If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.
The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?
What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.
>So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?
It's because of misaligned incentives.
Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.
First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.
First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.
Furthermore, having third party apps in directly against the business model, which seeks total control of the user's attention to deliver ads and optimize for profits. They are hoping to bump their valuations up before the IPO by this.
> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.
I wouldn't phrase it like that.
I'd say 'The anti-federation reality has always been that centralized entities have the authority to more quickly evolve their product.'
Whereas federated models have always had a terrible time upgrading standards in a timely manner, even when upgrades are obviously needed.
However, products typically exist in distinct phrases -- rapid growth/evolution is eventually followed by stability/maturity.
Once the product switches to that latter mode, the evolutionary speed benefits of centralization dull.
Obvious example: AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ's initial popularity... before multi-client Trillian et al. became preferable... because the limited intersection feature set it supported already covered everything everyone wanted to do via IMs.
Reddit reached feature completion and maturity a while ago, which made it ripe for disruption via a decentralized clone.
However, they're just realizing the emperor has no clothes and their only remaining moat is their existing users, and users are a fickle moat.
> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.
This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.
The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.
(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)
I left facebook towards the end of 2016, for exactly the reason you might think. I used Twitter for a while before and after that as a kind of methadone, and even stipulating that I was not looking for connection to friends and family, the interactions I had on Twitter in 2017 were, by and large, incredibly low-quality, and I was only interacting with people who ideologically agreed with me, the trolls never reached me, or if they did they were in stealth mode and ineffective.
In retrospect, some of the accounts might have been intended to make the left look extra ridiculous, not sure, but I don't really believe that's true, I've seen people chase enough bad ideas en masse now that I think these were well-meaning people who believed that by participating in this infernal attention mill, they were doing things that would change the world for the better.
Reddit has likewise never been even mediocre at what it's purporting to be, these are all just what happens when people approach the internet, which is one thing, as though it was a super cool television, which is a whole other thing. The illusion of participation and having a voice is really what people are buying with all their attention, because actually having a voice on the actual internet means knowing html at a minimum. Not actually a tall order for anyone who has a couple days and a willingness to do a bit of mental labour, but why bother when you can just post on whichever corporate daemon you favour.
The weirdest thing of all to me, I don't even know how I found this place but it's got some of the best interactions I've had since Usenet died, and I didn't know know what ycombinator was or why it wasn't called hackernews.net or whatever. To learn just this week that the platform is just a service operated by the people behind quite a lot of this VC fuckery, I'm still integrating it, but it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts.
Anyways didn't come to talk about that, came to say, been using Mastodon the last month or so, and I am also having pretty high quality interactions there. Nothing remotely like the idiocy I encountered daily in my Twitter feed. Occasionally a thing that I don't care for, like, I really don't need all the furry porn, holy crap are there ever a lot of very dedicated people servicing the furry market and I'm gonna be looking into that cause I know how to make tails move. But that filters out easy.
I'm on the main instance and I'm looking around at others while I decide whether to just self-host, but I enjoy the scroll with the accounts and hashtags I follow, the quality ranges from boring to amazing, very little annoying, trollish, spammy, Mindset-infected trash comes through my feed, and like I said, the only heavy filtering I've done is the porn.
Best part: I loved Facebook when I first joined and when I started to get discontented was when the default feed stopped being "what you follow in the order they post," and that has never been around since, except notably on reddit I suppose. Nothing wrong with having an algo feed available for discovery, and Mastodon has that, but your feed is just what you follow in the order they post as a default. So you scroll down till you realize you've seen it already, and you know you've seen it all for now and you move on. There is no machine trying to hold your attention, there is just what you asked for. What a concept.
>it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts
The tech genius hobos, burnouts, and weirdos come here to rub elbows with the Patagucci vest crowd. The guy who manages this place ("dang") seems to tolerate us unwashed types, as long as we don't post polemics. You're not necessarily in the wrong place, but I can see how you might feel outnumbered.
Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.
Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.
There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.
Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.
Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.
1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line.
2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.
Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives.
The problem with that, if it's true, is that those people are less likely to be the content creators and more likely to be people who come to read what the 'serious' Reddit users post. Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
Ultimately, Reddit's main work is to serve a small core group of people who post new content, and that content is what draws the rest of the users. They'll need those users to be happy in the first party app. That might be the case already. If it isn't, Reddit are taking a huge risk.
Reddit largely leeches anyways. I’m not exactly sure why (I suspect the sorting algorithm and the quick turnover of content), but its community is shockingly unproductive in terms of content creation. The only thing it does somewhat well is aggregation. So no, I don’t think they have much to fear in that regard.
They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.
Not surprising at all. Reddit's culture is vehemently against original creation and deftly afraid of any hint of self-promotion. The users claim to be tired of all the same reposts but shun 99% of attempts for people to share originality.
>Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.
I agree. I guess the gamble here (that historically, usually pays off) is that the casual userbase size is good enough to keep the power users around, who ultimately want visibility. That's the hardest part of the modern internet and why social media survive well past what would be downfalls for any other product.
I'm not going to say Reddit is too big to fail, but I don't think reddit's death will be by a thousand paper cuts. it will heal with new mods as fast as the old ones leave. Whether it whither and rots away over the years with that new modbase is the big question mark.
