>[Reddit says] that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. [Reddit] raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else.
I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it.
Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".
There is so much they don't understand about their own product.
Their motto "dive into anything" means go deep. Yet logged out viewers are only shown a depth of one or two levels of comments, and they recently toyed with dropping the maximum depth of comments from 10 to 5 on both the redesign and old reddit. Basically, they are copying other social media comment sections because they forgot their niche and they think the other model is more successful. I expect what will happen is existing users will leave, and nobody will come from other platforms to fill the gap.
One of their most popular draws has been AMAs from public figures, and they haven't done much else in this vein.
They could be hosting written debates from well known figures. Constrain their responses in length and number, say one comment per day, max 500 words, on controversial subjects like DEI [1].
Instead they want to lock it all down (to sanitize for advertisers? Or perceived popular viewpoints?). Meanwhile the only metric they consistently report, number of upvotes, is down 48% YoY! It was 46 billion in 2021 [2] and 24 billion in 2022 [3].
Reddit is incapable of being neutral on political topics. Anything even remotely to the right is attacked with numerous transparent tactics such as:
- Reducing their reach, they admit to this
- Stealth editing comments by the CEO
- Upvote manipulation
- Admin bans on mods who don't follow opaque, shifting and clearly biased rules
- Outright handing over subreddits to mods who agree with reddit
Reddit is not anything even close to a place for debate, because there is no free speech. After all, the CEO just jumps into the database and edits comments on a whim from a petty political debate.
Less than two years ago Reddit hired a transgender admin who was known for defending pedophiles (they vehemently defended a rapist of a 10 year old girl), and censoring any criticism of this person until forced to back down by mass protest. These positions are extreme left, not even liberals could support them.
Yeah, I was gonna say—Reddit's UX has been getting steadily worse for years now, but Discord is a poor replacement. No hate to Discord's own UX, it's just a totally different kind of experience for what Reddit is (supposed to be).
This is the status quo at the moment. The days of strong, robust third-party clients for a service that don't get squashed by said service are on the long tail at the moment. They figured out that they can monetize users, and thus third-party clients eat into that revenue. Thus the idea of "approving" third-party clients exists.
Man, seeing Trillian mentioned in the wild unlocked a core memory.
These days I've been trying out Franz and (more recently) RamBox as ways to connect multiple chat services under a single program. The family Slack, Facebook Messenger, and a couple other programs go in there and I never run the native apps or log on to their websites in my browser.
This has gone both ways. Apple was right to remove optical drives from Macbooks over user objections, but wrong to insist the touch bar and butterfly keyboard was a good thing.
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority
Wow, an amazing example of "missing the point." If the use of 3rd party apps is increasing over time versus the official app, there is something wrong with the official app and the proper thing to do is fix that.
Restricting 3rd party access is just delaying the inevitable.
The problem is that Reddit's incentives are directly opposed to their users.
Advertisers demand a lot of ads, a continuous drive for "engagement", and bland cookie-cutter content. Users want to hang around in their own weird little subreddits - without being bothered with ads or "useful" recommendations.
It is impossible to combine the two, so the official Reddit app can never satisfy the user base.
Advertisers need to select subreddits that fit their niche better. Yes there is porn on reddit, but that shouldn't stop amazon from advertising on /r/books.
Not all subreddits are equally suited for ads, but some of the subreddits are going to get people to stay. So if you come for /r/gonewild, you might end up going to /r/books and buy a nice e-reader.
Now if advertisers don't, or can't, target their ads to nices, then those ads don't need to be on reddit in the first place, and the people making those campaigns should not work in marketing.
I'm not sure how ads and eyeballs are incompatible. The internet has been running on ads since forever. Yeah I don't like them but I understand why they're there.
Companies often advertise open API access to increase usage and growth, and then cut it off once the growth from those open API access is less than the potential monetary gain from closing the ecosystem down (ads from their mobile clients, charging 3rd party clients for API access, etc). It's suck, but I'm actually surprised it took this long for Reddit to finally do it.
Its ads, I use a third party client because it has no ads and no trackers.
They won't do that, they want to collect souch data so they can sell it or use it for ad targeting.
