631–640 of 658 posts
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It's 100% about being able to stop adblockers
On mobile? Apart from a few geeks using firefox on android, mobile browsers generally dont hinder ads
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I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there. The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simp…
Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again. I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?
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Its so stupid that this is all "for" an IPO. I can't imagine huge investing houses, retirement funds, analysts and such investigating Reddit, and missing the massive user retention issues these changes precipitate. Its not like the stock market is littered with social media website corpses or anything...
It makes sense if the mobile app provides more "monetizable" users. Shift everyone to the mobile app (or try to) and juice those numbers for advertisers and provide better revenue numbers for the IPO. Unlike the API change though, I think they do risk losing users with this who still see ads and provide some return.
I know what they are thinking, but (setting aside the whole enshittification thing) it makes me sad to see yet another long term sacrifice for some quick profit. It makes me not want to invest in them.
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> Users can't block ads in an app. Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away , for the official Reddit app: – https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage – https://revanced.app/download Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.
any recommended links to learn more about revanced? the best I can find from their website is that they're a continuation of the "vanced" project but it doesn't say what that was and I haven't had luck on google. It's clear that they have something to do with providing patched apps, but is revanced a framework? is it a library? is it a person or group that does the patching?
They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.
They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.
ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.
So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)
Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.
So ReVanced is a team that maintains:
* A list of useful patches
* An engine to apply them
* A Java CLI frontend to the patcher
* An Android app frontend to the patcher
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Tragedy of the socials
Tragedy of the socialites? Tragedy of the socialite capitalism?
Say you have a shop and brand that sells chocolate cake; but a competitor appears that sells ice cream, and their market turns out to be 10 times bigger than yours. You could try to make a new shop, selling ice cream, but the lack of brand awareness might make it never take off. So instead you turn your chocolate cake shop into an ice cream shop, and use your existing customer awareness to catapult you into taking half that market. Good for you, since you now have half of a 10 times bigger market. Bad for the customers, since they now lose the choice between cake and ice cream.
Ok, maybe the part about "using your existing brand" is where social networks are a bit different from other industries. There are hundreds of companies that could create a good social network, but the hard part is getting a big enough user base going. Probably this is less of an issue in the cake industry.
Reddit is trying to monetize the platform and it is very healthy thing for them and for the users. Pushing users to the mobile app is very reasonable if not a must.
Apps have better engagement. Push notifications, quick access to the platform, having a foot in the door on the user apps home screen are very clear pros.
Also, pushing people towards being always logged in is a hugh step towards more customized ads which in turn will increase monetization.
Yes thier app maybe lacking but I think they will try to make it best the viewing experience for Reddit. Deprecating the mobile web client gradually only makes sense.
I am not hinting that they are angles but no amount of complaining will ever change the situation without finding a better model that addresses these points.
Twitter, Facebook, and every other social media have gone through this journey. Why do you expect anything else?
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Not always, though. For instance it won't work on YouTube ads. I'd call it a hack at best.
I'm sure you're already aware of this, but for other HN users on Android, ads on YouTube are blocked when using Firefox Android + uBlock Origin + m.youtube.com -- the experience isn't as nice as the app but still totally worth it IMHO.
I'm the mod of a small subreddit [1] with a few thousand members. Today I've spun up a Discord server [2]. Personally I've had a guts full of the banners trying to force the Reddit mobile app down my throat. It sucks it's a shitty app. Just no. I don't like how Discord is a walled garden however it seems like Reddit too is also becoming a closed platform. I might as well go for the company that can actually build a g…
Have you considered also joining Kbin (kbin.social) and/or Lemmy (lemmy.ml)?
I have been in this A/B test group and I have been in the A/B test group that tries to show a TikTok style feed (one that gets new content based on the content you spent time observing) rather than a normalized upvote based one. Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes. I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had.…
I mean... It's not ethical. What discussion needs to be had? If "we" don't like doing those things, why don't "we" find a job doing something we believe in? Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
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> 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.
Big (and small) companies routinely make "data-driven decisions" based on obviously-faulty data collection, bad models, or misapplication of statistics. It rarely takes some crack scientific mind to spot it, either. But they want a decision now and doing it right might take a lot longer or cost more, or the correct model might be a lot fuzzier and that makes them uncomfortable, or they've got some notion in their hea…