I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing).
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
> I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
Would be faster to just shut down the corporation and give the money back to the shareholders, whatever they have anyway, but your approach is not without merit, mostly in that I think it would be funny at this point.
That's basically why I'm advocating what I posted, that and also because I think it'd be a great chapter in tech history, showing how doubling down on a stupid user-hostile decision can destroy a company (assuming it does). Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.
Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.
> Then, 30 years from now, people will still talk about how Reddit self-destructed when they decided they needed to control the user experience and forced everyone to use their app.
No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.
Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most shitty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").
It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.
Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.
That's exactly my thinking. They can make a special Reddit app with Electron that basically recreates the website, but forces users to see lots of annoying unblockable ads while hogging lots of memory. Users trying to use the normal website will just be directed to download and install this app, and only shown a preview of the site that they can't use. What could possibly go wrong?
For all this UX design, responsiveness, mobile-friendly talk and SAAS products for conversion funnels and what not, does no one in management ever use their own app or website on mobile? Seriously, open practically any random website on a stock chrome or Firefox on mobile and just see how horrible it is. Scrolling loses position, you randomly click stuff and shit happens, half the page is filled with a sign-up newsletter popup or a privacy banner. And wow if you have to input anything and all the nonsense you have to put up with dealing with the page or app responding to the keyboard. Or you have to scroll in an input field.
Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this shit and how do we not have an alternative.
Or clicking on some post. Nothing happening. Trying to click again, but new screen appears from original click, so your second attempt lands on some new link.
The whole auto-refresh thing is bullshit in general. You see something interesting, and then two microseconds later it is gone because the app (or even tab) decided to refresh and bring you new content.
That's the point actually. And not only in Reddit, but in all current social networks. You must lose posts, you must always look at the fresh snapshot of posts. And it works, people are conditioned to work with ephemeral internet. Apps and sites all work like this nowadays - Facebook, Instagram, Shitter, Reddit main page, Netflix main page, even HN partially. You blink and everything is gone, here is new content for you, enjoy, but not too long and don't become attached.
This drives up engagement in the population with attention disorders and promotes advertisement, since it is organically natural to see ads between ad-like endless posts.
Yelp started doing this years ago. They slowly cut access to their mobile site that used to work perfectly well. Sure I could install the app, but the obvious disrespect to the user pretending that the mobile site didn’t work perfectly well and that you have to install the app was so frustrating that I just stopped using Yelp altogether. And that’s saying something, seeing as I own a local theater venue and refusing to engage with Yelp hurts be more than it hurts them. But screw it, I hate being bullied by these platforms.
I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
Could someone explain why a new web interface, albeit arguably better for mobile and actually enjoyable on desktop if the following can be forgotten, is so damn slow? When loading it appears to emerge from unknown depths and open up with a heavy sigh. Personification of a tool but this the impression it gives me every time. I thought 2020s were years when multi cores and gigabytes of memory would render everything snappy.
It's built by the idiots sons and daughters of rich people as their "my first job" project. Lots of sectors apparently function like this. Children of the elite can have play jobs, money is distributed to friends and family and everyone suffers.
There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.
And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.
I signed up for Reddit last year, finally. I’m a happy user of old.reddit.com. And if it goes, I go. I survived a decade without an account, and it would be easy enough to go back that way. My opinion is not that important to share.
Old Reddit with a Stylus theme is how I've been using it for years. I'd occasionally switch to the new site just to check it's progress and while it has gotten a bit better in the last year or so, little nitpicks eventually drive me back to old.
As much as old reddit is a clear winner ok desktop it is pretty awful on mobile. Personally I actually prefer the new site on mobile (although it is awful too) but I understand why sone people still prefer the old site on mobile.
People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
I'm personally not confident if the signal to noise ratio took a turn for the worse (re: spam and porn posts), the site would be as a profitable/popular anymore
What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly shitstorm?
Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?
Fortunately their app is compatible with the ReVanced project (think YouTube Vanced). It's terrible you have to recompile apk's to get a useful experience (sans ads, sharing tracking, other restrictions), but for me it's currently the only viable way to use Reddit.
Revanced is the only way to stay sane while using Youtube and Twitch on mobile. The adverts and other spam are more obnoxious than cable TV.
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
I stopped using reddit when the .compact interface was removed. No I go back once in a while but if this goes through I will probably simply never visit.
You can still use old.reddit.com, which is vastly superior and faster than the modern reddit. It also loads videos and images inline (when you click for them to load) and it de-emphasizes comments. This allows you to work like the compact feed where you scroll through posts and only go into comments sections if you _really_ want to. It is a good alternative.
It's funny because I also sing the praises of old.reddit.com but would describe it/my preferences in a totally different manner. My preference would be for reddit to be as close to HN in UI format as possible, perhaps with some minor thumbnails for visual content.
What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.
There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hope it can be longer (a month or something) to encourage people to find alternatives.
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, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
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?
> 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, simply because they're more invested.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.
I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
The point isn't that it's different or the same, the point is that the very definition of the site is that all content and moderation pretty much is created by users, and that the users hate being forced to install yet another app when it works fine for years as a mobile webpage. There was/is a spirit to reddit and it's being destroyed and if you love something and someone takes steps to change the thing you love into something you don't then you're going to resent and hate it. There's also the idea of not feeling powerless and at the mercy of every corporation by banding together to try to effect change. But you act like it's just a bunch of immature kids who are pouting about something silly. It's deeper than that.
I agree with the poster above, since at this year most of people are accustomed to install an app to interact with a website. It’s not where we wanted the web to be, but also it’s a minority that find it annoying.
My parents are technical sheep. They'll do what a site tells them to, even if it bogs down their phone, adds notifications, and inserts yet another advertising tentacle into their life. They won't be mad because they don't understand. As an engineer, I think it's reasonable to be mad for myself and those that don't know better.
> The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me.
It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.
The Reddit app is a worse experience than users currently have on mobile with 3rd parties. Reddit let this go on for years and has now decided, without warning, to make the product worse for a lot of users including myself.
I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.
There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.
> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
Yes, I had to run the script several times, but it eventually edited and got rid of stuff that was super old. Basically every single comment made by me is gone (which I wanted).
I ran it before the blackout though, not sure how it would work with Reddit in its current state.
I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.
Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
I would add a small counterpoint to your second point. For me, reddit is becoming pretty essential in my life. Since Google has been taken over by blogspam and ads, I struggle to find reviews or opinions of things I buy or use. I use google to search reddit to find comments relating to thing I'm interested in. Those comments might be astroturfing or paid support too, but it's easier to sus that out by searching past comments and painting a picture of the user. It's not perfect, but it's much better than trusting the authenticity of random blogs save a few I have bookmarked.
There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
I can relate to your intentions, but keep in mind that, when you leave your data there, you're effectively encouraging people to keep using a user-hostile platform that will likely wall those people's content in. In the long run, you aren't making humanity better - you're worsening it.
Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.
You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:
Even more valuable info will be generated, and I don't think that we should just cram it there like that. We would be exposing this new info to information loss.
And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.
Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.
Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.
I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.
EDIT: and as another commenter highlighted everything has been archived already. The info loss will be way, way lower than you think.
>The thing is that there's a lot of valuable information that I don't think we should just delete like that.
Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".
I’ve once held a similar view, but then realised that kind of data really isn’t worth holding on to. I deleted my 15 years worth of posts and account, and felt a massive weight had been lifted. Reddit had a negative effect on me, and freeing myself of that was well worth it.
I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.
That's how Meta pulls you in, but reddit has always felt less user-focused than subreddit and comment-focused. Read a link, make some smalltalk about it asynchronously for a few hours, move on.
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
It may be less sticky from a social perspective, but its comprehensiveness is (was?) its strength to me. I often search Reddit for very specific questions about a range of subjects. That's what I come back to it for.
(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).
>I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections.
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
It's not a problem with reddit. I've been there maybe 15 years and never had a single "friend". I rotate the accounts every year or so, not a big issue.
