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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

#371

Post by BeFlatXIII »

sickcodebruh wrote: post #83

Serious 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…

I hope the Reddit IPO fails or otherwise never makes good on the $1.3B fundraising. It would be fun to make fun of everyone ruined in the financial fallout.

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

#372

Post by Zak »

nottorp wrote: post #251
kevincox wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are at a computer yes. But sometimes I am on my phone and neither the old UI or the new UI are acceptable. I slightly prefer the new UI on mobile but it definitely sucks.

Well, I generally don't read anything on mobile unless I need a piece of info right now . Besides the screen having either too much or too little info, depending on if it's designed for the desktop or for mobile, it's usually unsafe since you can't run uBlock Origin on the Apple browser...

You can, however use DNS-based adblocking. Mullvad has a free service at adblock.doh.mullvad.net.

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

#373

Post by mdeeks »

stronglikedan wrote: post #361
macrael wrote: post #356

It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.

Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users, and leaner than ever which is better for the company. There was a short learning curve for all involved (those who were left and those who were brought on), but they've ironed out those kinks long ago.

Hm I have quite the opposite experience. I've never had so many bugs with Twitter as I do right now.

The feed random refresh bug never went away and somehow managed to get worse. Right as I'm reading something it'll vanish without a trace. I probably see this five times per day.

Sometimes I'll find my app on the "Following" feed even though I never actually switched to it (I'm weird, I actually enjoy the For You feed a lot).

Sometimes the content clearly hasn't refreshed because I see new things on my desktop that aren't on my mobile app.

The quality of the content has taken a sharp nose dive too. Almost everything is useless threads from "thought influencers", memes, or completely random posts that I have never interacted with ever in my life (anime memes? a thousand posts about the barbie movie)

The quality of the replies is awful now that blue check users are all at the top. It essentially made it "pay to be seen" rather than having the more interesting replies at the top. This makes me the most sad I think :(

Aside from that though, it feels like roughly the same app but with some small tweaks here and there.

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

#375

Post by SSLy »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #360
CharlesW wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. iOS has a standard browser extension system, and other iOS browsers support their own extension system. https://insightbrowser.com/

It looks like that's only true as of Feb of this year: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/07/new-iphone-browsers/ I think all of the major iOS browser competitors (chromi, firefox, etc) still use webkit for now, and are pretty limited as a result

iOS Safari addons are about 1.5 years old at this point. https://www.theverge.com/22722886/safari-extensions-ios-15-i...

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

#376

Post by geoduck14 »

macrael wrote: post #356

It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.

I don't think it is Twitter's fault at all. Twitter and Reddit are simply responding to companies like OpenAI scraping their data and building big models off of it without giving anything back to the websites (or their users).

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

#377

Post by plagiarist »

rglullis wrote: post #279
plagiarist wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're actually providing a service beyond what's available everywhere else, such as actively removing bigoted garbage or more powerful tools to discover high quality content relevant to me, I'd toss them a few bucks a month. Especially now in 2023. I don't think I would have paid even that much in 2010. And certainly not $50 for a newer and smaller network. I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly…

See, that is the problem right there: the things that are "beyond what's available everywhere else" are financed with ads, data mining, or both. I am talking about how much you would pay to have basic access to service. The reason that people don't pay is that everyone wants to add conditions to justify their financial support, and this is why we all end up in the mess we are all in. Now, let me try again: go to http…

Ah, you're irritable because it's personal to you. Yes, people place conditions on what they are willing to purchase, that's... how it works?

Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?

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

#378

Post by samtho »

vehemenz wrote: post #200
tremere wrote: 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 toothpaste is out of the tube on creating good communities like the Reddit of yesteryear. Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore. We need to go back to purposely small communities.

I don’t think the lowering of the average age is necessary one of the problems, but the fact that some of the new users are posing this problem is a symptom of a bigger one. They tend to comprise of many of the armchair-experts because a good deal of them learned very early to value engagement and good messaging over accuracy.

Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.

The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.

Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.

I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.

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

#379

Post by iLoveOncall »

bwat49 wrote: post #166
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.

I tried Apollo for a few days before going back and probably tried one or two others but only for a couple of hours (I'm on iOS btw).

Overall what I disliked was that they didn't have the same polish in the navigation.

On the official app I feel like everything that is going from a list of thread to the comments, to collapsing a comment, to going back to the subreddit, etc. is super natural and polished and I didn't feel the same on the others.

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

#380

Post by p_j_w »

stronglikedan wrote: post #361
macrael wrote: post #356

It is so disheartening that Musk's callous and destructive management of Twitter is becoming a template/excuse for shitty choices at other companies. We exist in a culture and Twitter has lurched the Overton window in a direction that makes everything worse for all of us.

Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users, and leaner than ever which is better for the company. There was a short learning curve for all involved (those who were left and those who were brought on), but they've ironed out those kinks long ago.

>Twitter is a better experience than ever for the users

The fact that I was getting notifications on my phone to look at a tweet from a Blue Checkmark that I didn't follow says otherwise.

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