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Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
1036 points by bears-n-beets on June 30, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 383 comments
I was actively using the app on my phone and it suddenly crashed at 4:10pm PDT. I thought it was just my phone acting up but then I realized that’s about 12am UTC. With the death of Apollo also goes the metaphorical death of all the best parts (IMO) of the internet: open-source, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit. Sad day. I guess I’ll go outside now.

Edit: sorry, Apollo wasn’t open source. That’s what happens when I make a post while two beers deep I guess. Hopefully you get the general spirit of what I was trying to convey.




I remember signing up for Reddit as a college freshman. I was a digg user and joined Reddit in the aftermath of that fiasco. I sometimes laugh looking over my post history for the past decade plus. If you read the posts linearly, you can trace my evolution from a kid arguing passionately over politics and culture (things he didn't really know much about), to a more mature young adult who rarely waded into discussions unless he had something meaningful to contribute. To me now, as a 31 year old man, who mainly posts on a few private subreddits full of likeminded people (and still occasionally gets into arguments about things he knows nothing about).

Until today I had not really mentally processed that Reddit as we knew it was going away. Until a hour or two ago I started get Rate Limits on Reddit Sync. At first I thought it was some kind of bug. Then noticed the date.

Like others mentioned, it will take some getting used to not having it. I've already noticed since the blackouts that "site:reddit.com" is less effective than it was even a month or two ago: some of the key subreddits I used have gone and stayed dark. I wish the owners of Reddit the best in turning their website into TikTok. But if I have need for mindless entertainment, I'll probably just use TikTok directly. The small communities of likeminded people are not as easy to replace, and will be missed.


If we’re having a wake…

I remember when I accidentally became a moderator of /r/science because they asked for variety of domain expertise and I’m a geographer and c’mon… nobody’s a geographer. It was a fun experience. Then became an educational one. Then frustrating. Then thankless. Then I stopped.

I’m happy for the lessons. I’m sad it died years ago.


I had totally forgotten that you had a flair showing your expertise. I did some computer vision stuff for a while. You wouldn’t recognize r/science of the early days though. Reddit is a completely different site.


r/science is now r/poorStudiesThatJustifyMyBeliefs


You aren’t kidding. Add r/Psychology to that list. It’s all bad social science studies now.

“Study Proves Republicans are Dumb”


I’m fairly certain that rephrased versions of “Study Proves Trump Voters have low IQ” are posted there just about weekly, and the rest is just psychedelic research.

It’s one of the laws of the internet: as the size of a community grows, the quality approaches a stadium full of drunk sweaty sports fans.


One of the reasons I hope hacker news stays relatively obscure. Fingers crossed


Agreed. I’ve definitely already noticed a significant decline in comment quality here since the Reddit debacle.


^^ Comments like this are low value. “Things are getting bad”. No proof or evidence.


Not just r/science. The hard part is that this logic applies also to "word/science" and to "world/society", and that this issue of belief confirmation will deepen until we learn to sufficiently value public good (knowledge discovery is a part of it) in our capitalist societies. Not easy... Unfortunately, it may take another World War for our societies to value public good more than we do currently. Call me a pessimist or give me reasons to think differently.


Im a systems engineer who works with 5 geographers, and a director who is a double PhD geographer. The geospatial engineering we do is a thing of art, and affects over 11 million people.

I get it!


Geographers are like wizards: there’s only so many of us at any one time. I’m amazed your company has amassed six!


Sounds very interesting, can you expand a bit more on what exactly your team does?


r/science went from being one of the highest quality places on the whole internet... to being like the rest of the internet


2015


You summed it up nicely. I followed a lot of tech stuff, and sci-fi, etc, stuff it’s hard to find on traditional social media. Following a tech Instagram will never be like seeing Netflix’s engineers posting to r/Kubernetes for an outage in the middle of the night.

And even if I wanted to keep using Reddit, a lot of brain drain has already happened, so it’s so much less useful already, and it really feels like one of my favorite tools is suddenly obsolete.


Thanks for sharing. I also joined reddit as a college freshman (2012). I don't even remember how I discovered reddit - I want to say maybe via StumbleUpon? My trajectory is pretty similar to yours. It's pretty surreal to have a community I actively participated in for my entire adult life essentially go dark in an instant. Of course the website still exists, but it certainly won't be the same.


Newsgroups > Yahoo Clubs > Yahoo Groups > Digg > Reddit > the next great "online community" good enough that you come to rely on it, which of course means enturdification is right around the corner, sure as turds.


Slashdot > Digg > Reddit > Hacker News


similar journey, but on two parallel paths

for tech/science discussions: slashdot > HN for entertainment: rss > reddit > ? (help)


Newsgroups > Yahoo Clubs > Yahoo Groups > Digg > Reddit

I recognise that journey!


Well said. Although one aspect that makes this both sadder and stranger is that we all watched Twitter do the same thing just a few months ago with awful results. Sure, the sites will still live for a long time, but the versions that existed as of last year are forever gone.


Don’t worry too much. It’s a cycle, new sites will appear to fill the gap and they will go through approximately the same evolution.


I joined Reddit almost 15 years ago, shortly before I became a freshman in high school. I mainly joined it to chat on r/programming back when that was one of the top subreddits. I was just starting out as a programmer and it was instrumental on teaching me the subject. It also taught me about life in general as a relatively sheltered introvert.

Fast forward 15 years, I now have a PhD largely due to the path that community helped set me on. You could follow a very similar journey of maturity for me through my Reddit history (and that’s the main reason I haven’t flushed my posts, even if I was an idiot at 14 that was my personal journey). The Reddit I joined changed a lot — we had characters like Bozarking and there was a strong libertarian element in contrast to today’s left leanings. I remember the Digg exodus changing Reddit fundamentally but not necessarily for the worse. The big subs declined by the niche ones blossomed and taught me much about my hobbies.

While I don’t expect to fully leave (Google will lead me there or I might have a question where I am not sure what other site has a pertinent community to ask), my use will decline 99% or more. I have long been aware a lot of Reddit has sucked but there was still a lot of value to be had. It’s also been apparent for years that Reddit, the company, has zero clue what users actually want (hint: it’s not 3 separate chat implementations, nfts, and profile pictures), however this open hostility towards the users and mods who volunteer their time (mods have had their problems but generally they are good, after all, you only notice the bad mods).

I won’t miss most of the absent scrolling I do on Reddit, but it also has been a bit like my childhood friend passing away. I am not sure what my online future will look like, but it will be strange without Reddit being there.


> r/programming back when that was one of the top subreddits.

It was also a default one, IIRC, and when I joined had far more activity than /r/funny. Pretty sure a lot of people were very upset when it stopped being a default.

I was teaching myself to code when I first encountered Reddit, and I followed the language hype on proggit as if it were gospel - I learned Common Lisp because proggit was giddy that Reddit was written in it at the time, and I subsequently learned about macros, and functional programming, and that Erik Naggum wants you to get off his damn lawn and stop asking dumb questions in comp.lang.lisp, then it was the Ruby hype, then Erlang, then Haskell etc.

All very interesting stuff to delve into, but yeah, I thought I'd never get a job programming if I was struggling with Haskell's type system, look at all the regular workaday coders on Reddit who're loving it! (I know, I know.)

That said, I really benefited from the Erlang hype period, the ideas in Erlang/OTP were very interesting indeed, even if I didn't quite understand what a finite state machine was, and what it was useful for, when trying to grok gen_fsm. But the actor model, the deliberate choice to treat failure as normal and build accordingly, that stuck with me all these years. Hell, I even ended up printing off Joe Armstrong's thesis to read on the bus to work.

Reddit was a great replacement for forums, especially for technical topics, IMO. But their "reopen the sub or else landed gentry" approach directly hurts tech communities, because the mods of a technical sub are often domain experts in the technology it's focused on, and a lot will disengage and move on.

At least, I know two of my fellow mods in a small technical sub have disengaged dramatically because of Reddit's approach, and they will be a massive loss to the sub.

But then, small tech subreddits aren't exactly a massive money-making market niche, so yeah. It is sad though.


The end of an era. I doubt a young person can emulate your growth by regularly using reddit now because how many meme and low effort inside jokes ones have to wade through before finding genuinely great and useful contents.


I joined my senior year of HS. My original account is 17 years old this year. I'll probably just continue to use old.reddit.com for a few niche time wasters on desktop, but the decline in quality is already apparent.

It's a damn fucking shame.


Narwhal has found a way to make it work, will be 2-7 a month. The pitchforks are up but I love Reddit as a community so I’m happy we have something.


As a Reddit user I'm a bit puzzled by these death or Reddit posts. I use Reddit by going to reddit.com with the old settings and it works just the same. Does the death of some third party app really matter? It would be like saying HN is gone because some 3rd party app on it that I've never heard of is gone. Honestly a bit puzzled.


The third party apps supported two important functions that the official Reddit app sucks at:

1) Reading assistance for people with sight impairment. Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though.

2) Moderation and Modmail. For people on the move, or, for example, where you're in front of a business PC or laptop all day, with Web restrictions or personal use policies. The mobile apps were extremely useful for moderation.

I did use the Boost app, but have moved to the official Reddit one for mod work; it's buggy and prone to erroring when trying to complete an action so you have to keep repeating things to make them 'stick'.

This is why the mods are up in arms because it's hard work at the best of times.


> Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though.

But with two major caveats. This is only for non-profit apps, which excludes almost all of them. For Android there is only RedReader now and for iOS there are Luna and Dystopia left.

And still without any NSFW content.


For some people access on their phones is important. Old reddit www is bad for that, New reddit is much worse. And Apollo was an extremely well thought out app, there's certain niceness in interacting with such products during your lazy moments.


Reddit was great for aimless scrolling, and its most recent incarnation was as close you could get to TikTok while still having text posts. Which meant that it got used the most while in the bathroom or while stuck somewhere - both phone uses.

I refuse to use the official app, and the new site crashes safari in the iOS beta, so Reddit is now dead to me. I’ve dropped by a couple of times but since the changes and blackout all of the good subs I follow are empty/dead. They lost me as a user.