I would've agreed with you 5 years ago. However, my weak connections seem to have thinned themselves out—the people I'd only ever see on FB have gotten bored and stopped posting there. Everyone else, I have other means of contacting.
i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.
old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can
Are / were they really 'friends' though if doing so obliterated your connections? Most people tend to misclassify being friends with being open & friendly with another.
There’s nothing wrong with having acquaintances that aren’t close friends though. I always see this argument and don’t get it.
Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.
Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
> Yes. Putting people through hoops and then going "were we really friends if you didn't do it for me, huh, HUUUUH?" is a "I'm the main character" mindset.
Interesting point.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.
Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.
Ah yeah man totally wanting to jump through hoops (email was just an example), installing shit like wechat, kik, tiktok etc is the same thing) totally makes me the 'main character.'
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
Yeah, I’ve been using BaconReader for years. It’s going to stop working soon and I’m simply going to stop using Reddit. I used to use it for more but the last few years I only use it for porn and I recently discovered that the redgifs site is great for that. Obviously not everyone uses Reddit only for this purpose but I suspect that when the third party apps go dark redgifs will get a nice bump in new users.
Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.
Sure - the next corporate ship will torch VC money until they can't, they'll go user hostile then the next corporate ship will have received VC money to torch to fill the void
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
Prisoner's Dilemma is a good example but probably has a lot of bias due to its naming convention. I think I prefer the Stag's Game for this situation. And honestly, the Stag's game is probably more applicable to this situation.
-----------
Both players have the choice of picking "Rabbit" or "Stag". "Rabbit" is the independent choice, you score 1 point for picking the Rabbit.
"Stag" is the cooperation choice. You get 10 points if both players pick stag, but 0 points if the opponent picks Rabbit.
Its not so much that the current situation is a betrayal (ie: Prisoner's Dilemma), as much as the current Reddit situation is picking a short-sighted, still profitable, choice. (Rabbit). But by picking Rabbit, they're screwing the community (who has gotten used to picking Stag / scoring 10 points instead).
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Unlike the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag's game is bimodal. If both players are picking "Stag", the Nash Equalibrium is to continue picking stag forever more.
But if for some reason, a player ever makes a mistake and picks "Rabbit", the game switches to Rabbit-meta and neither player ever has a reason to go back to pick "Stag".
That's assuming that everyone has a good grasp on what's going on, and considers this funny-picture-App to be their top priority.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
I can't believe they would do this AND kill off third party apps. I'm with you on not rewarding reddit, they have become very user hostile all the sudden.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
Exactly, don't take it personally just vote with your feet. Reddit doesn't owe you anything. The flip side is that you don't owe it anything either. If they do something you disagree with, that is their good right. But you are of course under no obligation to stick around.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I find it funny people have been going on this anti Reddit turning profit crusade, but ignore the fact Reddit is pretty similar to Facebook groups, just has much better ui and indexability
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
Just because every single comment complaining (rightly) about Reddit’s current behavior does not include a comparison to Facebook does not mean it’s ignored.
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense
And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta
What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round
If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down
Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.
Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.
People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.
I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.
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 already attracted users who are obviously happy with the web experience, why on earth not keep them there? I would be expecting developers, if anything, to be nudging people in the other direction. But that's not what's happening, not just with reddit, so what am I missing here?
I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?
The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control.
Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.
Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.
The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.
There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.
Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...
Worth pointing out that not all in-app browsers are created equal, however. A huge number of apps, probably the majority, on iOS use SFSafariViewController for theirs, which is basically an isolated Safari tab that runs out of process and app developers have no access to. Furthermore, SFSafariViewController instances are unique per-app, each with their own separate set of cookies so apps can’t trick you into visiting a link to gain access to full Safari’s cookies.
IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.
You are correct; however, in the case of some of the biggest apps (Reddit's official app among them), they use the old WKWebView specifically for the ability to inject code. The more user-centric third-party apps that Twitter/Reddit have targeted lately used SFSafariViewController.
The question is, is there any way for the user to tell the difference just by looking? Or is that something you have to be able to examine the binary to be able to determine?
On Android, when you have the WebView open, go to the app switcher and the title will tell you which app provides the view: the original app, or your browser.
Yes, the one that is “clean” has the open in Safari icon. However, as soon as that becomes common knowledge I’m guessing the malicious apps will be adding that icon
Can't always do that, though. Apple gets especially angy if you're injecting necessary stuff into the page, we found as a general rule they'll fail your app approval for anything like that (unless you're a big boi like FB I guess).
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 how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
My former boss, someone I used to think had a brilliant business mind, at an e-commerce company, forced us to produce a shitty mobile app, and then to pour more resources into it, because of how the average spending of users in-app was higher. I mean, no sh*t, these are people who are such fans of your brand that they want to download a whole dedicated app for shopping at your site. Of course they’re buying more. I have an app for stores I frequent a LOT, but would not see myself installing one for like, stores that I visit maybe once a year. But the causality was in the other direction.
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 heads already and they'll be damned if mere numbers are going to get in the way of that, so everyone in the room's just supposed to nod along when the blatantly-biased graphs come up on the Power Point suggesting (erroneously) that we do X.
The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.
It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.
(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)
Reddit is far from giant in terms of employees or revenue, and you'd be surprised at how many dumb decisions and how much money is wasted by startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You really shouldn't assume competence in situations like these, especially when Reddit has recently been making a bunch of terrible long term decisions to try and juice their numbers in the short term for IPO
I think the problem is that people read the analyses that companies share publicly (e.g., in a press release or earnings call), and they assume that that's all they did.
You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.
The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
Story time: Worked at a large multinational, and 6-7 years ago they decided they had to ape into the whole “data science” gold rush. They spent millions of dollars on hardware, software, salaries, and consulting.
After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.
Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.
i think that many business get lured into doing data-science because they think that math/stats powers grant borderline-mystical powers and that they can be used to peer into a data warehouse and create ideas/business strategies that no mere mortal (i.e., people with domain expertise in business) could have dreamt up.
But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements.
Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing values, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).
Me too. Reddit almost certainly ran those numbers.
They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
Having worked at some quite large companies: yes, it happens for real that they do not do stuff like that. It is likely that some team obviously has ran the numbers but that does not mean they made it to the people who made the decision.
People really think a giant corp acts a monolithic entity with perfect distribution of knowledge and ability and the stupid actions of dumb individuals will always be stamped out rather than amplified.
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 location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.
Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
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.
> They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers […]
They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
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?
"YouTube Vanced" was meant an "Advanced" YouTube client, minus the "Ad"s.
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
(I've skipped over a lot of the history details but this should give the basic idea.)
It's a community-driven collection of patches[0] for popular Android apps, supported by a patching framework which includes patch management software (ReVanced Manager[1]).
Not only that, they now have a perfect way of tracking the association between multiple accounts, which is very helpful for selling a person's ahem real browsing history.
Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
I would still say that even FOSS apps off F-Droid are less user-centric than the web. They're more likely to respect the user, for sure, than even most web apps. And a user who is comfortable with code can always fork them and customize them. But the barrier to entry for a custom experience is much higher on an app than it is on the web. Browser extensions are highly accessible to many people and can allow tweaking the experience beyond what the developer natively enabled.
As a simple example: Dark Reader has 5 million installs on Chrome. That's 5 million people who can view a web app in dark mode even if the developers didn't think to provide a native way to do so.
My thoughts exactly. I do lots of "tinkering" with my web experience and have a few open source apps that I build and install, and the barrier of entry on apps is way higher than for websites. Even for an app that is open and friendly, it's still a major undertaking to get a dev env setup and debug/tinker. And once you do, auditing the app to see what it does is further difficult. With the web you don't even need a dev env, and an extension like uMatrix makes it pretty easy to audit the site and see what it's doing/loading.
I'm to the point where I boycott apps. I will only use an app if there's a real benefit to me for doing so, such as podcasts and music and offline functionality or those that use hardware features.
That depends on the implementation, but its just a fundamental technology difference. On the web, the default way to do things is to use a bunch of HTML elements and whatnot, which are user-agent-introspectable, even if they are modified using a blob of code.
With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.
Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).
> Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years
That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis!
Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads.
But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.
I suspect some might be able to rise up by injecting themselves at framework level, since it's very likely that the programs will still keep some sort of in-memory representation. Though I don't think that injecting code into other WebAssembly blobs is possible with the security models we have today.
The surefire way would be an external application that uses OS APIs to fiddle with memory directly (bye bye mobile content blockers).
But whatever form it takes, it would have to be programmed to operate on every framework available, so it's way less universal than writing a CSS selector or URL regex.
Adguard blocking inside apps is exclusive to DNS methods, these methods are extremely easy to circumvent by app providers. Reddit (as an example since topic of thread) already gets around these DNS blocking methods because content and ads are served from the same location.
Adguard costs money and non-tech savy userbase has no idea it even exists, even less how to use it. And that is the userbase they wanna keep, I feel like they are purposely alienating their power-user base.
Awareness is certainly an issue, but I've enabled adguard's DNS on my mobile device and it does indeed block almost all ads and doesn't cost me any money.
Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).
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.
HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.
Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.
Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.
> HTTPS means the network connections between the app and the backend are opaque to third parties including the user.
It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.
You're not wrong, but ads are already moving to a different model with either first-party URLs or random ones that are difficult or impossible to enumerate to get around ad blocking. With Apple's new thing that's going to bring the reckoning even sooner (sigh). This technique is much harder and won't last very long I'm afraid.
I wouldn't call patching a binary very easy, especially since our point of reference was installing an ad blocker extension in the browser. Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated and full of various ways to check that it hasn't been tampered with.
You’re assuming there is some cohesive strategy here. It’s better to look at what often happens in practice at a more practical level.
Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say “why not just force existing web users to use it?”
It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.
I think your hypothesis is underrated. For sure part of the argument is to get around ad-blockers but people underestimate both the level of dysfunction and just how awful some people in powerful positions are.
This argument is at the intersection of “Wet streets cause rain” and “Depressingly likely to be accurate”.
“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”
I think people are usually over-inclined to assume that these companies know what they're doing; that there is, somewhere, some well-thought-out master plan. Often, there isn't.
Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run companies in the course of their daily lives, some people _really_ seem to struggle with the idea that a company might be poorly-run, and seek any other explanation.
Problem in big companies is that its is filled with people that , especially the higher you go, have their own plans and agendas. Sometimes they align with each other and oftentimes some part of company is actively trying to sabotage some other part of company.
Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.
And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.
An apposite war story from Nokia, just about the time the iPhone entered the market: our Lords and Masters had decided that internal competition would be a good thing, so smartphones were divided into business, entertainment, and mass market divisions with each bidding for exclusive access to the components being delivered by the the R&D and productisation teams. So it was that barcode readers ended up with "business" (use case: scan a business card) and auto focus cameras with "entertainment" (use case: selfie). With of course the result that the business phone needed an A4-sized business card held at arm's length. This absurd "strategy", probably sold in by a gaggle of consultants, was first celebrated then subject to extensive soul-searching and some tedious "lessons learned" enquiries that resulted in long PowerPoints filed carefully in NUL, rather than perhaps simply resolving next time to ask some small child working in the front line just what they thought of the Emperor's splendid new attire...
Probably sopping up more money from all the privacy intrusions possible with an app. Better ad revenue. Probably spent money on the app and need validation of the expense. Board might even have threatened whole team terminations without better app take up.
How many times is improvement UX in desired there?
The VC board always has the same reason: revenue, revenue per user and their respective quarter over quarter percentage delta. Number go up = good. Number go up less than last quarter = bad. Number not go up = disaster.
I’m not necessarily pointing a finger at the pressure or motivation to want mobile app growth. Pre-IPO is a stressful time. It’s mostly about how the team goes about attempting to accomplishing those goals and a management/product culture and talent thing that was likely in place well beforehand. Based on the last redesign and https://new.reddit.com there are plenty of signals of doing things for the sake of doing them or for UI trends, not because it makes it fundamentally better.
It’s easy to miss these failures internally and assume the teams/management are functional and effective when your app keeps growing… via Reddit’s content and existing market dominance.
There's also a huge disconnect between what power users want and what the ad-viewing cannon fodder will tolerate. Headlines this week say that Netflix cracking down on password sharing has been hugely successful driving new signups.
I work at a company trying to get more people into our app. The logic is completely flawed: "we want more engagement, app users show more engagement than web users, so if we get more users from web into the apps we'll get more engagement". It's obviously completely flawed but the product people and analytics department don't seem to get it.
At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.
I'm generally not cynical about human motivations, but after seeing many of these things and how thoroughly the "internal propaganda" at tech companies works, I think those are just the reasons they tell themselves. The real reason is the control and the deep analytics that you can get from mobile apps. Plus having an app icon which really does boost engagement, but nowhere enough to justify on its own.
A good compromise is to educate users on how to add a shortcut to their homescreen. I don't think people (including product people) know about this feature, and mobile browsers bury it. The pareto principle applies: 80% of stickiness is that icon, which you can get for 20% of the effort of an app.
All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...
Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.
One way or another there are a bunch of Google-app icons that all look the same to me. Third party apps on iOS or Android generally have nondistinct icons: I have many icons that are basically a letter like "H" with no indication that one of those icons controls my stereo and another one does something else. I use Microsoft' RDP on my iPad all the time and I struggle to find the icon not least because the colors blend into the background but it is just some arrows without stems like the logo of some british railway from the 1970s.
I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.
Personally it’s been a long time since I launch anything besides ~4 apps (phone, messages, browser, mail) from the homescreen. There are wayyy too many apps for that (because of BS like reddit is doing) - I always drag down and start typing the app name into search to launch.
I've gone the other way and just don't use very many apps. I'll only use an app instead of the site if I find the app provides actual added value *to me*. And that is not often the case.
And for cases that force you to the app instead of the webpage, I don't use that site on my phone. Which tends to start a cycle where I stop or at least greatly reduce using that that site.
If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture. There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position. After a few rounds of this the user will leave in frustration.
Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.
> There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position.
The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.
>If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture.
Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.
There have been lots of complaints about a well-funded advertising campaign from Hobby Lobby called "He Gets Us". App users are getting DMs from the advertiser and are unable to block the adverts or user. Other advertisers are blockable, which stops those ads.
The decision maker likely wants the app installed because it increases the friction to users to “replace” the app with a competing one. Amazon used to offer $5 credits to install their app years ago, and I initially struggled to understand the reasoning; however these days its so convenient to buy via the amazon app compared to signing up for an account on different websites (i am more likely to use Amazon which is already installed than to go directly to some manufacturer and buy directly)
For Amazon, I prefer the web-app since it's able to open tabs for products I'm comparing. With the app, you're forced into a forward/back/forward navigation pattern that I think is sub-optimal when comparing products.
Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.
Yeah this is a common theme. The web presence often gets more attention ironically, because it is the facade and starting point for the given endeavor. Then comes greed and they try to discourage web usage ... we've all seen it play out over and over.
I too find this baffling. I have developed and maintain two platform native pairs of apps in use in the agriculture level irrigation control sphere. Our reasons for doing so are varied (historical, user experience, performance, desire to minimize cloud dependencies, need to really push Bluetooth and other OS assets (like location, storage, and photos)). But it is a butt ton of annoying work. From Java to Kotlin, Android to Compose, ObjC to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI. It seems to never end. How I would love to use the a “cross platform silver bullet”, but I spent 20 years using and pitching Smalltalk in that space and am just really distrustful that that problem is truly solvable. But I’m surrounded by what seems 10:1, if not more, of web programming hoards who all use the cloud and web apps as the hammer to every problem they see. Their enthusiasm through the industry is great. I honestly am confused why I see app after app be retooled native in parallel or in replacement to a mobile web app. The variety of contexts is great enough that I’m uncomfortable ascribing it to a machivelean subtext of control. There’s too much inconsistency and incompetence betwixt the various marketing/steering levels of all the participants to see it as some universal evil plot. I feel there has to be something more general going on.
"Install the app" walls might be super effective at destroying reengagement, though.
