471–480 of 658 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It offers a little more stickiness, among other things.
In that it tries and fails to preview links in the app's crap internal web engine? Surely people don't actually use that?
There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have al…
Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.
That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that. I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch…
Wow haven't seen a "peak hn" comment like this in the wild for quite a while :) Make a sure you write everything in brainfuck too! As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million (they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers when they had 200 million users at their peak and touted having 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release. Every post is people saying the Reddit app sucks and asking where Dubsmash went)
It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok. I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The IPO capital you can raise is a function of your revenue prospectus. If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker. And if you're not currently collecting l…
The key point in that is that many IPO buyers are willing to believe in imaginary revenue that will never be extracted. Extracting revenue as a goal in and of itself uses a different playbook than IPOing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok. I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me…
I only use Spotify for music, and recently, my homepage was all podcasts and audiobooks, with only 1 or 2 lines of recommendation for music. Spotify, please stop! You’re literally turning your homepage into something that is unusable for me!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if some kind of discord server aggregator will become a thing soon, something one can add their server and invite link to so people know it exists. That plus a forum thread only setup might make it a viable replacement for a bit.
Already exists. https://disboard.org
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This, this and exactly this. Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s…
> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
And yes comments like this amaze me too.
There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have al…
If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.