If you want to feel the equivalent impact, try browsing old.reddit on a mobile device. They have actively bastardized and impeded readability in order to force people to the app. Also, NSFW is a entire feat to try and get loaded on a phone. Sometimes it just doesn't even give you an age prompt.

And to be honest, I think old.reddit is also on its way out. It's inevitable. So we're going to experience this shit storm all over again.


I have always used old.reddit on my phone. I use no other reddit client. Just checked it right now and it looks the same as always. If old.reddit.com goes, I'll definitely go too.

I support the protests so I'm trying to use reddit less for news and stuff. But for certain needs I'd scour forums for, since those forums no longer exist, I kind of need to check reddit for some stuff. Things related to my health and such.


I don't quite know how to put my finger on it, but in my mind Reddit died a couple of years ago. The site was still there, there was still content, but the soul seemed to have gone out of the place.


I can trace my earliest account to middle school. You can imagine the cringe on there...


If every Reddit user was tagged with their age, it would be an eye-opening experience. "Why is this 16-year-old talking about divorce lawyers on r/relationship_advice?"


> "Why is this 16-year-old talking about divorce lawyers on r/relationship_advice?"

The opposite has occurred and it wasn't very pretty to look at.


Huh? Divorce lawyers talking on r/teenagers about relationship advice?


https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/djdmd9/we_banned_all...

/r/drama banned people who posted in /r/teenagers and brought to surface a whole bundle of pedos


Talk about dark patterns. Reddit has disabled scrolling down on mobile devices. Well that ends my reddit usage.


Yeah, reddit has been mobile hostile for a few years now. Hope this forcing more users to the site reveals that.

Granted, I don't think anything will change, but complacency is the moment reddit truly dies.


A 16 year old with recently divorced parents probably has some reasonable insight there.


I think that is absolutely not true.


I remember seeing reddit on my coworker’s screen in 2010. The front page of the internet? Isn’t that slashdot… Oh but its for everything? Interesting!


I'm surprised that TikTok, YouTube, and Meta (via Facebook? Instagram? something new?) aren't trying harder to welcome exiles from Reddit and Twitter.


To most people outside of this bubble, nothing about Reddit has recently changed. At all.

Reports of Reddit’s death have been greatly exaggerated.


Joined reddit the second half of my freshman year of university in early 2008, after hearing about it from an XKCD comic on 4chan. It was during the democrat primaries (Hillary vs Obama) and between that and the science articles I was hooked.

It was not the only website of its kind, but it was the fastest for news updates and also had some content on other sites like it didn't (such as slashdot, which had the tech and science stuff but not much else). I would repost stuff to FB and managed to garner a decent amount of clout that way. It went along like that for some years but eventually reddit 'hit mainstream' and the content I reposted didn't get the same traction. At that time I remember thinking reddit wasn't "underground" anymore. I recall that thought occurring in 2012.

But that still didn't stop me from using it, except for a couple breaks it was my primary source of info and discussion and debate for many years, even to this day.

However I'm at a point though where I feel like I need to divorce myself from social media entirely (perhaps even HN). The 'debates' / discussions / etc feel as though they have run their course for me. It's like groundhog day where I feel like I've had the same interactions 1000 times over to the extent where I don't feel like it's worth the effort.

But at the same time living without social media makes my world feel much smaller. I only talk to a handful of people, my friend group has dwindled significantly, and adding new folks has become really difficult, even with sparse usage. I feel like I was so dependent on social media for so long to keep in touch with people that, now living without it, I have practically no social connections.

This has been exacerbated by my decision to live a sober life, free of any and all mind altering substances. Going out to a bar or music night loses most of its appeal without alcohol involved. Likewise for gaming without smoking. Between all this and no social media, my life has become really... Well, boring I guess. spend my days reading books, and going to the gym. It's more boring than it sounds. No social media also means no gigs and that's a bummer, may have to start looking for steady employment.

Anyway to stay on topic, I don't know what a world looks like without these things that have taken up so much of my life in the last 15+ years. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. I want to develop other hobbies but thus far the motivation I previously leveraged from caffeinated beverages has dried up as well. So I guess I can just wait and see, and try to remain optimistic.


By chance are you into sim racing? It’s just that your first paragraph is exactly my Reddit story, so maybe we have similar hobbies… haha.


My only note: state the year (and month if possible) in the first paragraph of a story like this.

It helps for readers now, and archaeologists later!


Consider r/redditseppuku


I'm going to press X to doubt.

Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the author's profile page. Almost inevitably, they've written a comment within the last week. This is a remarkable property for a social website to have, and it's not one that I see exhibited in other places, like StackOverflow or ancient vBulletin forums.

I'd like to think that this is finally Reddit's "Digg moment," but I am just not convinced. The boycott was over in 48 hours and everything is back to normal, but people are just complaining more. Heck, the commenter I linked to from 11 years ago also commented two hours ago, unsurprisingly, complaining about the API changes.

As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_gr...


Eh I think this will fundamentally change the site, almost like the inverse of the Digg exodus. A lot of us old school users are angry and done. The newer users that haven’t experienced a different social cycle of Reddit are the one are the ones upset that the mods are revolting. Over the last month, the quality of the front page has significantly dropped, and the remaining subs were heavily biased towards the ones that most recently rose to prominence (and have the most repeated / bland takes in the comments).

I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that


Three problems with your theory:

1. Deleted users aren't going to pop up as much

2. It's going to be highly dependent on your search history. I'm sure more technically minded people will be around more often than results found on news subs or some more specific hobbies.

3. Commenting last week doesn't mean they are a regular commenter. Many of those people IME comment much less frequently later on. Maybe from a daily commenter to a weekly or monthly one. They are around, but not as active.

>As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...

On a macro level, sure. I think anyone hoping for a sudden implosion was dreaming. But many are talking long term, a death by a million papercuts. There will be no one reason reddit dies.

Also, sample of one: I did in fact leave years ago. Still lurked w/o an account, but these actions caused me to try and replace nearly every community I have.

The main hole atm is a steady stream of gaming discussions. So i unfortunately may spend some 15 minutes browsing some niche gaming subs for certain news.


I have (had) a 9 year old Reddit account, that I unironically grew up with. I created it when I was 12 (sue me COPPA) to comment on a Cookie Clicker subreddit. I remember my cakeday, May 28, 2014.

It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016.

I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war.

I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments.

In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks.

So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that Reddit used to. I hope the future isn't as crap as I anticipate.

Rant over.


I’ve long used Apollo to hold an alt account.

I just downloaded the official app and logged in. In 3 minutes I deleted it.

Ignoring design issues, all of a sudden the official app grabbed ALL Reddit links and if I viewed Reddit in Safari there was an unremovable “Open in the app” banner above the Safari content that couldn’t be removed.

No way. Deleted.

The last year has just destroyed so much of the value I get out of the internet.


Apollo had an optional safari extension that caught Reddit URLs and opened them in Apollo instead. It was great.


And it worked flawlessly too. Apollo was really a cut above anything I’ve seen out there. Was holding out hope that Reddit would reverse course, but I suppose not.


I don’t blame Christian. Spez, on a whim, decided to basically destroy his livelihood, with basically no notice. Then Spez kept doubling down and accused Christian of extortion, repeating the accusations after it was proven they were false.

I would sell the app even if they reversed course. I wouldn’t trust they wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t trust they’d ruin me some other way.

If they had said “we’re doing this in 6 months” and then listened to the community, that’s different. But Spez burnt the bridge to the ground and poured toxic waste on it.


I'm not sure how much of a whim Reddit had.

A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.


NSFW content didn't show without an account for years. What's the difference between using the same account in the official app or on the website or third party apps?

Additionally one of the API changes which also goes is into effect is that they won't serve NSFW content on the paid API. So even if you pay you only get half of Reddit.


Hell, they could have banned all real NSFW content. Would have been a big deal, but wouldn’t have interfered with 3rd party apps or anything I use Reddit for.

Any NSFW stuff (due to laws, investments, advertisers, anything) had nothing to do with the API decision. They may have done them at the same time, but it wasn’t needed.


That or old.reddit is probably the next big schism in the making. The NSFW fiasco may cause some significant change if it ever does happen.


Classic correlation not being causation.


There's no possible way this is the cause. Like, at all. The simple sniff test is that blast radius of the passing of this law would be way way way larger than "reddit charges for API". We'd see many other sites follow suit with reddit.

IANAL but I'll put down $100 that this law has nothing to do with reddit's API changes. First person to prove me wrong gets it. I'd like a quote from spez that says, paraphrased "If Virginia didn't pass the law we wouldn't have started charging for the API".


https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

> Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.

…

They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.

Not for usage, but value.


> They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.

Counter argument: it’s not their data to charge for. And if they want to claim it is their data then they should be held accountable for the content therein.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t recoup costs for access to said data. You do after all pay taxes and get access to local libraries and archives. But they shouldn’t be extorting third-party developers.


I agree.

They built a platform so that we could create communities and manage them how we want to.

We posted information. We created content. We exchanged ideas, had discussions, and we all helped each other.

I’m fine with them recouping their costs. I’m fine with them even making a bit off of it. However,

> I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

…

> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.

My understanding is that Christian is grandfathered into an older plan on Imgur. Having said that, the Mega plan is $10,000 per month for 150,000,000 requests. If we use this pricing, 50,000,000 api calls is $3,333.34 (vs Reddit’s $12,000)

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...

https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing


The announcements that they were going to charge for API access was in April. https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates . Mature content being restricted was mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r... and in https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe... it was stated that Imgur also banned sexually explicit uploads the same day.

While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th.

The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th.

---

I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."


> I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."

I do agree with you here - Virginia's mature content law probably had something to do with NSFW content in the API. The API pricing was just poor decision making occurring at the same time. (Apologies if my previous comment was a little unkind).


I don't see how that could be related to reddit charging for their API.


How is that solved by charging for the API?


