeing so many ads for Nitro and features gated behind Nitro.
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On mobile you can hardly even scroll down a thread without the page crashing and dumping you right back at the top. 75% of the time it’ll be an error page and you have to refresh again to get past it. I can’t imagine people will tolerate this when they’re forced to use this UI and not their favourite app.
There is a mobile-only client called troddit.com that is really good. It shows what could have been possible with pure browser client on mobile. Not only is it waaaaaay faster, the UI is better too.
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#266[deleted]
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#267The Apollo app lets me use Reddit while signed out. I can favorite some subreddits and browse through them with no fuss. The official Reddit app won't do anything until you sign in. Apollo also has a bunch of life improvement features that the Reddit app will never see such as auto collapsing pinned / auto mod comments, icons that identify newer accounts, and showing who deleted posts.
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Count me as another person who frequently adds site:reddit.com to my google searches. I realize there's a lot of astroturfing that goes on there, but it's still useful when I want to get a pulse from real people. Also count me as another person who abhors the "new" UI. Every once in a while I get bounced out of the old UI and I don't know how people do it. The old UI isn't my perfect UI but it's darn near close to it…
Astroturfing is the least of the problems; most threads are filled with fake experts (of a very specific demographic - usually very young, american, male, etc) projecting. This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche…
It's a good thing we don't have any of this foolishness on Hacker News! /s
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#269The app is complete garbage, and the dark patterns on their mobile webpage are insidious. If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great. But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit. Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance…
Could use a load of uBlockOrigin filters to convert the site into something useable on mobile.
Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
#270As 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…
Remains one of my proudest contributions to Chromium https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/25...