A lot of content on reddit these days is advertising that is pretending to be organic content anyway. It's nigh impossible to completely filter out the astroturfing that happens.
You can just go for the allow-list approach (only reading the subs and niches you care about) instead of the block-list approach (where you read r/all and try to filter out the astroturfed material and advertising).
However, you might be out of luck if your niche/hobby is very mainstream popular and has a large following on reddit as well (e.g., marvel comics or general stuff like world politics). As someone who mostly reads just a few smaller subs, none of the astroturfing gets to me. As soon as I check r/all though, especially comments on popular posts, it instantly reminds me of all that garbage.
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else.
Can you imagine the horror if users were allowed to control what and how a website displays on their own device?!
I’m curious the ratio of ad-block users. It’s got to be higher than the average internet user. Probably even more so for the ones that are logged in.
> Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage.
The word is “user agent”. A web browser is just one such program. You can even name it whatever you want because like all web standards from that era, it’s just a line of text with implicit trust of the sender.
I don't understand why they don't just serve up ads that are indistinguishable from the normal content? I get a lot of ads it seems in facebook even with an adblocker. not that i use facebook much anymore but still... there are ways around it
In a way I’m thankful that Reddit has made using their site so inhospitable to mobile browsers. I’ve simply stopped using it. Though it seems they’ve at least brought back old.reddit.com but i.reddit.com still seems to redirect to the incredibly unusable www.reddit.com on mobile.
Now, in its place, I load up a .epub book in the iOS Books app and set it to continuous scroll mode. This way I’m getting the dopamine hit from the continuous scrolling AND I’m actually reading something worth my time, energy, and effort rather than outrage bait, astroturfing posts, or karma farm threads.
I've been using the space bar more and more in the browser (and less (and c-f/c-v in vi/emacs)), and am beginning to find it annoying when I have to scroll any other way.
I wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit.
It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
> For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer (later clarifying that with NSFW content they're talking about sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons), but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit.
I wonder if this is the real impetus to do this now. It feels like there's increasing pressure coming from somewhere (payment processors? advertisers? politicians?) to push NSFW content to the margins.
Edit: Another commenter mentioned them going public soon. That seems more likely.
>To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
> To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
Can’t, or more likely in my opinion don’t want to.
What users want is pretty simple: a feed of posts from subscribed subreddits that’s sorted by post score and recency. The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer much room to twiddle with UI, algorithms, etc to drive ad impressions, feature adoption, etc.
Apollo basically did that a while back by shoving adds to paid lifetime users about subscriptions. I abandoned use of that app at the time while christian started only allowing "one thread a day" related to his change there and claiming he needs the subcription money to live (while having in the past begged for donations to buy ridiculous things like the apple apple and mount).
I am not a fan of subscription culture in general and I had paid a lifetime fee he agreed upon to avoid such ads but he simply changed the definition of an ad to be a "reddit ad". I also used to toss him tip jar donations occaisonally because the app was good. But he seemed to get greedy after his virtual tamogachi.
RedPlanet does well but honestly I use reddit for less and less every day, despite my account being 16y 11m old.
> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free.
This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money?
There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
I don't think Reddit is profitable? I can't find any sources indicating it is and several indicating it is not. That isn't to say they can't squeeze a profit out once they IPO, but it's been fairly altruistic up to this point.
Reddit is fairly unique among large internet properties in that even as their "default" design has gotten shittier and shittier (in my opinion), it was possible to go back to older iterations via old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com. I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork.
Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.
When old.reddit.com goes away, so will I. The new UI is such trash that I can't stand looking at it for any extended period of time. That and the RedditIsFun app are the only things keeping me on reddit, UI-wise.
Ditto. I have been using both old.reddit.com and RedditIsFun for 17 and 10 years, respectively. I can't imagine I'll stick around if either, and especially both, are removed. Certainly the removal of either will drastically lower my usage. Probably a good thing.
> I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork.
I've seen a couple of subreddits publish their stats on user agents (moderators get access to this), and even on highly technical ones IIRC the old design and third-party apps are miniscule compared to the vast majority being the official app and current website. I'm fairly sure r/homelab was one of them, but Google seems to indicate that isn't the case.