It makes it much easier to pass liability around and argue that the 3rd party app, with access to location services can verify if the person is in Virginia or not. If they aren't upholding the age verification law, you've got a credit card account tied with an individual or company that the person suing can be pointed to.


They didn’t even have to reverse course for this to work out. Just give a reasonable runway before beginning to charge for the API (to give third party clients enough time to adjust their subscription customers who may have just paid for a year), and charge a reasonable price.

Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.

I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.


Why are the apps being charged for api access and not the people using them?


Reddit never intended for anyone to pay for API access, that's why the costs were so high. The intent all along was to kill all third party apps through unreasonable pricing of API access so they could funnel users to the official app and inundate them with extremely intrusive ads.

If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).

This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.

They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.


The premium account holders don't see ads in reddit. All Reddit had to do was require premium accounts for users that wanted to use 3rd party apps. If you want to keep using yoru 3rd party app, then sign up and pay or shut up and go home.

It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.


I think it's just a play to bump up their in-app DAU for increased IPO valuation. Fuck the users, all about the short term gains. I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit


> I'm curious what the percentage of people accessing the site via the official app vs all other avenues was before all this shit

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.

> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...


I can't think of any software that the end-user pays API fees or even supplies their own API key/token. I've only ever needed to supply that when interacting with APIs directly in a developer setting. That, or open-source projects that require API access from some 3rd party.


I recall a fairly brief period a few years back where Twitter rate limited 3rd party API keys so heavily the apps basically stopped working... so some apps just put a feature in to input your own API key which you could get for free as a developer key at the time.


Spotify does. Can't use any 3rd party apps without having a premium account.


Reddit could of done the same. Reddit subscription for your account that a 3rd party like apollo can use.


Passing it on to the users wouldn't have required billing by API key, just gate at authentication instead.

Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.


That was a nice feature, but there are other apps that do this without consent and I don't like it. For example, if you have the NY Times app installed and tap on a link in Safari that leads to a NY Times article, it automatically opens it in the NY Times app. iOS has no user controls for this behavior. The only way around it is to long-press on the link and pick "open in new tab", or uninstall the app.


  > iOS has no user controls for this behavior
Actually, it does but they are shockingly unintuitive and hidden. The best way to change your preference among supported link handlers is to copy a URL, paste it into the notes app, then long press that link and choose “open with” either safari or your preferred app. That will stick until the next time you long press a link in this way.

An iOS developer for JIRA taught me this when I submitted feedback that the JIRA app suddenly stopped intercepting links (probably because I had inadvertently long-pressed to open a link in safari, not knowing I was setting a preference by doing so)


Woah! Is there any other way to do this or any way to do it directly from Safari?


Other apps with text boxes besides notes can do the same, but safari specifically can’t. Why, I haven’t the faintest idea.


Not the parent but I’m 99% sure there is no other way.


I kept it tuned off since I used it for my alt account and usually just wanted to use the web version.

I see why it’s useful. But I couldn’t find a way to turn it off so it was messing with my normal workflow.


Yup, their own app makes Reddit unusable. Thing is, even if their app was great I'd still not use it. I can't stand being in someone's walled garden force fed content like Clockwork Orange.


old.reddit.com is somehow still a better mobile Safari experience than the new Reddit site.


You can install "Sink it for Reddit" to remove that obnoxious "pretty please install our app." banner. It also does other stuff to make their mobile website not as bad, but it still isn't a great experience.


RIP Bacon Reader.

Reddit, you’ve burned so much goodwill.

I’ve been an enthusiastic user for over 14 years. Now I’m planning to delete my content.

At one point recently, I got excited about applying for an engineering leadership position with you, but this debacle has made me realize your senior leadership is not who I want to be reporting to.


What I'll miss most from BaconReader is the Android widgets, which as far as I can tell, are not available through either the official app or anything else.

It was super convenient to be able to display a sub or /r/all on my phone's home pages, and I used it every day to keep up with current events or my favorite hobbies without needing to open any apps. For many years that's been a core part of how I use my phone, and I will sorely miss it :(

If Reddit someday added something as nice as BaconReader's widgets to their app I might give it a shot. But looking at the design they used for their iOS app, which apparently does have a widget, I don't have high hopes for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/kdycmj/introduci...).

Other than that, no plans to use Reddit on mobile anymore. One less bad habit, I guess.


Apollo had a slew of widgets for a variety of use cases. In fact the Apollo dev was quick to jump on many of the new ios APIs and had many nifty little features that will never make it to the official app.

Guess it’s all a moot point by now.


Use a GDPR delete request, otherwise your content will resurface after a while.


How?


Reddit has been quietly undeleting content in the last few weeks.


No, it hasn't. Their software is just shit, and it lets you access only the last 1k comments/posts on each view of a given collection (e.g. saved comments, posts on a given subreddit sorted by hot, your own comments sorted by new, your own comments sorted by best).

It also doesn't let you touch comments/posts that you cannot access - i.e, if you post on a subreddit, and it goes private, you won't be able to see, edit, or delete any of the comments on that subreddit unless it goes public again. They just won't appear in your history.

Put the two together, and it doesn't matter what kind of delete script you run: if you launch it on your /new page, it'll drop the last 1k comments, minus any comments made in subreddits that might still be private, and stop there. Older content, and content in subreddits that returned to being public after the fact, will still be around.


How to use a "GDPR delete request"?


Please don't delete it without adding it to the Internet archive first


Putting the content somewhere else defeats the whole purpose of deleting it.


not really, it'd be outside the garden wall, and thus not monetizable by reddit


Can reddit issue requests to archive or whichever site is used to do it and have them taken down ? Or worse yet, rebuild their deleted history from the archives and THEN issue takedowns? I am realizing I have no serious idea how archival of digital content works legally.


User-provided content is provided under a license between the user providing it and the site hosting it -- inherently, because otherwise the site wouldn't be allowed to do anything with it at all. Generally this takes the form of the site's ToS saying that the user gives the site a perpetual license to use the content however they want, but generally not an exclusive license.

As such, and I'm not a lawyer and can't promise this is true, I suspect that reddit couldn't actually do takedowns on someone who's archiving their user-provided content. Any specific user whose content was archived without their consent could do so, however.


When Reddit owns the delete button, they control what happens when you press it. There’s no need for them to rebuild their deleted history. It’s still there (even if it’s inaccessible to the world)


What is the whole purpose of deleting it? To me it seems to be to punish Reddit, so why does it need to be off the Internet entirely?


I tried Apollo early on and it was a bit too bare-bones.

After all the news, I gave it another whirl for the past month and it’s very nice. After previously using the official app, it was a breath of fresh air to see a native video player, native share sheets, and so much more. Super nice, useful details like image counts on galleries. Such a shame that Reddit’s huge team is actively working in the opposite direction.

Amazing work, Christian. Really unfortunate that Reddit has gone in this direction and truly shameful and disgusting how they’ve handled it.


There are so many small details that make Apollo such a well designed app. I definitely started to feel the UI could use an update / polish recently, but man, the UX was unreal.

Assorted highlights:

- Share post / comment as image. When sharing comment as image, you could specify how many parent comments to include in the image as well. Super useful. - The theme change shortcut (more common now, but I think apollo was one of the first apps I noticed it in) - you could change subreddit with one tap. Narwhal doesn’t have this and it’s so annoying. - unreal in-app media playback (including YouTube) - customizable swipe gestures - great comment editor - content filters - ability to hide subreddits in just a couple of taps - saved item categories

I’m done with Reddit on mobile devices. I’m actually quite happy to have a good reason to stop using Reddit, but I’m sad that such a well-designed app has just disappeared.


If you care about this stuff, please at least give the fediverse a try. Yes it's inadequate right now in all kinds of ways. But the main reason is that not enough people are there. It needs critical mass.

Pick whatever you want - kbin, lemmy, mastodon. Go there, find your community (it will probably look very sad compared to Reddit). And contribute something positive - comment, post, whatever. If everybody just did that, we would kickstart something durable that couldn't be destroyed and take back the internet that everybody is pining for.


That's the thing - what I like about reddit is that every single community is right there. I don't need to figure out a new complex system. It's a megaforum with every single subniche you can think of, without having to go to any other site or any other server

I want a centralized megaforum. I don't care about federation or what technology it uses. I just want easy access to everything


This seems to be a very common sentiment that is not stated that clearly often, but it makes me very sad to read it.

The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.

Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.


I think it's correlated to the failure of search engines.

There is no way to discover content anymore, long gone are the days where some expert's blog would appear prominently when searching a topic. Now all the results are people trying to sell you something. Reddit has replaced google (more or less) for a lot of people.

The only functional search engine nowadays is marginalia.


This is exactly the issue. Search is useless, just like Amazon is useless.

5 years ago even the internet as a whole at least felt functional. Today everything feels like a giant scam.


Yeah, I Don't get it personally. People are seeing the results of Reddit and their thoughts still remain: "yea I want all my eggs in one basket". I appreciated that when one forum shut down it didn't take out my entire means a of communication. That if a big forum shut down it wasn't the only big forum for a given community. I Don't know what changed for people to not value that variety, that redundancy.

Also, don't know why no one remembers RSS feeds if they want an aggregator anyway. Even Reddit and YouTube have RSS protocols (for now). I never used them but it's nifty for the best of both worlds.


The problem is that as the Internet has advanced and filled every aspect of our lives, the average technological literacy of users has fallen off a cliff. I understand that in every aspect of life you cannot and will not care about being fully literate with everything, for instance most car owners are not mechanics, but that literacy used to be a requirement for access. I speak as someone who experienced the tail end, and thus one of the lowest bars of entry, but I still had to work to find things. I had to tinker with IRC clients, with port forwarding torrents for my Linux ISOs, for self-hosting servers for me and my friends. To find new communities was a mix of Google plus word of mouth, and took a bit of effort, but that effort was okay. It made finding and joining them more special. If I just click a “subscribe” button then it’s not as interesting to me. Not to mention by making the barrier of entry so low, it means the barrier of quality is lower too.