I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.
When Reddit first tried pushing their mobile app I gave it a try, but it was so horrible I decided to stay on web. But they kept degrading the web experience, so I quit Reddit on mobile until discovering Apollo. At this point I don’t browse on desktop, and with Apollo being shut down, I don’t think I’ll be back.
I asked the marketing team about it when I used to work at a restaurant reservation company 5+ years ago and the numbers were clear, marketing notifications work, way more engagement.
It’s the same reason as the third-party app API changes: prevailing forces within the company want to know that for every X API requests made, Y targeted ads were put in front of eyeballs. Most mobile browsers can block ads at this point. Plus, native apps offer more ways of gathering user data opaquely, which is worth lots of money in the eyes of finance people even if they haven’t started doing it, or if they expect it to be limited in various ways by mobile OSes and/or laws. The profits vs losses just point them this way, at least according to certain financially-minded people. This isn’t really a new phenomenon.
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.
They could have changed their API or keys to require an adserve API included and given the app makers time to adapt to the new setup.
Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.
It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.
Slack and Discord work fine in desktop browsers and do not regularly hassle users about installing a desktop app. I think Discord users often install the app for actual user-centric features that are not possible to provide from a browser (push-to-talk voice chat while playing games for Discord, as I recall).
In addition to all of the control issues that other commenters have mentioned like blocking adblock and including tracking, an app also puts the user in the mindset of using your service by default and exclusively. If you view Reddit on the web, you might copy and link and repost it to Twitter. You're less likely to do that in an app. Additionally, it leads people to use Reddit by default, for all purposes. On the web, I might think "Oh, I should search for this on Reddit", but then if Reddit doesn't have the results that I need I'll check another website. Humans are creatures of habit. Once I get used to opening the Reddit app by default, I'll subconsciously invent ways to use the Reddit app for everything, as my one-stop-shop. Which is why I don't use any proprietary apps, ever, if I can do the same thing on the website. And also why I don't use mobile internet very much, to be honest.
Easier targeting, especially third-party means higher CPM, means more advertising driven revenue. Also, you’re worth more if you can be tracked across different devices (that became more important after the so called cookie-geddon.)
Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).
So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.”
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.
I have uninstalled several apps that I actually wanted to use due to trying to do this. I feel you probably increase engagement of the users who stay at the cost of scaring away a whole bunch of other users. I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.
> I have for example uninstalled the FB app and only user their website.
Well, that is why Facebook and others are pushing to "allow alternative app stores" on iphone. Getting past the app-review process means the dark patterns and data mining can get way more noxious, and at that point they just do like reddit and kill the mobile experience. No, no phones allowed on the website, we have a native app for that.
But third party app users are likely to be even more sticky. Doesn't that mean they should encourage everyone to install third party apps? No, this is just idiocy.
Yes, but the third party apps don't allow Reddit to take in heaps of tracking data or run ads every 3 posts, so for the company's purpose they're useless
Its easier to collect info on users via a mobile app than via a webpage. My guess is that they're simply trying to increase what they know on their users which is the data they can monetize with their ad customers (with some small print to not get them in conflict with data protection laws).
Couple of reasons:
- Push notifications to reengage the user
- Collect more data - you can spy way more on a user using the app than on the web
- Bypass adblockers
All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.
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 every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
It's something that does work in other industries. If fantasy books are big you pay someone to write another fantasy book. If people start buying crossovers, you build a crossover.
The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How someone spends their leisure time is a limited, valuable resource.
In the case of social network platforms, you have to do more than convince someone to switch one person at a time. Using one social network platform over another is a group decision and you have to convince an entire group to switch at the same time. It does me no good to switch platforms if the people who I interact with are still using the old one.
This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...
Big tech businesses always suffer from lack of creativity but most importantly they often lack a central product vision where someone can say “no”.
What happens usually is some middle tier exec (or big name customer if B2B) will say, “hey did you see Snapchat new stories feature? We should do something like that” and then without careful customer research, or a product leader connecting it to an overarching vision, the devs just start work on it and it rolls out because it’s just there.
Everyone needs something to do and everyone loves new features right?
Blindly copying some other company’s new features or UI patterns, and pigeonholing it into an app without cohesive product-wide strategy (aka connecting it to what customers already like about your service but even better) is always the sign the company has entered mediocrity. Largely a talent issue and execs who don’t really care about long term product dev. People just looking at generic growth charts and hoping they go up and then buying other companies when their own teams can’t hack it, hoping they can seed some life, without fixing the root causes.
> Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar.
Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
>Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
OP said:
>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"
Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.
Lord of the Rings Online, Archeage, Tera, Wildstar, Kingdoms of Analur, City of Heroes, The Matrix Online are all from that era of every MMO trying to be the WoW killer and needing to supplant WoW for their business model to work.
What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.
Blizzard spent $100,000,000 building the first version of WoW. They captured most of the other MMO players. Every company that claimed to be the next "WoW killer" had a budget that was basically "3 bent paperclips and some bellybutton lint". No one was willing to make the content.
> 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.
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
This has happened before. I joined FB and Twitter when they were new, and loved the interaction with people I knew, people in my city and some very few online-only acquaintances. Both over time pushed people into following random people they have no real connection with, and that is now how they work.
You are right, it probably generalizes to other industries as well.
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.
>Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
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!
It's roughly analogous to a tire company producing a lemon of a tire that needs constant repairs, then acquiring a chain of repair shops, Revenues are up, engagement with brand are high. The company seizes on those metrics, refusing to acknowledge the downside: the tires are bad products, which could easily tarnish the long term reputation of the company. But who cares? They have a steady trickle of income from their customers. It's a gamble, but lucrative in the short term.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
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 of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
They have a point, though. In my honest opinion, more than 50% modern apps and services I've used - including e.g. Spotify, or pretty much every e-commerce site - have UI/UX strictly inferior to that of MS Access. Less functional, less ergonomic, less integrated, less useful.
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.
I think web browsers need to get back to basics and do their original job as "The User's Agent" rather than what they are today: Instead of being a tool to fetch and display hyperlinked text, they've morphed into this API platform built for web companies to control down to the pixel what users see in their browser window.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
If you do much mobile dev, you'll see companies burn so very much money making their app harder to use, possibly less accessible, and slower to develop, in the name of chasing some "on-brand" look, rather than just using built-in excellent UI elements that users are already familiar with, with minimal customization.
It's so frustrating. The Web, of course, has a similar but much worse problem with that, in no small part because there aren't—for no good reason—excellent built-in UI elements. They could be good, and there could be a lot more very helpful more-complex and smarter elements (think: mobile listviews, native hands-off payment prompts, that kind of thing), but they're not and there aren't :-/
Damn near every app on my phone would be better if the designers and brand-obsessed product managers hadn't gotten their way.
i (at least), as a power user, don't want to work for every small thing in my life. my free time gets spent on hobbies and friends, not on fixing the broken web. if i can use those tools with low friction, i will, if not, i will stop doing it entirely.
> It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you.
Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
The solution to social media companies behaving badly once they have users locked in may not be to lock yourself into another unprofitable company's closed ecosystem that's temporarily free.
It’s how they’ve been taught to attract younger users. Cool new video app work to attract teens, we buy cool new video app.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
And the way a certain MassiveCorp talked about the acquisition of my previous workplace, lead less experienced employees to believe they were doing so in order to diversity their offerings in that area.
Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
That's exactly the standard playbook. The acquisition happens, and there is a lot of talk sbout how important it is to keep everything the same, no one getting fired, no real changes except for a few different people to report to. Basically, no one gets fired in the first year while the new owners figure out what's actually going on with their purchase.
Just over a year, as the comments below guessed (congratulations! Prizes coming your way!).
Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.
>Dubsmash allowed users to videotape themselves while lip syncing over audio clips and including sections of songs, movies, and famous quotes. Users could upload their own audio and add colour but not filters and text animation to their videos
Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine.
Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
I get buying it for that purpose, but why then kill it? Especially when it is a personal video platform, when Reddit is mostly an anonymous text platform?