How much do you think these numbers are impacted by people who arrive at posts via search engine versus active subscribers to a community? We all know that adding "reddit" to the end of your search query is a quick path to getting human-authored (and reasonably decent) results, which I'd imagine applies double to the topics covered by technical subs.
Probably safe to assume that people hitting Reddit via Google aren't opening those search results in a third-party app, and then there's the fact that the site defaults to the new layout for logged-out users.
(In other words, I'd be curious to see breakdowns between subscriber traffic and non-subscriber traffic and doesn't-even-have-a-Reddit-account traffic, if those breakdowns even exist.)
> Probably safe to assume that people hitting Reddit via Google aren't opening those search results in a third-party app
I absolutely do, Reddit is basically unusable in a browser for me which also seems to be the consensus in this discussion. But probably fair to assume that for a large majority.
The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years.
Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?
5$/month for premium is fair to remove ads, Youtube has a similar but more expensive option in their app. Removing the ability to use third-party clients altogether is dumb.
Has HN ever released data on operating costs? HN is obviously a lot less featurefull than Reddit, but it'd be a good starting point to get an idea of what's possible.
Damn, imagine a stripped down donation-funded text only Reddit clone run by something like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive.org.
I feel that's fair considering I (we) provide 100% of the content and 99% of the moderation.
I can take it or leave it to be honest. If it's free or very cheap I will use it. If it's not, I won't. But I won't tolerate ads.
Also I really should doomscroll less for my own mental health and productivity anyway.
The internet was great before reddit and it'll still be great long after reddit has shittified itself into irrelevance in the pursuit of shareholder returns.
Most forums never need a paid subscription and have very minimal ads, if any at all. Usenet was/is free on your ISP with no ads.
Computing power and network bandwidth have never been cheaper.
There's so much more content out there for free than I could ever consume.
I'm so sorry their dream of becoming millionaires on the back of others content only worked for a limited time.
>r&d
HAHAHA that's a laugh. I guess they need to pay the enshittification engineers.
What has actually improved on reddit over the last 5 years?
Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.
> Hoping that one of us geeks can come up with a workable open decentralized solution, so we can finally escape the corporate carousel of birth, shittification, death, repeat.
5 years i couldnt say. But older versions of reddit often had outages and all sorts of scaling issues when they were using...what was it...Cassandra for their backend.
They way I see these things is that reddit has captured many communities and is now holding them hostage. I would prefer reddit to die and to be replaced with federated software such as lemmy or even a decentralized solution.
I realise nothing has changed yet but with the news of this a couple weeks ago I deleted the Apollo app. Nothing against it, great app, I just wanted to wean myself off Reddit ahead of the big switch off.
I've actually found my mood to be much happier in general. I'm not saying Reddit is entirely a horrible place full of grouchy people but there is a lot of it. Maybe it's that, maybe it's getting rid of the doomscroll dopamine overload. Whatever it is, it's good times.
I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. Continuing to use "site:reddit.com" in some searches but I reckon I'm done with general use forums for the foreseeable.
Thank you for doing a digg, Reddit! I might not have realised I don't need you without this :D
> I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life.
My belief/hope about Twitter is that it won't be replaced by any single competitor, it will be replaced by a combination of people being a bit less online and spreading out their traffic and attention to multiple sites rather than making any one their home.
If Reddit spends the next 5 years slowly dying because it's too big to die quickly, that's the best we can realistically hope for.
I was going to say that if they kill RiF, I will most likely just never browse reddit, save from the odd web search that lands me in a thread.
But the truth is that I seldom visit Reddit right now. It grew worse over time to the point of being nearly intolerable to me. I suspect that is the fate of any network that grows to the point of becoming ubiquitous.
I don't think that Reddit will die, but I certainly won't be there to see what happened to it.
Twitter is definitely being side eyed for sure. Currently keeping a check of how much I'm using it, but I do use that partially for marketing and keeping an eye on new tech
HN also has a pass for now for the same new tech reason
> Reddit will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. (Note: This change should not impact any current moderator bots or extensions.)