Preface: I'd like for the fediverse to win, active on both mastodon, and reading lemmy; however, economies of scale in the present Internet does not favor that outcome:

* What we want is high signal/noise ratio.

* In the magic old internet, the bar for signal was relatively low, because it competed with books, and TV.

* The competition over attention has raised the bar over what "good content" looks like.

* Content like that don't materialize out of thin air, but needs an audience to keep it alive, and to grow, and select, and feedback

* The re-fragmentation of internet communities risks loss of economies of scale for the content creators to create or maintain high-quality gems.

Let's take something specific, say furry artists. Their content loop for reddit was: post cute pics on r/furry, if it hits quality bar, gets upvoted, and seen by ~1000s of people; 0.1% of those will commission a new drawing, draw the thing, get paid, post it on reddit, close the loop.

In a re-fragmented Internet: 1, a lot less people will be able to find those "gem forums" focused around a topic, and they won't browse it daily; and 2, the artist needs to spam their stuff to all the communities to get the fraction of traffic they have on reddit.

The outcome from this re-fragmentation _in our present time_ will be the "hallowing of the middle", the "hobbyists scaling towards professional", and people who are just really into the thing, and make some money on the side. In a re-fragmented Internet, you are either a fully professional -with competent marketing team- or you're doing it for the ~20 people sharing the same forum.

I understand that many people are expressing explicit preferences for there to be only that 20 people they chat with, or only the hobbyist / geeks to participate and _I'm happy for them_. What I'm claiming above, is that this will kick the professional ladder out for upcoming people to build - show - get attention for their stuff. And that creates a less magical Internet.


If reddit was the only, or even best place for that I may agree. But reddit isn't Twitter, and in fact many rdddit circles detest OC despite also complaining about rampant reposts.

Ofc you exploit it anyway, but Reddit was never truly good for professionals unless they were eternally on reddit to begin with.


For what it's worth, Lemmy and kbin are very much the v1 of the fediverse, the UIs and servers are improving quickly as they break (just like how reddit was notoriously down all the time years ago).

After you sign up you don't have to care much about servers or instances, just tap "all".

I don't think it will be long before someone comes into this space with a good UI and the community that reddit just marooned and turns it into gold.


You're not exactly selling it.


I’m not going to sing praises that it’s a perfect drop in replacement.

It’s a pretty good replacement for Reddit, and the community that’s forming seems good so far.


If you're looking for a one stop reddit replacement you're not going to find it. As such, I don't think selling the fediverse as "reddit without the BS" is an honest or even reasonable comparison.

You're going to have to stick with reddit and give replacements a dew years for the dust to settle before asking that question.


> just like how reddit was notoriously down all the time years ago

Heh as if it ever stopped...


I hope you’re right


This isn’t exactly how Reddit worked either though. Each subreddit is a community with its own rules.

I’d also not exactly how fediverse works except for direct links. You read posts/comments from your instance.

Mastodon should figure out an extension to simply redirect links to your instance. It would remove a lot of confusion.


I can't vouch for the quality but squabbles.io has gained some traction, and likely more after today


This is learned helplessness acquired from the past decade where the internet became five megacorp websites. No different from your siblings or parents saying they aren't good at computers. It isn't a complex system. You are surely capable of figuring it out.


I'm not even slightly interested in the "fediverse". My impression is that most of the people involved are more interested in the ideology of decentralisation and the technology than they are about community building. I don't care even slightly about decentralisation. The focus is to the clear detriment of the product itself.


This shows you have not been on the fediverse and certainly have not indulged with communities mostly populated by long-time fedizens who view it as a place from their community to their community. There is a lot of feeling of community, inside instances, wider subcommunities, with a great example being the push to pre-emptively block all Meta instances and projects.


I have Mastodon and Lemmy accounts but thanks for your concern.


Fediverse isn't it man. Whoever owns the server is in complete control of all the content and can delete it at any moment then you have to find a new server and start over. It only solves part of the the problem, not even accounting for how confusing it is to normal users.


There are plenty of good critiques of the Fediverse, but the one you just made it true of every single website.


Maybe they think the next "internet" needs to be entirely P2P or something?

Either way Fediverse has its problems but it's the best "old internet" i've seen in a long time. Lemmy and Kbin are just the start. I'm excited to see where it goes. Developing for the Fediverse is fun, frankly.


Thats the same for any website though?


Pretty much all forum works like that. The admin can delete whatever stuff they don't like. But at least in fediverse, you still have an option to start over in another instance instead of silently accepting your fate. If admins deleting your stuff is a concern for you, then you can just run your own instance, which is not possible on proprietary forums such as Reddit.


That’s something I am trying to solve with my upcoming site LimeReader. The user data gets submitted to multiple servers and retrieved from multiple servers. Users can add their own servers if they like too.

I was hoping to have the beta already but I am now hoping to have it out this weekend. For those curious, I am the developer of HACK, one of the top rated hacker news apps for iOS and Android.

https://limereader.com/


Using HACK rn and its great ;) I’m new to HN since using reddit less and this app is really easy and snappy to use. I particularly enjoy the “best comments and posts” feature. If I could offer one feature for the future, would it be possible to specify the range of time to view best posts from? Love using the app nonetheless!


> The user data gets submitted to multiple servers and retrieved from multiple servers. Users can add their own servers if they like too.

Can you give us more details? How can you do this without creating double posts from multiple accounts?


Each action from the user (post, comment, votes etc) are signed by their private key. The resulting signature is sent along with the public key. The servers and clients all verify the signature with that public key.


Wait, so using the same private keys on multiple accounts on separate instance can work? When you post a comment from all those accounts with the same private keys at the same time, the servers will accept only one of them? How does replies work? Will replies to your comment get sent to just one instance or all your user accounts in other instances as well. Is this only works on lemmy or is it a hack that's not always supported by all ActivityPub implementations?

Sorry for the barrage of questions. I knew that accounts already have private keys associated with them, but I didn't know it's possible to use them at the same times across multiple instances without any negative impact.


No, I think you might be conflating my implementation with what the Lemmy/Fediverse/ActivityPub does. I am not using any of those. Unlike those, in my LimeReader, there’s no real concept of “accounts” or registration. The “login” phase is mostly used to help users easily generate the public private key pairs. But they don’t necessarily have to do it on my site. Any valid ECDSA p-384 key pair will work.

I am using ECDSA P-384 for the keys and signing. Browsers come with the CryptoSubtle library which does this natively, so I am able to build it all with pure vanilla javascript without frameworks:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt...

The client (browser) creates the public private key pair. The private key pair never leaves the client device. The client uses the private key to sign the records (data such as user metadata, comments, posts, votes etc). These signed records get sent along with the public key and signature to multiple servers hosted by multiple people and then fetched by multiple other clients from these servers. The servers (if they want but highly encouraged) verify the signature of the records using the public key. If verified, then it stores that record as “belonging” to that public key. The public key is basically the user’s identity. It’s also unique. So one public key is one account only. When other clients fetch these signed records, they also verify the signature.

Behind the scenes, there are no “real” accounts on servers. There are only records which have been sent by the public key and been verified. Using these records, the clients create the metadata of accounts, communities etc.

The API will be only 2 endpoints - /search and /create.

The /create accepts the signed records of various types. These are the types of records which can be created for my site which I also think should cover most similar sites: user, community, text, reaction, hide, bookmark, pin, award, view, delete, follow, report, collapse, media

The /search accepts the filters which are enough to build the feed of a link aggregator like website.

The signature of each record is unique due to the benefit of ECDSA signatures. So, the signature also becomes the “id” of your record. The replies to your comment all reference this “id” i.e. the “signature” of the comment they are replying to. These replies get sent to multiple servers (whichever ones the client has configured). Unlike the Fediverse, in my way, the servers don’t talk to each other. The client talks to multiple servers and sends its signed records to them.

I will have a more detailed write up in the coming days. I am having to have all this work as seamlessly as possible so that to a non-techy person, they shouldn’t have to understand such complexity. On the front end, it will look like a simply link aggregation site.


This seems to be very interesting and address the main drawback for current federated apps implementation. I do hope you can support ActivityPub somehow because you can jump start your community by allowing interaction to mastodon and lemmy/kbin instance. You don't have to expose all your feature set, just enough to allow people from those communities to talk to your community


Love HACK. Would you be willing to add a Six Colors icon like Apollo has?

Looking forward to LimeReader!


Thanks for the feedback. I will add that icon in the next update.


No, that stuff is nonsensical. I don’t want to browse servers and keep a list etc. The federated stuff will never take off and in a way I hope it doesn’t, all that content locked away on personal servers that can go away at a whim.


I tried to make a lemmy account on my phone in between errands. Couldn't figure it out. I'll give it a shot on desktop, and I want a reddit replacement, but I wonder how many other people are gonna go to the same effort. Maybe that's a feature though, an escape from eternal September.


I joined kbin.social and have been pleasantly suprised with it. Everything I'm subscribed to there is slow moving at the moment, but frankly I find that pace refreshing. I've seen threads remain active for several days, which doesn't seem to happen anywhere else.


I tried to make a kbin.social account several times, and also lemmy.world, lemmy.social.

They all take several minutes work to fill out the form, and then another few minutes waiting. Then they hang with no error message. It's tedious and I've given up trying to sign up for any of these new fedi-reddits.

EDIT: ok, after reading some more of this thread I decided to have one more try. Sign up on squabbles.io took 2 minutes. Yay!

EDIT 2: information density is so low on squabbles. Also, they already block all NSFW content - I'm not looking for porn, but I am looking for a community where people are free to share whatever kinds of content they like, including stuff that I don't like. There needs to be strong boundaries - nothing illegal, no racism etc. But the boundaries should be as broad as possible. Besides, NSFW means a lot more than just porn. Are we allowed to share dirty jokes there? Or important but horrible videos exposing war crimes?

A community that decides to block all of this from the very beginning is not what I want. Although I can understand their reasoning and honestly if I was running the site I might we'll make the same decision.