They want to intentionally hamper the website to drive mobile app usage for more juicy data. They don't care about those users who fail to migrate as they are generating less revenue. They begrudgingly keep things working just enough to keep some engagement to drive mobile app use.
They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
Robert Reich explains it well using Hacksaw Bob. There are facets he doesn't touch on in that example which he addresses in the full series. Very excellent presentation.
That only makes sense when there’s competition. Why maintain two apps when it’s cheaper to maintain one? Now, in this case it seems like an awful strategic choice, given what happened with TikTok. But I think the reason is nevertheless the same.
Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
Of course it is. It's right there in the name. It's not "competitism" or "winwinnism" or "fairism". Capitalism is about accumulating and making money from capital - that is, making money from what you own, not from what you do. It's pretty close to rent seeking - I'd dare say "rent seeking" is what we call it when you do capitalism too hard, and it starts feeling viscerally unfair.
But this is the same discussion as with communism, where the fans will rush you for saying that real-life communism sucks so badly, and tell you they will do it By The Book (or something). It's always surprising how many people take their truths from books instead of what's in front of their noses...
Unfortunately, Real Capitalism has never been tried before...
The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being.
Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do).
The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement.
I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself.
Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
> Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism.
That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments.
Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
I agree with much of what you wrote, except that if you don't think business have ALWAYS been running on the principle of "make money and disregard external costs to society/environment/human well-being", that's just rose colored lenses. Even in the pre-USSR-collapse heyday you're referring to, look no further than the tobacco industry. They literally killed people because it was profitable.
I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.
Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
Anyone that I know that has worked in Big tech in the past decade knows that. There has nothing that managed to capture the slice of life absurdity that Big Tech can be at some times than that show.
There were times I thought "I know someone like that", there were times I thought "I know that person", and there were times I literally knew people on it... It was disturbing to watch.
They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?
What we really need is more shows to take up the concept and satirize modern tech (and SV specifically) from their own unique angles.
The only one that did was the short-lived Amazon original Betas, which had more irritating younger characters, yet for all of its memespeak it really did feel like it grokked the startup bubble culture well enough, especially since it was actually set in the SoMa of San Francisco, rather than Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto!
The last season was my favorite. I was amazed how well it captured the AGI vibes in my corner of Silicon Valley at the time. These days I think most people would easily recognize OpenAI and GPT, but it was filmed 5 years ago!
Indeed. They could go with an anthology of seasons style show, however, if Mike Judge is up for it. New start ups with new seasons, with the occasional throwbacks perhaps.
I've seen a few shows go through this kind of death phase, and have always been curious about the internal writing dynamics that leads the team towards these bite sized episodes without an overarching story line of interest. Especially because it seems like such a staple of good shows to have an overarching story, then a few concurrent story lines, with a final dose of single episode dynamics. I'd think they have to know they are breaking away from an established successful formula and instead trending towards the show being cancelled, I just wonder if its on purpose, or they just can't get the good writers back, producers meddling, or what.
Because they want to force the content on you. It's not the goal that you can choose to enjoy TikTok-like short videos. You can already do that. They want to mix the videos into your feed so that you get caught in the net, like they already do on their app.
It’s likely that very few Reddit actually users want short form video. And that the acquisition was mostly for the user base which they then tried desperately to hold on to.
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
And it's harder to block ads/sponsored content. And they can send annoying push notifications that lots of people don't know how to disable. Dark patterns all the way down.
I tried to official app recently, and while I did figure out how to remove ads using ReVanced, I don't think I managed to get the notifications I wanted (replies) without notifications I didn't want.
Where did you get the $50 million from? The actual amount seems to not have been disclosed and it sounds a bit low for the time and 200 million user base.
> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
Using tiktok without the app is also an interesting experience. I was perfectly happy with the mobile website, but they recently started limiting how many results you can see and putting more "install the app" banners up.
Its going to tank but for a different reason -- because like Coinbase, Robinhood, and other hyped stock listings, all the insiders are going to dump shares on the unsuspecting retail public. I imagine day 1 of trading will be the highest the stock ever gets.
Lol, good luck doing that during a recession, and after pissing users off. They might have tricked me into buying it before this fiasco, but definitely they lost me now.
For Reddit to go public they have to submit a financial disclosure known as the S-1. This will give the public an idea of Reddit's finances and business model.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
> 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
No because it is a different thing. US black population has their own distinct culture (grown out of a shared struggle and history) that simply does not exist for the group that people call 'white'. In this case black teens isn't just pointing at skin color but at culture, one that is very valuable for the VC crowd because it's where cool stuff originates.
> one that is very valuable for the VC crowd because it's where cool stuff originates.
Still sounds racist, in its way. As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
Later edit: Reminds me of this Dave Chapelle skit [1], the part with the "white dude" whispering:
> Oh, my God, I think those black guys are gonna try to save us
> As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
That's a good question and if you're sincerely interested in understanding the answer, there's a long history of thought on the topic of black excellence in the context of racial oppression. You could start with W.E.B. Du Bois and the "Talented Tenth"
For the record, I'm assuming your questions are disingenuous, but answering in good faith for other readers who might interested.
Found it funny that one of the establishment's darling magazines, I'm talking about Foreign Affairs, has started doing the token racial thing when it comes to Du Bois by finding out that he had, indeed, written for them 70 to 80 years ago [1], and in the May/June issue they even re-published a July 1943 piece of his. No mention of his communism, of course, that would defeat the purpose of talking about race without really looking at what stands behind race.
Is that as cool for investors? I would imagine, for better or worse, being black correlated with being poor, and therefore black userbase is less valuable then white for ad serving purposes.
You're missing why this would be important. It's cool for investors because the black user base draws in a bunch of other people along with them. It's also not about people saying "omg black people, I must be there!" Culturally, historically, in the USA, black culture has set a bunch of trends. See NBA, NFL, hip-hop/music, comedians, dance, etc.
Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc.
Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
The fact that hip-hop originated from the black community and got big (you might want to read on how exactly it got big) doesn't really translate to a marketing/talent scouting strategy going forward.
You could shoehorn K-Pop like that too, quick somebody buy Kakaotalk for a ridiculous amount!
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. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
While I do not agree with the trend, especially how it's currently going, I think this is how Reddit leadership (and many other C-level/PM people of other brands like YouTube) view it: the site isn't a place to choose what to see, it's a consume consume consume kind of thing.
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
That's not the attractive part of TikTok-style feeds for business leadership: it requires you to engage with exactly one thing at a time. And you don't decide what that one thing is, and they can make it an ad.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
I'm always surprised by the sheer amount of ads on Instagram. TikTok barely shows me any ads, even through prolonged periods of me using the app. Using Instagram is pain with the constant amount of identical ads being shoved down the pipeline.
This would make me suspicious, and my first assumption would be that the ads are hidden as fake content. On reddit it's quite obvious, when there's yet another /r/funny post about some (for example) "funny" Coke bottle thing or some other brand. Lots of those kinds of posts, actually. Also a lot of quite obvious fake engagement-encouraging posts, such as the many question reddits with thread-creating questions (/r/AskReddit comes to mind, a large subreddit also shown on the frontpage when I'm not logged in) that even look and sound like they were planned and designed (and they all have a similar vibe, as if coming from the same source).
Modern ads are not the obvious type that are marked as such. It's more like product placement and a bunch of other less obvious methods.
They're either hidden extremely well, I'm oblivious to them or they're not there as much I'd say.
Most of the things I get on TikTok are, I would argue, genuine content that someone made because they wanted to or is following along a trend that is ongoing. I don't get a lot of people showing off a product, and often when they do it's for stuff I'm interested in and I'm already following them for.
Perhaps its a matter of diversity. Instagram feels very monotone in its ads: bottom barrel mobile games or brands trying to sell me their garbage I don't need nor would be interested in. TikTok on the other hand feels less monotonous in what I get shown.
I’m almost positive that Instagram also has those sort of embedded promotions/ads, which are generally done outside of the official platform. But they also have a metric shitton of actual ads, within their own platform, that they queued up.
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.
