Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 438 posts

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

#361

Post by stronglikedan »

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.

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

#362

Post by sogen »

alexp2021 wrote: post #346

There is no credible Reddit alternative as we speak, is there?

a lot of consumer-generated content websites are around us:

from YouTube back in 2006 - based around videos

to

- Twitter

- Instagram

and the newer ones such as

- Discord

- TikTok

- Mastodon

etc.

even HN

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

#363

Post by EliRivers »

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…

Indeed; as Cory Doctorow calls it, the Enshittification stage. The point at which the platform begins to extract all the value it can from its users and its advertisers.

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

#364

Post by giantrobot »

eddieroger wrote: post #109
flenserboy wrote: post #76

Back to USENET (which Reddit is a weird copy of) again, I suppose. The best part about Reddit are the small, topically-focused communities — those are going to have a hard time finding new homes, given how anti-community, anti-user-generated-content, & resistant to discovery (and much of that is on the search engines) most sites are these days.

I never really got in to USENET, being a child trapped in the Prodigy and AOL and CompuServe Internet a little too long, but as an adult who is planning for Reddit to hit the fan, I am unsure of the best way of discovering newsgroups that would interest me. I have a handful of subs that I follow, but I wouldn't know how to find the equivalent of r/homelab. I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would…

You can just download the list of newsgroups. If you find one that looks interesting you can just post to it.

The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality.

Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.

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

#365

Post by omar12 »

randunel wrote: post #272
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.

Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs. I've watched my favourite specialised blogs turn off comments because of bot spam, and I've watched forums raise the sign up bar and browsing restrictions for similar reasons. Reddit's anti-spam measures plus moderation makes it a much more decent experience.

> Communities used to be on specialised forums and blogs.

Now these communities are on Discord, which is not the friendliest to look for archived knowledge. If Discord can solve the UX for knowledge share, I can see it as the product with the better chance of replacing Reddit.

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

#366

Post by Daishiman »

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.

Every time I see a blue check mark on a contentious topic it’s never good. Good writers have left the platform or participate far less. Things break all the time. The only good thing is it’s helped me drastically reduce the time I spend mindlessly scrolling.

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

#367

Post by ricardobayes »

z3c0 wrote: post #343
tasty_freeze wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see this response every time somebody criticizes reddit, and I think it matters little. Even when you get off the defaults, many of the niche interests are segmented into multiple subreddits due to infighting and conflicts. And beyond that, even if you find a peaceful sub, the whole site is overflowing in bot-driven karma farming that reposts the same things every few months, and of course, my least favorite: armch…

Don't even mention that, a small (<100k subs) youtube channel I follow has three different subreddits covering it, because of infighting and moderation issues.

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

#368

Post by Zak »

spacephysics wrote: post #7

The 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…

Site-specific browser extensions are the classic way to do this, but most mobile browsers don't support them. Even Firefox severely sabotaged extensions in the Android version.

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

#369

Post by BeFlatXIII »

pierat wrote: post #320
danudey wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Old Reddit may be 1% of the user base, but it's 99% of the worthwhile users and janitors.

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

#370

Post by zeekaran »

WorldPeas wrote: post #214
bee_rider wrote: post #172

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

Matrix can replace the 1-1 and group chat function of Discord, but you would need Zulip to replace the Slack/Teams group forum function. And having them separately kinda kills the whole idea, doesn't it? That's not including that neither have screensharing. Not even sure if they have group audio.
Post reply on HN