May want to try Squabbles.io too. Easier to figure out and it has a friendly community. It was featured on Product Hunt yesterday. It made it to the top 3.


Why is the UI so... terrible?


> Yes it's inadequate right now in all kinds of ways. But the main reason is that not enough people are there.

You have that backwards. Not enough people are there because it is inadequate in all kinds of ways.


I never really got into twitter but mastodon is quite nice.

Lemmy/kbin still have some rough edges in their UI but given enough time I think they'll get there. If any of the big ex-reddit apps turn to the fediverse I think it'll give these communities a big boost.


I am still somewhat shocked that they went through with this.

I built a Reddit API[1] alternative as a form of protest, they responded by blocking my personal Reddit account. Very sad what Reddit has become.

1 - https://api.reddiw.com


Like a lot of news today, it’s simultaneously shocking and not surprising. It’s tough to keep a positive attitude. Every week it seem like things that, against the odds turned out to be good, are being deliberately torn down so that a few rich people can get slightly richer. Greed is killing everything nice, and nobody has both the power and willingness to stop it.


More and more I find myself on the side that greed and those who egregiously practice it, need to be excised from humanity with extreme prejudice. Greed should be a short-lived terminal illness.


Will you release the code for this?


I think so. Though it’s not nearly as sophisticated as you might think.

Are you interested in hosting an instance of it?


Having an equivalent of Nitter and Invidious would be amazing! I would love to host an instance of this API, you should publish your code!

Apps like RedReader will be impossible to modify and use in a libre manner without a replacement API implementation like this.


> Having an equivalent of Nitter and Invidious would be amazing!

Something like https://teddit.net/ ?


Have you tried https://libreddit.de ? It can also be self-hosted


What will they do if many people do. Make the site inaccessible without signing in?


Even LinkedIn has not gone quite this far, usually the first page is viewable without logging in.


They banned your personal account?!

Do you have the ability to edit or access your old comments? Is it a shadowban, read-only, or a full block?


They “permanently suspended” it. It appears I have read-only access to my comments/subreddits but cannot comment/upvote/access my subreddits moderator tools.


It's a completely different approach, but maybe you can do web view shenanigans to create an API bridge on devices.


Why work around it? If they want to kill their service, I'd rather watch it happen with a smile than desperately try to save them.


Because reddit is a social phenomenon, not a technological one.


It's both and the technological element is laughably easy to recreate. The social element takes time but Reddit never had any meaningful control over that anyway.


Reddit will be able detect that easily.


I'm one of the first Reddit users, joining in October 2005.

My usage has gone up and down over the years, but for the first time ever for me, Reddit doesn't have a bookmark, a pinned app, or any way for me to get to it other than typing in the URL.

I don't care about all of the API drama beyond the fact that I was paying for a Reddit premium subscription AND Apollo to have a good experience using Reddit and, now that that isn't an option, I am stepping away for the time being.

Reddit will forever have a special place in my heart.


What's so sad about this is how easily it could have been avoided. Reddit could have done their equivalent of Musk's blue checkmark push and actually succeeded by simply requiring a paid user account for third party API access. Plans and pricing would have been implementation details to hash out, but they literally had everything they needed for it already in place.

Instead they came up with a half-baked approach that's a terrible fit for how apps in the Apple and Android ecosystems are allowed to charge and gave developers 30 days to be ready for it - or ~75 if you want to be generous and go back to when they said "hey, we were wrong a few months ago, we are going to a paid API after all." Sure Narwhal has negotiated an extension (the developer declines to say anything about it, but he's not eating months of API charges) while he prepares a completely rewritten version of his app that will work with the new subscriptions. *slow clap* I wish him well.


> I wish him well.

We all do, but does anyone really believe spez won’t seem to kill it off a year from now?


Sync is also dead. They just sent out a push notification: "Sync for reddit had shutdown. Thank you for using Sync. It's been one hell of a ride."


There was a brilliant little Reddit app for the Apple Watch (!) called Nano. It is also dead.

Such a shame. Made it super easy to browser Reddit anywhere.

The same dev also has “mini” Apple Watch apps for Steam, Wikipedia, and Elon’s Musk.


apparently there is going to be a Sync for Lemmy. Hopefully we also get Apollo for Lemmy and get rid of reddit for good.


On a similar note, the Boost dev who previously said they were not interested in making a Lemmy app seems to have changed their mind, their Play store account now has Boost for Lemmy available for pre-registration (waitlist essentially).


On that note, does anyone know if there’s any decent lemmy mobile apps? I searched a bit but couldn’t find anything meaningful


https://join-lemmy.org/apps this page lists various Lemmy interfaces. I've just joined the mlem testflight and it's decent. It also seems to be improving quite quickly now that people are flooding to Lemmy.


For Android there's Jerboa which seems to have the most features and Liftoff which is still getting there. Personally I like Thunder which supports iOS as well, I got it off GitHub


While Jerboa is an app created by the core developer of Lemmy, it's not as official app and the developer treat it as a personal project and freely blocks any instance he don't like there. I understand it's within his right to do so, but I still find it concerning due to his association with Lemmy and how many people think it's the official app.


Apollo for Federated... ::drool::


sigh. Android Sync was one of the best reddit apps i have used. it had tons of customization, never crashed, snappy, had multi-window support etc. Apollo on iOS was a distant second.


Agreed, Sync was perfection. It got a little rocky with the redesign, but I think the dev handled it masterfully by rolling back for a bit and taking stock. The re-launch allowed you to configure the UI of the app any way you liked, so you could go for an "old.reddit" style information dense UI if you wanted it.


Sync was exquisite I just had to pay for it. Apollo was good, I used it on iPad, but Sync captured well so many of reddit little things like domain browsing, multireddits etc


Yep. It was fun. I'm done with reddit I guess.


When I was younger and in college I remember Spez coming to my city to visit friends and gave a small talk, detailing how they got started. I was enraptured by Reddit, tech and coding at the time so I really looked up to him and what they were doing.

I am sorely disappointed in how things have turned out. Tech as we know it has become this sick, twisted battle for clicks and eye-balls and exits. Not to discount those that are doing great work, but where did all the integrity go?

Edit: remember when Google had the audacity to have the catchphrase “don’t be evil”? Bahahaha. Good stuff.


Bye, Apollo. I kind of feel like a drug has been taken away from me. It’s is going to take a bit to adjust to not using Reddit on my phone, as I refuse to use their app.


110% agree... I have occasionally today looked at my phone like Hm....... nothing to do here, and then just stared out the window. There's always opportunities to learn instead, but I already learn for hours a day.


I've been reading. No clickbait. No ragebait.

Just Discworld and its hilarious inhabitants.


I stopped browsing Reddit 2 months ago and switched that time to reading Discworld too! It’s fantastic. I just started Mort. It feels like an incredibly more rewarding use of my time. Terry Pratchet really is wonderful.


GNU Terry Pratchett


Woke up this morning with no Apollo to scroll through as I wake up and wait for my medication to work. It was definitely weird, but not bad.


Lemmy with Wefwef (if you can get past the odd name) has gone a long way to smoothing the transition process for me

http://wefwef.app/


I am actually quite sad about this. I noticed the same thing re Apollo app no longer working. I used Apollo to interact with a number of communities and have tried the official app and the website (both new and old) and simply cannot use them in the same manner as I used Apollo. I am done with Reddit now and the void created by losing the communities I interacted with has left me with a feeling of loneliness. Damn you u/spez.


There will be a spiritual successor though, for kbin/Lemmy, called Artemis: https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp

Right now it's in a closed beta, and the size of the closed beta is increasing slowly through the end of the month. The goal is for it to be public around the start of August. That kbin magazine has a link to a signup sheet for the closed beta.

(disclosure? I was an alpha tester for it, and so far it looks AMAZING. The dev is awesome, it's a really friendly community, and the amount of progress in just 2 weeks of development is really impressive.)


> What is Artemis using for building its user interface?

> The Artemis UI is built with React Native + Typescript

Sorry, this is DoA for me. This is not a spiritual successor. Biggest USP of Apollo was its clean, native and thoughtful UI, not cross platform UI bloatware


I had conceded to the fact that I might be one of a very small group that feels like this about React Native, Typescript and native apps. I also did not consider that I would be in that group along with the_lucifer.


Memmy is also similar to Apollo


Been using Memmy — a few weeks ago, it felt like a very impressive beta app, and since then it's gone to just feeling like a great app. Seems to have taken a lot of good lessons from Apollo in terms of responsiveness and speed. Planted the seed of wanting to even host my own Lemmy instance.


There are also Mlem, Liftoff and Wefwef


There is also Jerboa. A bit rough but does the job.


I started reading the Wheel of Time books this year and I discovered their surprisingly active subreddit where they have an active read-along including spoiler free first time reader threads.

I listen to the No Dumb Questions podcast and the official episode discussion threads are on Reddit. As are the official discussion threads for the Nebula original Jet Lag episodes. As are the best unofficial discussion threads for newly aired TV show episodes.

When new Age of Empires or Planet Zoo patches/expansions drop the only place to find thoughtful discussion is the subreddits for the games. The actual game developers hang out there as well. The subreddit wiki for Cities Skylines is the best guide to mods available on the internet. If you need to talk Civ strategy or want to follow the latest Smash Bros tournament then Reddit is the best place to go.

Similar to when new music drops from a major artist - the best interactive discussion happens on Reddit.

I haven't found anywhere that's as good as /r/NFL for game threads during the season.

-----

I've long given up looking at Reddit for any meaningful discussion.

Every major sub is infected with noxious politics. Technology/programming subreddits are flooded with confidently stated but mostly uninformed opinions. Trying to post something helpful feels like swimming against the tide.

But I still go to Reddit for discussion about media be it books, podcasts, video games, music, sports, or others.

I really hope someone migrates those communities somewhere else so I can finally ignore the site.


This is sad, but the silver lining is that the official app is horrible enough that it will more or less force me to go cold turkey on breaking my Reddit addiction.


I pretty much only like Reddit for niche communities and fighting shit google results.