Right, but actually I chose the job I'm doing now because I believe it's good for the world. I've put a lot of hard work into bootstrapping a renewable tech company, and made sacrifices to do so. That's why I felt annoyed at the implication.
"Vote with your feet" is probably a more realistic strategy for enacting this kind of change, so to deny that there are software jobs that are not part of the problem is a bit defeatist. I'd be all in favour of a general strike on building adtech, though I personally couldn't participate.
I've been wondering if I'm in some experiment sometime as well. Sometimes my r/popular will be filled with content from niche subreddits I don't follow with barely any upvotes. The content is generally bad. Seems like a failed attempt at a "for you" page (and then I would just have browsed my own frontpage with subs I follow..)
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
I want both. I want the old.reddit.com UI, but I would like to have algorithm curated feed. I am sick and tired of all the USA politics on there. I've added a lot of the political subreddits to my filters, but that just means sometimes when I browse r/all I just get a blank page since every single post on that page was from political subreddit.
> It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
They do – there is a beta option in preferences that is unticked by default that lets you opt into experiments. However it seems to me they just kinda forgot about it?
I've subscribed to the beta experiments years ago, before the dark patterns started emerging and I was actually looking forward to any changes, and you're absolutely right, it is totally abandoned. The subreddit has just become a place for people to vent their frustrations and to be completely ignored by the admins.
Doesn't make it appropriate at all but since they're testing "will the average user put up with this crap" restricting to just people who went out of their way to go into settings and enable labs would yield really biased results.
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
I mean the other way around. Sure, bully your users by default but let them opt out via a somewhat hidden setting. If they use the setting instead of installing the app you have your result.
It's still not quite what the experiment is designed to test. How many people who opt out when given the ability would stick around when not given the ability?
If they make opting out difficult (ie. You go to a page in settings that you have to directly link to because you’re “signed out” in the main app) then that wouldn’t skew the results that significantly, while still providing an escape hatch that isn’t “wait for this to be finished”.
I get wanting to test the hypothesis that disabling logged-in mobile web will drive app downloads, but the user experience a critical flow you used to use went a way for no apparent reason, and workarounds also went away. It would feel like you're going crazy or your device/IP got banned, somehow.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private and shocked at some napkin math of how many total subscribers are affected.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.
Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.
>Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.
No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.
Why couldn’t the third party apps just ask the user to provide their own api key?
It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?
That is how it worked already, apps made requests through the users OAuth creds and rate limits were specified by unique OAuth cred and App combo. The new system is just each app having global rate limits, after which they have to pay. Getting an API key requires submitting a written application to reddit and seemingly precludes "I want to use a third party app".
I wouldn't say unique, r/bayarea has been a dumpster fire for a long time now. r/sanfrancisco followed suit a few years after that. I won't miss the toxicity they bring to Bay Area discourse at all.
The Reddit API changes are hyper-focused on killing 3rd party mobile apps.
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
Those 3rd party apps have mod tools built in that have been requested for years by moderators and never implemented by reddit.
The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.
“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.
Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?
I'm mostly worried about how long this can last and whether it will have the intended effect. It's a huge community rallying point but Reddit has clearly shown it does not care about the community's opinion.
> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
Counting subreddits is meaningless as a stock percentage. For example, there are millions of subreddits, but only 150k or so even have any activity at all. A small percentage of those are responsible for most activity.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
It may only be <1%, but many, many subreddits are barren, unmoderated, entirely inactive wastelands. I would assume that if you only consider subreddits with actual content being regularly posted, the percentage is significantly higher.
I assume this comes in addition to "reminding" me multiple times a day, sometimes when I click a link, sometimes seemingly on a timer loop while I am just reading, that they have an app?
Yes. I tried the app. The app is better not because it is good but because they deliberately break the web.
Also the app seems to eat battery and I am planning on charging my new iPhone 14 twice a day to use it or jump through hoops to figure out if it is anything I do wrong.
Between this and the community blackouts I am leaving for now.
I left Twitter a few months ago (including Nitter) and my stress levels have been lower since that. I guess the same will happen after I leave reddit.
Edit: It also seems to me the fediverse is picking up steam quickly now. The number of lemmy instances and lemmy users seems to have exploded recently: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
I am a user of the official Reddit app, even though it sucks, and I just deleted it. As an “experiment”.
I’ll probably come back at some point, because I do like being in touch with some of the subreddits.
But I’ll see how Reddit-free life feels for a bit. I find it really offensive that they can have such a trash UX in their app and then shut down the other apps.
The Reddit UI has always felt really hostile, which is fine… I just chalk it up to incompetence. But shutting out people who are more competent just feels way off.
> But I’ll see how Reddit-free life feels for a bit.
If you're anything like me, then it feels more productive and less addicting. Turns out the longer I do without it, the less connected to it I feel, the less compelled to go back and participate some more. And I feel better using the wasted time to do something more useful with my life.
I turn off HN periodically for the same reason, when I feel like it's becoming too much.
Well there goes the last social site I was engaged with, other than this one. I just don't get it when a business decides to declare war in its users. I'll miss the 3D printing subreddit, oh well.
Since the redesign they shifted their focus on images, and well, I don't have any hobby best communicated by images. So, lately I have been only looking at the joke subs.
I unsubscribed from the 3D printing sub a while ago, because the good stuff didn't get upvotes, because they were not images, so nothing good would make into my home page.
So many of the subs I used to follow or would use for reference have become a dumpster fire of consumeristic box shots.
pcmasterrace is basically just "check out this pile of boxes of expensive stuff."
The home server / selfhosted subreddits are endless pictures of a wifi router, 2-bay NAS, and a small form factor PC sitting on a shelf (and in the case of the selfhosted subreddit, also screenshots of people's web dashboards for their home server which is almost entirely torrenting / media related.)
My local area subreddit is almost entirely photos of scenery, with little in the way of anything of substance like news or politics.
IMO, the cool stuff was things like somebody coming with a question like "oh, what is the best way to add a filament spooler on a Prussa i3?" and an endless discussion of the current possibilities with pros and cons appearing on the comments.
Today, the closest you could ever get is somebody posting a picture of the support they made for their spooler, and people talking about this one design. What is much worse.
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.
I blame Reddit's leadership for bad decision making. They have basically decided to apply every known dark and anti pattern.
I remember when they started using those annoying pop ups to ask people if they want to rather use the official app or continue. Then suddenly for some links only the Reddit app would work. Nowadays I try to avoid clicking on Reddit links when I am on mobile.
The incredible thing is that this is an "experiment", not a policy. As an experiment they're ready to harass and alien X percentage of their users? Amazing.
Also, the answer theoretically should be right below the question 'cause it's most relevant but I can see how no one could bring themselves to upvote this.
Yes, despite assuming that old.reddit.com was static, it doesn't seem to be. Periodically they tweak something about it and break it a little more. Trying to convince people to stop using it I guess.
I stopped using Reddit for a few weeks because of this. I use Reddit almost exclusively on my phone and I don’t need nor want to download a separate web browser just for one site.
But then one day I checked out of habit and I was back in.
But if they want to “ban” me from the site because I visit with my phone’s browser, so be it. Honestly they’d probably be doing me a favor. But I’m not downloading the stupid app.
Screen Time on iOS/macOS lets you override the clock but in a “snooze” style. It blocks me from habitually browsing the front page but lets me land there from search.
The Reddit official app only reflect the poor quality of management of Reddit: completely bad designed app, only your competitor could approve this. The web experience is much better. It is the case when you think nobody knows where Reddit is going.
Right, which is why they should shut down the web site and instead force users to install an app (including on PCs). If they believe that strongly in users being required to use an official app, they should force this everywhere.
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 great experience and Discord is miles ahead with their UX and people seem to love it.
There's so many places you could take your community that aren't another VC-backed SV startup well on its way to trying to be the next TikTok or whatever (see the Discord username change fiasco).
Try Discourse, or Zulip (disclaimer: I used to work there), or Mastodon, or spin up your own forum using any number of self-hostable solutions. Try anything but Discord. Future you will thank you when Discord is the one in the news some future day.