This seems to be a common theme. Tumblr, Imgur, Onlyfans (tried and walked it back). I am betting this has to do with their credit card processors. They tend to enforce their values/morals on others. It is unfortunate sites just immediately obey and do not fight it.
I doubt the reason is morality, it's to hamstring 3rd party apps so they are baseline inferior to the official client. It's sabotaging the competition so anyone seeking a 'full' reddit experience is forced to use the official client, regardless of whether it is the best app or not.
It is an interesting time in internet history that we'll be looking back on. Twitter is eroding itself. Reddit closes itself off. Fb lost focus.
It's a ripe time for something new, or somethings new, to emerge, where people can go to discuss 'things'. But I'm not sure if it's going to take the forum like form we're expecting.
Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth and then pay for Reddit gold to get access? Then the apps can keep letting users call the API directly without a proxy server, and they still get paid.
(Yes, I’d like the API to remain free. But if it doesn’t that seems like the next best option rather than losing any and all open source clients.)
The alternative is for every single user to register as a developer to get their own OAuth2 client-id, or if Reddit switches to some kind of API token (thus collapsing the distinction between an _application_ and the _user authed through it_)
> ...it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser.
I find this to be a particularly cogent point. What is stopping someone from making an app that just displaying the normal site, ad free with extensions such as RES?
Without RedReader I would not use Reddit. It's understandable that they would want to capitalize off third-party app users -- this approach is pretty disappointing though. Been on the site over 15 years but looks like things are coming to an end.
Given how simple Reddit's API is to replicate, I'd love to see somebody build their own federated version of Reddit that the reader apps could consume alongside or in lieu of the main API.
Reddits value isnt in their code or API. Its in their userbase.
Reddit used to be completely opensource. As in you could clone reddit and deploy it for your own use back in the day. But it made no sense to do so other than research since the content, which is all user generated, is whats in the value.
Reddit is a cesspool I find hard to avoid due to its position, but that was my same take on Twitter and losing my client was the thing that got me to break that habit. I'd welcome it for Reddit to do the same and then I'd be free of both.
We are definitely entering a bold new shitty age where each user will start to have to register & upload their API key to their various apps.
Pax Intertwingularity was great & good, but everyone is shutting down, closing shop, removing access. The great disconnecting is upon us. No more internetworking, it's just endless silos & walled gardens forever in Internet 4.0.
Will this not be subject to the same limitations reddit is imposing on RedReader and others? I guess I don't know enough about how they distinguish a "third-party app" versus a website hooking into their API.
These changes seem to be in preparation for Reddit going public later this year, right? They're trying to make their financials look as strong as possible in the short-term even if long-term it fatally injures the website.
It will be interesting to watch! I see a lot of people saying they'll go to alternatives, but what alternatives are there to Reddit? Back to Digg? Voat? Here? I'm not aware of a good replacement.
There isn't going to be an alternative. Nobody can shoulder the burden of several tens of millions of Redditors except for another company, who'll be compelled to act in a similar way to preserve the cash cows.
What already has been happening is that communities in the crosshairs of administration have set up their own sites that very few people know of, and the rest continue to be farmed for ad revenue.
Yet to see a definitive statement for my choice of reddit browser, "joey for reddit"
It has a "hold for popover" feature which makes skim reading and image preview much easier. I find myself doing it in browsers, wishing they did the same thing: thumbnail of an image? Just hold to see full size. It's a remarkably useful gui shortcut.
I use a chrome extension called Imagus that will load any linked image on mouseover (either instantly or after a configurable delay). The image can be shown as large as your current browser window and it will even load links to albums in such a way where scrolling while mouse-overed or pressing left and right on the keyboard will advance between images.
I've never developed a mobile app that talks to an API. How do you even store API keys, open source or not? On a jailbreaked iPhone someone could just extract the IPA file and then decompile the API key. If you proxy through your own server, then you replace the problem with that anyone can try to talk to your own server.
I seriously believe their censoring and bad mods is going to make the decline faster, just try to comment on subs as wallstreetsilver and you can get autobanned of some subs as justiceserved.
I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it.
Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".