The latter is a necessity but for the former there’s other communities to satiate my needs. It’s just that it’s a bit of a fragmented way of diving into my interests.

Is there such a thing as a forum aggregator?


Where are these other communities? I can’t find them. And no, I don’t count Discord as an acceptable replacement. Googling for old-school forums has been pretty fruitless for me thus far as Google is basically useless without appending site:reddit.com these days (the supreme irony of that…)


I guess it depends on how niche your interests are. I’m mainly into electronic music machines and synth diy. There’s enough forums for me. There’s other stuff that I frequent on Reddit but at the end of the day it’s usually just crap to distract me that I could do without.


I'm part of a lot of smaller women-centered communities on reddit - my favorite subreddits were r/MoneyDiariesACTIVE, r/FIREyFemmes, r/girlsgonewired r/adhdwomen, r/AmateurRoomPorn, r/AskWomenOver30, etc. Not all of these are explicitly for women only but they all have a majority female user base. I don't think there are equivalents in a forum-type format; I'd probably have to go to TikTok or something, but I don't care for that format so I'll probably just lose those communities for the most part.


The big "mostly women" subreddit I'll miss, despite being a guy, is the /r/RomanceBooks subreddit. It is hands down the best book community on reddit. At least as far as community and moderation goes. It sounds like the mods don't think the alternatives are technologically mature enough.


Most gaming groups moved to discord, like it or not. But it does help discover some niches once you want deeper knowledge than what a wiki would give.


Boardreader.com


Sad day indeed. Swiping to refresh and just seeing blank views everywhere was such an abrupt and matter of fact ending.

I’m wondering a few things:

1. Will the app ever be made open source

2. Could an endeavor be undertaken to give everyone their own ability to auth to the api themselves? Then instead of relying on the Apollo oauth keys you plug your own in and/or run your own self-hosted auth infra. These days it’s so easy to spin up an app on Fly or similar. Could see small communities a-La mastodon where one person operates an auth/api server for themselves and a few others (distribute the api load to many tiny api instances) versus the Apollo situation where one dev is footing the bill for every user.

Hate to see what is hands down the best iOS app of all time just poof disappear.


So many sites and companies have turned on the users that put them on the map. Twitter, Red Hat, Reddit. It's like they're saying "we don't need the users anymore."


They're all panicking for money. Modern capitalism demands not just stable businesses, not just profit, but quarterly increasing profits for all of eternity. This is obviously-to-anyone-who-isn't-a-grifter impossible and company after company will die being forced to chase it.


hn sez 30x plz?


Still using Boost with the ReVanced patch[0]. No telling how long that will last though. Regardless, I'm massively scaling back my use of Reddit.

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLks...

Edit: For those interested, the patch just lets you use your own API key. But the dev is no longer supporting the app and there's no telling whether the bring-your-own-key strategy will work in the long term, considering Reddit's recent behavior.


Boost is still working for me on the standard API key. I wonder how long that will last.


>Edit: sorry, Apollo wasn’t open source. That’s what happens when I make a post while two beers deep I guess.

Well, the server backend was recently opened:

https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend


I think only made available, but not licensed?


Yeah, it was put on github as proof they weren't webscraping like spez claimed.


RedReader for Android, and Dystopia for iOS were both granted exemptions to the new API pricing by Reddit due to their accessibility and non-commercial nature.


I'll give it 2 months at most until Reddit will claim that their own app is now accessible enough to shut down the other apps.


With all due respect to the developer of Dystopia, the experience compared to Apollo is subpar.

I tried twice already to use Dystopia, but I can’t really force myself. Probably just for the best to give up on Reddit.


Joey on Android with text to speech feature also seems to be working. The developer has been very quiet throughout ordeal, hopefully there's an exemption as well.


Thank you Apollo for all the fun times. You made it way too easy to use Reddit. While you will be missed, I’m glad this is giving me time back in my life.

I’ve already finished two books since the new API pricing was revealed, and I am NOT a book reader (having read less than 10 books in my lifetime, and I’m turning 40 this year). But I’m happy to be becoming one.

Bye Reddit. I hope one day your corporate leaders will look back and realize the error of their ways and how they single-handedly destroyed countless online communities practically overnight.


I can honestly say that I have no intention to continue using reddit on any mobile device without apps like Apollo, Sync etc. A real shame, because I found reddit communities made over hobbies to be such a good source of anecdotal information.


I'm going to miss reddit. I was one of the people who came over from digg. I deleted the app and stopped using the site when the protest happened. There's a missing itch for me for short to medium form content that isn't straight news, or straight memes. A thousand person discord server works differently than a 10k person reddit.

Part of me wonders if this is inevitable. We used to do this ever few years. Hoping from aim/man/yahoo to Skype to discord. I guess we figured things had gotten stable enough. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe we all got too comfortable and thought our content consumption habits could stay the same for ever. The internet has changed from when I first got on Reddit. I wont say for better or worse. I don't like it as much.


GeoCities redux.

Corporations don't like communities unless they can profit. One day the Greater Community will arise as a non-profit under the control of its contributers.

"The community literally helped this site grow to what it is today by engaging with and creating content, creating communities (sub-reddits), and moderators who assisted in developing those communities for free." -- https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14kjohc/n...


Wikipedia’s staying power gives me hope that non-profits can succeed in this age of dopamine driven fast clicks


So where is everybody going after reddit?


I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm going to try giving up internet comment sections for a while to try and see if I can live without them. I have wasted far too much time on Reddit, Hacker News, and recently Lemmy (which I tried to use as a Reddit replacement).

The articles themselves would be nice to keep around, I haven't found enough RSS feeds to make my feed reader app populated enough. I will probably make a userscript to disable comments here, use Kagi search to minimize the amount of Reddit in my search queries, and overall use a solution like Screen Time to try to limit use of other sites I spend way too much time on.

I know a lot of users are going to Lemmy or Kbin, both of which are on the Fediverse.


Same. I'm actually attempting to make my own, but in similar motivation from your comment, i'm trying to make mine reduce engagement. I want something that explores the positives of social/link-aggs/etc, but doesn't try to keep engagement high.

Something that lets you check it once a day and not feel like you missed anything. etcetc

I think there were good things about Reddit but it is scary how deeply Reddit (and frankly, HN) have driven muscle memory and addictive doomscroll behavior. I'd love to see more people explore features which attempt to extract user value from these platforms but minimize addictive features.

Difficult, but a fun area to explore.


Lots of communities on Reddit have started the process of migrating to different platforms. The federated alternatives like Lemmy have had recent success although I question the complexity of it all in terms of getting mass adoption. Most of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.

I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/Sociables/board/trending


Looked at this last night briefly before going to bed and said I'd check it again today but then got distracted by the whole twitter fiasco.

This looks awesome dude way to go :D

I forgot the link was in this thread (didn't bookmark it). It was a real pain trying to find it via google or startpage (until I remembered what thread I was reading last night) I remembered "sociable" but searches for "sociable social media platform" and even "sociable site:news.ycombinator.com" yielded zilch.

Long story short I'd suggest working on your SEO just a little you're competing with "sociable.co". But design+concept are 10/10 as far as I'm concerned, god speed o7


https://lemmyverse.net/communities

https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning


I think Lemmy and Kbin has the most potential due to their federated nature. I have found several vibrant communities with interesting and thoughtful discussions across many instances there. Too bad some of the largest instances started doing these de-federation shenanigans recently. I'm on my own personal instance so I'm not affected so far, but it does concerns me. Imagine if Gmail de-federate from Yahoo mail so users of both sites can't talk to each other (but can talk to the rest of the internet). This is absurd and has the potential to kill the fediverse if the practice is unchecked. There has to be a way to moderate discussion without abusing de-federation.


I’ve been trying very hard not to go anywhere. Though… hi, here I am. I’ve set myself a 15 minute a day limit for news.ycombinator.com on my phone, doesn’t apply to my laptop but I’m less concerned about that.


Lemmy has scratched the itch for me. Obviously not as big or thorough as Reddit, but I’ve found a lot of the niches I used to frequent on Reddit, and they’re fairly active.


lemmy is trying, but it's pretty bad as a replacement.


Trying kbin and lemmy. Both are compatible with each other through activitypub federation (aka fediverse), so choose an instance of either and browse away.

It's still very quiet compared to what reddit was. Not yet enough users to support the niche communities which made reddit special (IMO), but I'm trying to contribute anyways, hopefully building it up a bit.

Losing reddit is sad, the feeling to me is a bit similar to when we lost supernova, then what.cd. An internet jewel that will never be the same again.


"Suprnova", but definitely point taken!


Since the Apollo dev broke the news, I'm trying out Lemmy and it's an interesting alternative. Definitely too new to say what will happen to it, but looks promising.


It is not, and doesn't even try to be, a Reddit replacement, but https://tildes.net has impressed me with its quality of discussion. More akin to HN, but with a subreddit-like system to facilitate a wider range of topics than is usually found here.


straight to /pol/


http://squabbles.io


Back to real life.


I was an innkeeper, in this crazy, little town in Vermont...

https://youtu.be/OwYw2i2icNg?t=430


Oh I wish. People struggling with reddit replacements should try making new friend groups in 2023. Lot more energy for a lot more disappointing results.


I uh.. came here?


Lemmy/kbin


Perhaps Github? It is not social media as such, but technically it could be used as such. A kind of "intent hacking". A repo = subreddit. Issues = posts with comments. Regardless, I think I will spend more time there, since I have some small personal projects in mind.


Not going anywhere. None of the subs I follow (~20) moved away


So far HN and Tildes furfilled most of my browsing. Have a KBin account I keep tabs on and I'm helping to fund Non.io (not really ready yet, but I'm happy gambling on the long game).

(Btw, I have Tildes invites for anyone who still sees this comment. Feel free to reply to ask for one).


One option not mentioned so far: gemini://bbs.geminispace.org

Also +1 to https://tildes.net

The important thing: use multiple sites to hedge your habits against such issues.