I dislike how sync Discord is, too. I mean, I don't have time to sit here and chat with people for hours. That is why I'm on HN and Reddit. I read, give it a thought, post some good comments (plus a couple of shitposts) and then I get off my computer. I come back later to check on my responses.
Discord just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to scroll through hours of chat, and I'm not going to sit there and watch the chat rehash the same discussion people had hours ago.
I have things to do... kids to take care of, a house to clean, groceries, dinner, places to go, etc.
If Discord tacks on a layer of forum-like discussions besides the chat... It might take over a chunk of current reddit-focused communities.
At least for me, personally, that would supply the only thing I still use Reddit for, some of my hobbies have communities on Reddit + Discord and I participate in both, if Discord provided a discussion board to allow a more asynchronous communication I would ditch Reddit completely.
It seems to have something like this. I'm in the CloudFlare community Discord and there seem to be some channels which are message boards. Crappy message boards, though. Just like Slack with threads, I haven't seen evidence of a chat platform adding meaningful async communication that doesn't feel tacked-on.
I'm considering them now. I tried kbin yesterday and it seemed very slow. I doubt I'll be able to get enough of a critical mass to make it work but it might be worth a shot. Certainly a torrent like forum system is nicer than yet another walled garden.
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...
Chances are, the investment bank looked at Reddit's financials and said "Here's the IPO price we can hit", and Reddit's execs realized it would be well below the amount they thought their stocks option packages would be worth.
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.
But that comes at the great long term expense of alienating some of Reddit's most prolific users.
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.
Yes, they did. The reddit frontend on mobile is total garbage and actively user hostile.
Recently, they decided to move you to an absolute blank screen after login. Nothing is happening. You have to activate "desktop mode" before the page loads. Or you have to open a subreddit directly and click on the "Home" button afterwards. It's a joke.
The chat is a nightmare as well. Now you have the legacy and the new chat tabs. As a user, there is no notable difference between those two. I was able to pop out the chat in previous versions into an own window. They removed the button to do that, but it still appears sometimes.
Like many or most of us, I've long been annoyed by Reddit's nagspam to install the app or just use a browser (on mobile). It's annoying, particularly because the app is shitty. As others have said, the browser experience is just significantly better (eg tabs, pinch-to-zoom).
Forcing you into the app is next level.
I'm surprised some have put them in the same boat as Tiktok. Compare the logged out mobile Web experience of clicking on a Tiktok link to, say, Instagram and then get back to me. Tiktok just works and plays the video. IG nags you to login. And the page is slow to load. Like how IG Reels expects to be aserious Tiktok competitor is completely beyond me.
But we're doomed to repeat this pattern with Reddit and whatever eventually succeeds it:
1. Company creates app/website for users to create content;
2. Users create content. The company does everything it can to create hypergrowth;
3. At some point the owners decide to extract value from the user-generated content through ads, selling information, etc. It's easier to monetize an app than a website so you'll get nagged (and eventually forced) into installing the app;
4. There will be cries of protest. Comapny will mollify its users by partially backpedalling;
5. It'll quietly just roll forward with the changes months later after users have accepted the partial changes from (4);
6. Go to (3).
At some point the site turns into Myspace, Geocities, Experts Exchange, etc and users eventually leave and the cycle repeats itself.
I deleted reddit account week ago. It's just time sink without any value:
- It's true that some hobby specific subreddits have wealth of information. But it's just occasional view of such subreddit and "sort by top". New posts are 99% attention seeking posts without value, even on good subreddits
- Besides the above, 99% of reddit is political virtue signalling, memes, karma farming
HN is like a subreddit anyway. There are subreddits that good enough and worth it , but many of the mainstream ones are destroyed by politics. The remaining ones are still one of the best places on the net though
Indeed, time is little and precious and should be spent wisely. Very virtuous of you.
> hobby specific subreddits have wealth of information
Ah the virtue of doing hobbies
> New posts are 99% attention seeking posts without value
Only the most virtuous of us completely avoid the trap of attention seeking, well done.
> political virtue signalling
Ah the biggest virtue of all, avoiding virtue-signalling. You've really tapped into the big one here, well done and thank you for letting us know that you're not some filthy virtue-signaller.
This whole thing has felt like the other person in an unhealthy relationship ending things. Maybe a little painful at first, but very obviously, and immediately so, for the best.
I guess you can get karma here? But it is not as if anyone is attempting to build communities on the HN platform. I'm not even generating worthwhile content, let alone doing tens or hundreds of hours a month of free moderating. I don't think it is the same at all.
EDIT: Forgive me, I’m cranky. Of course the communities resting on Reddit’s beach are themselves the castles. I’m so tunnel-visioned on the API aspect that only used that lens.
The sandcastles are the communities built around subreddits. The subreddits are on a corporately owned beach, the owners are building a mall, and the sandcastles are in the way.
Lots of sites a/b things, but it seems that when PMs start aggressively a/bing the core experience to the point of breaking the user journey and against just general common sense it points to a bigger product issue... i.e. "this is data driven and if we can uptick this KPI by x%", but isolated from any kind of coherent wider product vision.
It's surprisingly easy to kill a product through a series small isolated 'improvements'.
For instance, FB a/b a lot but I can't remember the last time it broke the ability to go to someone's profile entirely.
I didn't think of it like that, but you're totally right. And they didn't even let the user know this is what was happening. That's how ashamed they are of the change- not like "hey, user who is used to being logged in, we're trying something new and we hope you like it!" Just... hope they don't notice, or just use the app like a good little piggy?
In Zuck's interview with Lex he was talking about a text-based social media platform they Meta has been experimenting with recently. This would be a great time for them to try to acquire users
Every company will get this desperate at some point. Everyone has shareholders none is driven by any other mission statement but to maximize profits year over year.
Wondering what will happen when Google comes to that point. Or Microsoft.
Microsoft is already putting ads in a paid operating system.
What is worse about MS is that some of their designers and project managers admit they dont even use their own products - so they dont see how bad they become.
When you keep selecting people for an specific behavior, you get a population biased towards that behavior. If you suddenly decide you want something else, then you have a problem.
Apple people are a weird cult to me. I think Apple is happy to have a subset of customers willing to pay exorbitant prices, and fine with a large chunk of people (like me) who won't buy any of their products.
If Apple one day said they were pulling the plug on macOS and force-installed Windows on everyone’s computer, people would complain! That’s the level of user-hostile disruption we’re dealing with here.
That reminds me of the butterfly keyboard. Many were in the habit of buying macs with working keyboards and they took the working keyboard from us in order to get a thinner keyboard.
In a sense releasing things like they have is testing. It just doesn't seem like tests because they haven't had to pull anything back. They should have had to though. If people heeded Stallman's warnings, nobody would have continued to support Apple after they launched the iPhone without third party apps (other phones had them) or when they launched third party apps with no sideloading. The world would be much better for it.
I think this latest profit-driven crap made me finally switch to HN as a 'main' platform for news. I'll miss /r/machinelearning, but posts here are like a combination of programming + ml so, I guess that's fine.
I think that trying to see the the decision from the point view of Reddit is the very first step towards a meaningful discussion about the issue.
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?
Until users understand their value. Companies will treat them like aholes.
If companies break your trust make them suffer. Leave. Find alternative or build them.
Any user who continues to use a platform and keep getting treated like a ahole deserves it. Look at recent netflix flip on password sharing, users rewarded them by giving them more subscriptions instead of leaving and finding alternatives.
Reddit has been around for 15 years and never made one red cent of profit. Maybe it's companies that don't understand that there is not much money to be made on discussion websites. It's not like there are any reddit influencers signing multi-million dollar brand deals for doing a popular dance.
If users want to make a statement and move away from Reddit, where should they move to? What’s an alternative to reddit that is closer to the original reddit?
Sidenote: could the 3rd reddit party clients embrace such an alternative and give it a meaningful boost in usage?
I just used shreddit to wipe out all my comments and posts. It actually felt quite liberating. Then I did the same thing on Imgur using Redact. Now I'm contemplating doing the same thing on every other site ;-)
I would be fine with the App if I could simply set my subreddits I want to follow.
