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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

#311

Post by makestuff »

lyu07282 wrote: post #22
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 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…

Does Reddit actually make any money though or do they run in the red?

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

#312

Post by danudey »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #281
interestica wrote: post #261

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.

Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a mi…

I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.

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

#313

Post by WorldPeas »

bee_rider wrote: post #260
WorldPeas wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It will be interesting to see what the enshitification process looks like for distributed/open source chat programs.

it'll likely be at least somewhat thwarted by forking(one hopes).

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

#314

Post by CharlesW »

Narushia wrote: post #254

So, basically any kind of customization to the Reddit experience is now limited to browser extensions and userscripts that scrape and modify the website itself. On Android, this means using Firefox. On iOS, I don’t think there’s much choice. Unless someone creates a Reddit app that is actually just a web view wrapper bundled with the necessary client-side scripts.

> 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/

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

#315

Post by ruleforty »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #303
slantaclaus wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reddit is sprawling. There are thousands of non-political subreddits. Yeah, if you are following the default feed and reading r/politics, or any of the drama subreddits, you are going to have a bad time. Are you curious about what information is being sent through your house between 10KHz and 6GHz? Curious what your water meter is broadcasting to the neighborhood? https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/ Feel like some short…

and in some modicum it’ll always have these communities but like was mentioned above: watching cat gifs, some drunk girl smashing a wine bottle, or the random police videos - those non-niche areas are at jeopardy… and good. It’s time they do their little IPO and we all move on to whatever emerges after the dust settles.

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

#316

Post by danudey »

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.

Let's be clear though: this is exactly what happened.

Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs".

What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use so that they don't start mining us for ad clicks as soon as they think they can get away with it, because as long as users are going to insist on everything being free companies are going to need to do shit like this to us at every opportunity.

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

#317

Post by giantrobot »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #145
fathyb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board? > invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss. > try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddi…

> Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board? Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment. It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually use…

> The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.

A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.

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

#318

Post by danudey »

raydev wrote: post #305
bazmattaz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US. I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul. If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in s…

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?

People are using third-party apps because they're not trying to be all things to all people, while also constantly pivoting to handle whatever it is that management thinks the business should try out next.

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

#319

Post by mywittyname »

raydev wrote: post #305
bazmattaz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily past it’s expiration date. It’s ranked 6th most trafficked sites in the US. I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul. If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in s…

> understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?

Not the OP, but yeah. If something is so bad that >1% of users go through the pain of changing it, then it's probably annoying many more users. Do those something else about the problem, i.e., use the app less often.

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

#320

Post by pierat »

danudey wrote: post #312
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that symbiosis community stuff is for when you're still growing. Once you're big, it's time to pull up that ladder, put on the corporate mask, and start cranking that ad revenue at all costs. You've got a million rubes doomscrolling past your homogenous r/funny - i mean, r/all - slurry who don't know the difference between an ad and a real post. People who care about things like UX and quality posts are a mi…

I don't understand why they don't either mandate ad display on third-party apps, or waive API fees for third-party apps that show ads in an approved manner. I'm sure there's a reason, but I'd rather be able to use Apollo even if it shows ads as well than to use the official app.

Control of the narrative is worth more than just money. So instead of just removing it, they just set the price to be laughable high so few, if any actually pay.

Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one.

I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.

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