FB Groups :(


This happens to coincide with the date that a new law (singed May 12th) goes into effect in Virginia requiring commercial entities that publish or distribute "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users. Commercial entities violating that may suffer civil penalties.

https://legiscan.com/VA/text/SB1515/2023


Sounds coincidental. It doesn't have anything to do with pricing and NSFW content is still flowing to the remaining clients (as of right now). Reddit has never mentioned that law either as far as I know.


I don’t know law and am bad at technology too but I’m wondering if there is ways companies can get around these kinds of laws through a combination of geofencing, blocking IPs, and displaying messages that the service isn’t available in a particular state/country. I understand that it might make economic sense but just wondering if showing a certain amount of due diligence helps absolve them legally.


That's exactly what some of them do.

Pornhub blocks access in Virginia over new age verification law - https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/pornhub-blocks-acces...

Part of the challenge with this one is it does that "civil right of action" where it's not the state suing the entity but private citizens. That makes it more difficult for the company to defend against it.

Though this gets into a "how much effort are you going to put into it" and "how much control do you have over the ways the content is distributed?"

This also is about liability for the backend service - not the ISPs or other providers (3rd party apps are in a gray zone as to if it is Reddit or the 3rd party app that would be liable for showing such content... and my crystal ball says it would probably end up being that Reddit would be solely liable).


> With the death of Apollo also goes the metaphorical death of all the best parts (IMO) of the internet: open-source,

Apollo was Open Source?


The Backend was open sourced to counter U/spez Bullshit arguments about inefficient code creating too many API requests

See here https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend


Sorry, that was definitely the wrong phrase to use. I was reaching for a term I couldn’t find - something that conveys the concept of “freedom” on the internet - like the ability to leverage an existing tool/service and build upon it and make it better?


Yup, same thing, wasn't sure what timezone it was gonna happen in, then all of a sudden it did. Screenshotted a couple pages of my (cached) home page for the memories.


I hear you. I only get the courage to post a comment when I'm beers deep; it doesn't always go well.

I feel you did great!


That's very nice, thank you :) Pros and cons of lowered inhibition I guess haha


Same. Then I delete it 24 hours later.


Reddit is Fun is also gone.


The writing was on the wall, but as a user for a decade+ opening it to see "No threads here. Tap to refresh." is a little jarring


I noticed that I could use it when logged out.


Probably would have been interesting to relaunch the Apollo with its own backend as a direct competitor to Reddit. I think one simple push notification would've pulled millions of the most active users over to the new service


That would have required negotiating image hosting, having a significant amount of server power and storage space, dealing with laws about who can see what, and active moderation until volunteers can be found to moderate the content. Having someone to deal with DMCA requests and age verification laws.

If it wasn't a subscription service (that had to front load a lot of its costs), it also involves getting advertisers for people who are demonstrably hostile to advertisements on board.

This requires hiring more than a few people and investing a bit into the infrastructure needed. It isn't just "hey, gonna spin up a server that is API compatible with reddit and switch everyone over."


So, are we just pretending like reddit has any of that when it started out?


It was a single page link farm with votes that competed with Digg in a much simpler regulatory time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124035428/http://reddit.com... (edit: upon reflection, I am nostalgic for the time when that the top link there was to "The Truth About Web 2.0" at paulgraham.com shared by a user named AaronSw)

If you were to try to build something today that competed with Reddit and wasn't just a "here's a bunch of links - vote on what you like (without even comments)", it would take quite a bit more investment.

If you were to build reddit c. 2005 you wouldn't even need a device local app.


Apollo is not competing with Reddit when it started out but Reddit today.


Apollo had just over ONE million users. Only 540k of whom were active. And significantly less that paid the fee needed to be able to post.

And most active according to whom? People keep saying Reddit is committing suicide. Do y'all truly believe that most of Reddit useful content was created on mobile? In Apollo? The app that forced you to pay if you wanted to submit content to Reddit?

Get real.


If all the rejected apps banded together onto one shared backend, they would have more people than any of the new movers people have scattered to.


Probably. But its a prisoner dilemma and part of the reason apps shut down was because they lacked the time to react. There's no way they'd have an alternative ready "in time" even if we all agreed on an alternative and made a big push for it.

And "all agreeing" on the internet is a herculean task to begin with. Some want federation, some want centralization. Some want memes and others want serious discussion. Some don't even want to leave reddit period.


I suspect that those who bothered to go through the effort of downloading a third party app were also power users who most likely also contributed a lot more content than other users. How many content creators did Reddit lose by killing these third party apps?

Reddit doesn’t produce content of their own. If content creators and moderators took away their effort, Reddit would die.


> How many content creators did Reddit lose by killing these third party apps?

Thats a good question. Are there any stats to show that Apollo users were significant in terms of content creation? Or that any small subset of users are significant (besides mods)?


>Do y'all truly believe that most of Reddit useful content was created on mobile?

These days where 50% or reddit traffic is on Mobile? Yes.

>In Apollo?

No.


all of the third party apps sucked in terms of usage, hence why reddit was willing to destroy them


Hardly simple.

Who recreates all subreddits? Re-establishes all the mods? Re-subscribes all the users? And all the while on a brand-new implementation that has to immediately scale to millions of users flawlessly.

That's a lot of work.


Hopefully he does that later. Reddit sucks


> the death of Apollo also goes the metaphorical death of all the best parts (IMO) of the internet: open-source, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit.

It died years ago for me. I don't want go get too nostalgic, but it depresses how amazing the early internet was compared to what it is today. The early years of web 2.0 (2002 - 2007ish) were the golden age imo.

Then Facebook and the smart phone came along... From that point on the internet was no longer a place for geeks on their desktop computers to chat on forums and build cool stuff for other geeks. It became mainstream. Boomers got online. Children got online. Then the corporations monetised everything.

Everything happening to Reddit today is a result of boomers, children and corporations going online. Edgey content gets banned or boomers complain. Everything gets age-gated or censored because, "think of the kids". And all you're left with is sterile advertiser friendly content served next to half a dozen ads.


I mean, you cant just have Pepsi being advertised in a r/wtf deadly bus crash with people wearing coca cola, now can you?

I mean, think of the chil... advertisers!


boomers built the internet, my dude


I deleted my Reddit account of over ten years over this. No going back.


They already deleted mine because I refused to buy into their gender ideology BS. Haven't used it since. Good riddance.


Do you still read article from Reddit when you search for information?


Official post as shared over here earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36541886)

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14nb5qs/today_is...


WefWef [1] is a Lemmy client that looks and feels very similar to Apollo and even supports importing the data exports created by Apollo. It feels almost native despite being a web app. For anyone looking for a Reddit/Apollo alternative I would recommend checking it out.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36488016


The last two weeks I noticed an onset depression in my life and I think it was because I basically stopped using Reddit since the blackout started and I have no intent to go back. I swear it was an addiction withdrawal.

I’ve been feeling better the past 2 days but I do miss having a place that helps me keep in touch with the parts of the world I cared about.


I’ve only really used Apollo on Reddit. The official app never stuck for me and I don’t have it installed. It’s one of the few apps I only really use on my phone, so I don’t have it bookmarked or anything. At this point, I’m burned and so I’ll take my ball and go home.

I bought the screensavers though. Thanks for all the good times Apollo.


The official Reddit app is quite bad compared to say Sync (this is on Android).

Like.. doesn't even seem to have a rich text editor?


I’m curious. Do you guys use some app to access hackernews? I still use the browser like a caveman.


Harmonic on Android


Hack is great.


Octal on iOS and Hack on MacOS for me.


I'm enjoying Octal on iOS.


I use Octal for iOS


> metaphorical death of all the best parts (IMO) of the internet: open-source, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit.

That's a weird connection to make. Reddit isn't be-all-end-all of open source (given that it or most of the major apps were never open source anyway)


It’s a sad day.

I just deleted the app.

Starting to delete all my Reddit accounts now too.

I’m so tired of poor managers ruining good products.


Narwhal (a 3rd-party iOS Reddit app) is still going and it turns out not biting the hand that feeds you works pretty well.

Respect to the Apollo guy for having the confidence that he could get Reddit to back down through a well-organized PR campaign. But he could’ve had a decent business if he’d just backed down, given in a little, and not tried to make Spez look like a bigger idiot/liar than he already did.

I love a good risky David v. Goliath gamble and would’ve liked to see him win, but sometimes you lose it all.


Reddit didn't win. Sometimes you're going to be lunch whether you want to or not, but you don't have to be a pleasant lunch. Reddit is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.


>Well-organized PR campaign.

Sure, if you call simply posting his experiences on his own subreddit for his own app a PR campaign.

He certainly did a better job than Reddit did, blatantly lying about their conversation, timelines, and motivations for killing 3rd party apps.

Reddit is trying to pivot to the TikTok and YouTube comment section population of the internet, while the HN commenter types were simply costing them money.

We’ll see how it plays out.


> Sure, if you call simply posting his experiences on his own subreddit for his own app a PR campaign.

Yes, this and the organized blackout and anti-Reddit posts among the biggest subreddits is a coordinated PR campaign.

Remember that the headline narrative they were pushing was “Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps.” It was buried in walls of text that in fact Reddit was making 3rd-party apps pay more than they wanted to pay.

If Reddit was in fact killing 3rd-party apps why does Narwhal still work?

And yes, I understand that you are quite bright and understood exactly what was going on. But the whole point of the campaign was to appeal to people not like you and get them on the side of the developers. Although admittedly getting Redditors to post “fuck /u/spez” is only marginally harder than shooting fish in a barrel.

I’m not throwing shade. Respect to them for shooting their shot. But see it for what it was: an attempt to control a narrative, get the public on their side, and achieve a desired outcome. If that’s not PR, what is?


If Reddit wanted third-party apps to pay for the API, they wouldn’t have priced them out.

Narwhal will shift to subscriptions with unknown prices. Don’t be surprised if it falls apart quickly.


>If Reddit was in fact killing 3rd-party apps why does Narwhal still work?