Instead they force suggestions. I don't want Reddit politics ever ever ever. I subscribed to sdnsfw, I don't want other nsfw boards, I wanted stable diffusion only. They have a juicy controversial topic that drives me crazy, show me so I can waste hours commenting, no please don't.
You literally can't get rid of these. Or at least it was not clear.
I don't use reddit because I like being addicted. I used reddit because they had niche info.
I'm used to website ( often old.reddit.com because it is more readable ).
Last year, when I tried the app, it asked if I was happy about it very often. It becomes annoying to skip this question. I tried to answer "No": I felt my answer got lost in a confusing procedure. I never tried to choose "Yes", but I guess it would have led me to the notation on Google Play?
I have bad news for you, Narwhal and other apps will all stop working after this month. That’s the reason for the current protest. Here are recent articles:
Reddit is eating itself alive. The Discord for a couple of subreddits I was in have exploded in growth and participation due to the API nonsense, and the users are finding out that it's more fun and useful to actually engage live with other like-minded people, and are simply not going back to Reddit.
Why is it so important for Reddit to get you on the app? A daily active user is the same, you can still serve apps, still control your UX and still track.
I’m sure they lose more users by throwing up the banner to people who can’t be bothered or don’t want to download the app.
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using the app you would get it. You are instantly under their control and they show you what they want to show you and what they are paid to show you. I’ve tried many times and it is always a miserable experience and a quick uninstall.
For me to install yet another app just to read (I rarely post) on an internet web forum, the experience via the app would have to be dramatically better. “Never say never” but I find it hard to imagine how much better it would have to be.
In a word, no, at least not for me (ymmv; it's reddit we're talking about) I use the mobile site daily (until the blackout), shows me as logged in, never had any issues
I reckon in the coming months we'll see a statement from the CEO 'I take full responsibility' - by which time, it will probably be a bit too late to recover.
I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism kills all interesting social media for me. The founders build something. It's pretty good. I engage. They decide they need to make more money. They make a change that I find annoying or unacceptable. I leave the platform.
Facebook, Twitter, .... now reddit? Might be.
And it's never advertisement. Advertise away. It's usually one of two things: encroaching on privacy or pushing "engagement." I'd have left reddit years ago except that I could opt out of the re-design.
IMO, we need some well funded and user focused non-profits to provide social media. Capitalism and the drive for growth is destroying these platforms from within.
Capitalism does not mandate growth, thats just pure investor greed. I hate capitalism as much as the next person but lets not forget its the greed that ruins it for everyone, not the basics of the system. I would acknowledge that it seems like capitalism actually facilitates greed more than other systems as it gives a single KPI to track what you have.
I'm sure it doesn't help. I'm convinced that is what caused Twitch to invest in heavy anti adblock. As each time streamers ran an add you'd have people in the Chat proliferating it so it was no surprise that they'd go after it.
However there is likely certainly more to it, as forcing users into applications provide much more control & analytics which can be profitable for companies.
On my iPad, this post appears as neatly formatted text in a nice font, centered on a white background with absolutely nothing else on the page. Not so much as a username or date (though it does say "by" on the line above).
There's also a little hamburger icon in the top left corner that does nothing if clicked. and a search icon that behaves the same.
It's... uncluttered and free of distraction, I guess.
I remember few forums I was in a long time back, and all of them went offline and all its content is gone, so yeah there would always be this risk with a user maintained forum.
I remember the weekly rotating "Covid in Russia" threads in /r/worldnews where people were cheering for more Russian deaths. Voicing objections didn't get you just shadowbanned, to maintain the illusion that everyone agrees that Russians need to die, it got you permabanned on multiple of the biggest subreddits. For voicing objections to this vile practice, my 8 year old account got permabanned from /r/worldnews, /r/movies, /r/pictures and another one I don't recall.
All my slavic friends working internationally are now trying to hide accents because people might think they were Russian and have them lose their contracts or mistreating them.
I have since broken off friendships with people proudly proclaiming they were redditors. In history "books" 200 years from now, such websites will be treated as the 21st centuries version of the hitler youth. If you're tolerating such behaviour or denying it's existence, you're supporting racism.
I'm wondering what I'll get here. Censorship or debate?
I can't decide how to feel about this. It's unrelated to the reddit access issue and very hard to believe (the "I got banned for saying it's bad to wish for covid to kill random citizens and multiple subreddits conspire against me" part, not the hiding accents part). At the same time, it sounds bad and I somehow don't expect malice from your side, just misunderstanding somewhere. So idk, I understand that it's hard to prove that this happened and that your version is the full story. I decided to just not vote on this post, but if you're wondering why people are voting this down (at least that's my expectation), I really don't think any one of them are of the opinion that random russians must die or something. Rather, I expect people find it either off topic or implausible or both.
Those threads were at the top of /r/worldnews for months. Each week the old one would be deleted and a new one posted. Everyone has seen them. Why are people pretending they weren't there? Because no one is going to admit they supported this or were the ones that looked the other way. Not even to themselves - they're the heroes of their own story. I understand the situation and why I'm downvoted - I wouldn't have posted it if I cared about HN points. I would feel worse if I hadn't made this post.
I believe you. And good for you. Now take that thought that made you unsubscribe from their default sub one step further and reevaluate if it's worth supporting such a company in any form.
Indeed. My recollection of similar threads at the time was not a celebration of Russian deaths, but a mockery of official Russian statistics that were claiming an implausibly low number of hospitalised and dead.
How I wish all those threads weren't all systematically deleted after one week, so we could delve into them right now, but they were, for some reason. And here's my anonymous word against yours. The celebration of Russian deaths started out as morbid innuendos. Example: "Oof, i really really hope not more Russians die, wink-wink. lmao". As time went on the comments became more open and more vile. No objecting voice was left in the threads, as they were cleaned by the free mods into a perfect echo chamber. A fake testament to how alone you are in opposing such thinking.
It was my experience that Reddit stopped caring about its users a long time ago. I am convinced that Reddit unofficial motto is: "Moderators own the place they operate and are free to do whatever they want with it". So it isn't a surprise that the admins think they can do whatever they want with the entire site.
For a less popular opinion, I don't sympathize at all with the reddit moderators who are up in arms about the API problem. They have had full, unfettered control of their subreddits where their power is near absolute and they enjoy pushing their own views and punishments on anyone they don't like. But now that a higher power is enforcing their rules on them, they cry oppression (see u/awkwardtheturtle and the moderators of r/art). It is pure hypocrisy and almost hilarious to me.
I know not all moderators are the same, but with the way reddit is designed, power is only exercised in one direction and power abuse is unavoidable. The very culture of reddit at its core is flawed now and I think it is funny that only now, when the higher caste of redditors, who are in the minority, started to get affected that we see some calls for action.
Isn't it like this at most places? Even here, where mob rule (the introverted ones hiding behind their downvote ability) oppresses contrarians?
You know, the best choice is not to do general socializing via web. Specialized discussions okay.
Spend your leisure time at a pub or similar places with the regulars. And bring a book in case you don't anyone meet up that day. So much more fun and relaxing than trying to argue with strangers or wrestling with mods.
>Isn't it like this at most places? Even here, where mob rule (the introverted ones hiding behind their downvote ability) oppresses contrarians?
To be fair Reddit has an additional issue:
Whoever is the top mod is based on seniority. This sort of system tends to attract basement dwellers with no social skills (even if those are essential for a good mod), who are there just for the power.
If you save the world and then fart once in public, nobody will remember you as "the hero that saved the world". You'll be forever remembered as Mr. Fartman. And the same applies to any group of people.
Being a mod doesn't make you a good mod, not even a good person; you're bound to have a few piece of shit moderators, like awkwardtheturtle, godofatheism, millionsofcats, bardfinn and the likes. And when you remember "the mods" you'll remember those farts, and end blaming the rather decent big majority, who silently does their mod duties for the best of their communities. I sympathise with _those_ moderators.
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".