Come back to me in 6 months and see how that statement rings. I wish the best but history serves that Reddit's user have never heen able to put their money where their mouth is. I believe Relay is also doing this, but they seem ready to shut down if users don't pay up.


RemindMe! 6 months


Well organized PR campaign? You're giving reddit users and Christian too much credit.

Christian got caught up in this becsuse the Reddit CEO is a walking PR disaster, and Reddit's protests are a cute diversion at best. Anyone wanting to truly damage reddit should have been planning migrations, not shit posts.

>I love a good risky David v. Goliath gamble and would’ve liked to see him win, but sometimes you lose it all.

I don't think Christian is being put out on the street over this decision. You're on Hacker News and think an app dev with almost 15 years of experience is left with nothing?

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he was close to retirement levels of money. At the very least he can have a very long leisurely location before his next venture.


I came here from Apollo today. I think I’ll be happier having a news feed without all the ridiculous stuff. Hopefully the community is decent.

Edit: I will genuinely miss Apollo, but it was what made reddit useable for me. It was one of those rare pieces of software that was so elegant that at a first glance you would assume it was only a few hundred lines of code. That kind of elegance is rare and beautiful. It belongs in some sort of software hall of fame.


I guess this is how we break our addictions. Feels bad though.


I'm curious what happens to reddit now. I'm guessing just auto pilot of low effort content. Don't think it'll truly die as far as numbers go.


Nothing. Apollo was less than 1% of users. It would be interesting to a see a survey to see what population of Reddit was affected by these changes or cared.


It may have only been 1% of users, but what percent of active contributing users was it? What percent of active mods?

The people who paid for a third-party app to make using and working with Reddit easier and more convenient are the power users.

I don't know if you're a regular Reddit user, but if you are have you looked through /r/popular in the past? Recently? What's bubbling to the 'top' of Reddit right now is significantly lower quality content than what used to be there. A lot of that is likely due to so many mods effectively going on strike, but do you think that's going to improve when Reddit's employees remove all those mods, reopen subs and appoint whoever wants to request moderator status as the new mods? Hint: it's not going to be all sunshine and flowers.

I like what one of the mods of IIRC /r/canning posted within the last week or so when Reddit started getting serious with threatening messages - he noted that the mods of that subreddit are there because they have specific subject matter knowledge and canning things wrong kills people. If that subreddit is forced open with mods appointed by Reddit employees and dangerous advice becomes a regular thing, does Reddit have any liability? Can an attorney make enough of a case that they do to drag them into court?


I think it's more important to know how many are content creators and posters that are effected.


I think the bigger issue is that Apollo (and other apps such as RIF) were amazing tools for moderators, with the official app lacking a lot of features the unofficial clients had.


I recently described it to a friend as trying to get from point A to point B in ankle deep water when using 3rd party apps compared to waist deep water in the official app - sure, you can do it but it’s going to take significantly more time and effort.

So if you’re constantly popping in and checking things throughout the day, that extra time and effort really adds up. By killing these user friendly apps that a large portion of power users and mods preferred, it’s Reddit showing all of these dedicated unpaid contributors that their time and effort don’t matter to the company. Steve spit directly in all of our faces repeatedly over the past month and now most of us are actively rooting against the success of an IPO. I hope he continues to be the 3rd most successful Reddit cofounder, and his name never gets mentioned in a positive light within YC/HN.


barely any moderator uses mobile for moderating, it's absolutely horrible, even with third party tools

most of the "power users" on the reddit (and I'd guess every other website) are good old fashioned desktop users


What is missing in the official app? And how many mods are using a mobile app rather than a desktop env? A desktop browser seems like it would be infinitely better than a mobile experience.


can you tell me how to view posts as a gallery? can you also tell me how to create a link with username and subreddit below a post and when you click it, it takes you to the sub or the users profile? Such a simple thing...


Im not sure. Are those moderator functions? I was curious about the OPs statement regarding missing mod functions.


Apollo was much better for actually interacting with Reddit: voting, commenting, digging into posted content.

The Reddit app is designed to keep you scrolling down your feed past advertisements.

Apollo and its compatriots were used by actual users; they may not have made up a huge percentage, but they made it what it is.


Sure, they've got the numbers. But there's no life.

I picture the hordes of zombies in The Walking Dead, unknowingly led by a select few ghastly humans wearing zombie masks.


Yeah, I personally suspect it will be a slow death march over the course of a few years, culminating in it basically becoming 9gag.


Reddit will continue to exist, but will never come back.


Yeah you’re drunk. Apollo was a cash grab and selig admitted as such. That being said no one can give any points to Reddit for how they handled things either.


I guess you can call "creating a great product that people want to pay for" a "cash grab", but what isn't a cash grab then?


Creating a great product that makes money isn't a cash grab.


they created an interface around a product they didn't own..


You just defined every third party app that works with an API. Are all such apps cash grabs to you?


>and selig admitted as such

Proof of that happening?


Centralization of internet forums was always going to end like this. I hope this accelerates the decline of Reddit dot com. The moderation and the censorship is pretty much universal across the large boards. You will find tons of deleted comments on anything which challenges the common view remotely. Can't say I'm not glad the site is going down, or enough alternatives pop up.


Reddit Migration Directory https://redditmigration.com


I'm pouring one out for Apollo tonight, I tried the official Reddit app and it's hot garbage and the Reddit website is somehow worse.

Mastodon and Lemmy are fine, but I'm old enough to remember the web I grew up with and that what I would really like to see is a Renaissance of niche bulletin boards and RSS based blogs. I'm not holding my breath though.


Remember Alien Blue before Reddit bought it? That app still appears to work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlienBlue/comments/14nimob/alien_bl...


Goodbye, Reddit.

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com


I’m giving Lemmy a try using wefwef.app


Is there a way to change some settings or something to make the official reddit app look more like RIF?


The app? No, there's no such way to control that. Your best bet is CSS configurations on the website but it'll be a pale imitation.


At this point I'm more angry at the mods than I am the evil corporation. They were afraid of Reddit ruining Reddit so they went ahead and burned it down themselves first. Congratulations, you got to be the ones to light the match.


For some reason, Narwhal, which is another nice app, is still working.


App developer is playing ball with Reddit. Is going to charge users for API usage and complying with all terms of usage e.g. no nsfw content


I wasn't asked for payment yet. I wonder when that will kick in.


I am confused, 12:00am UTC is 8:00pm EDT. So UTC 12:00 should be 11:00 pm PDF. It is 7:40 EDT as I type this on June 30

EDIT: was in junethack while typing this, yes 5pm PDT is 12 UTC :)


The author posted on Twitter ~20 minutes ago that he shut it down early, due to some change in the API causing crashes. I presume he had been expecting to shut it down at midnight in some American time zone.

> Well, looks like Reddit pulled the plug a little early. Apollo started crashing, but I just manually revoked my token and it looks like it fixes the crashing, but no more Reddit access haha. Those folks are fun to the very end! > @ChristianSelig > 6:49 PM (CDT) · Jun 30, 2023

Source: https://twitter.com/ChristianSelig/status/167492828678112461...


hah. if twitter wasn't such a twat we could actually read the tweet. You know what? fuck reddit and also fuck twitter.


https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110635856662952525

and yes, I totally get that there's a wider point to be made in reddit and twitter both going hostile on the same day.


confused is the expected state when thinking about timezones so you have nothing to worry about.


You're right, I think I mixed up PDT vs PST


AlienBlue (the original 3rd party app) is still working.


Interesting, when I go to my purchases in the app store, I see Alien Blue, but consistently when I tap it to try and re-download it, I get a "failed to connect to App Store" error.


I've deleted my Reddit account last week, after 13 years. So far, surprisingly, I don't miss it at all.


Honestly I’m not sure if I’ll use Reddit on mobile anymore since Apollo is gone. The native Reddit app is horrible


The Apollo author should put up a page that says "Reddit has moved to Mastadon, click here to sign in"


Why would he post a dishonest statement?


These apps developers were trying to piggyback off the reddit api, so are you surprised?


So, will Reddit still manage to have an IPO soon? Or maybe better to ask, a successful one.


The window is closed right now, but this at least removed one of the risks. At the same time, it exposed the moderator risk, the revenue impact isn't clear yet, and it's drama that investors might not like.


End of Apollo means end of Reddit for me.

In same time I bought premium of Octal for HN.


They’re passing up an interesting opportunity to compete.


Infinity is the Open Source one.


Oh that's dumb. I forgot to check my inbox before midnight. I had offered Tildes invites and don't have the password to that account (but have been logged in since years, can access the auth token, etc., but reddit doesn't want you to recover from this scenario, so that's gone forever).

Well... anyone here needs a Tildes invite?


I'd love one; Hope you don't mind if I send you an email in lieu of posting mine here?


For the record: That's fine! Contact info is on my profile for a reason :). As you'll have seen, I have replied to the email!


Hey, could I get an invite?

Please excuse the new account. I just made it because I didn’t want to put my email address in the bio of my regular account.


Didn't need to make a new account for that, could have just emailed me directly :)

Anyway (also for the record) I am out for the moment, but I'll note down people's email addresses for the next time we get a round of invites made available. So far it has been every two weeks or so. (So if you want, you can remove the email addr from the profile again. Btw I never got spam on a rot13, base64, or other trivially encoded email address, in case anti-spam would be what you're hiding it for.)

Note that one can also email the owner at invites@tildes.net as per https://docs.tildes.net/contact


If your offer is still open, I would like one, please.


Me too please and thank you.


I'll take an invite please


Empty profile, not sure how to send you one without having someone else snatch it. Please email me via the address shown to you on https://lucb1e.com/email-address/


I'll take one, please.


Would love a tildes invite


No contact info on your profile, not sure how you want me to send an invite without someone else snatching it...


Would love one for myself if you don't mind.


I'll take one, if you don't mind.


So there third party apps were trying to run a a _profitable_ business off Redit APIs?


where's the long live apollo part?


Eeee


Tell HN:


narwhal is still available.


In losing reddit we lose nothing of value.




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