I wish the Twitter client were half as good as Apollo. I really miss the ability to navigate the stack by swiping as intuitively as I can with Apollo. In Twitter the best I can hope for is a stack of depth two.

Twitter pushed me onto Mastodon a while back and i imagine Reddit will do the same. Funny enough, i have exactly one of the clients mentioned in this discussion - Tweetbot - on Mastodon. Ie the app made by the same devs.

I just don't think I'll use Reddit anymore. It was a nice place to catch up with my interests but the only way in which I used it was via Apollo. The one thing that made Reddit unique compared to all its competitors was its developer community and they have deliberately torpedoed it.

All good things have to end but this was avoidable.

Where to next though? is there anywhere else like it?

You’re on it, buddy :P

Indeed. And it even has the same features (centralized, ultimately beholden to commercial interests) that destroyed Reddit!

But don't worry, that's not going to happen here. You don't need a decentralized non-profit community, trust me. It's going to work out this time. Really.

Ironically Reddit also gives users way more control over their data than this place.

I'm not sure if you're being entirely serious but I disagree. HN is special because while it's a popular (relatively speaking) social media site, it's also run by a company that isn't in the social media business. YC is not concerned with how to make HN revenue generating, they just want to push people to where the real money is made for them: their startup accelerator.

With that said it's in YC's best interest to keep users happy, only change what is requested and generally keep the status quo. Unfortunately for a company like Reddit that is a social media site and has to make money with their social media product, keeping users happy at all costs is not in their best interest (though that has yet to be seen).

Unfortunately, HN has nowhere near the diversity of communities and viewpoints as a place like reddit did.

Yeah it's a bizarre claim. I've described HN as a single, usually really good, subreddit before but it's absolutely not a replacement for the entire site.

Well, as it stands HN is like just another good subreddit.

I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...

Not commenting on your app, but I think the real reason mobile clients are needed for Reddit is that they intentionally try to break the mobile web experience to force their app down your throat. In contrast, HN.. doesn't. The mobile website is pleasant to use, if you are okay with the rather small text buttons.

That's a perfectly fair point. I personally think HN is one of the best designed sites out there. Being extremely minimal is one of the best designs. I hope that never changes.

I built HACK specifically to be able to be notified when people reply to me. That's one of my selling points.

iOS has "unblocked" browser notifications now, hasn't it?

That’s only if hacker news decides to implement it. And based on their motto, I doubt they will.

What I mean is that you don't have to build an iOS app anymore just for notifications.

Commenting this from HACK. The default HN interface does have problems. The buttons are indeed too small. The comments indentation is a little too small. Lack of notifications. A separate page on clicking reply, etc.

I was spoiled by Apollo for Reddit and HACK has done the same thing for HN. Thank you!

message me at (my username) at gmail dot com. I'm the creator of Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) that lets users share all their online platforms in 1 profile, and I want to speak on possibly integrating HACK as a platform that users can share their account of.

Hey I’ve never been on HN before but have seen good articles pop up on Reddit. A few minutes ago I searched for hacker news in the App Store, scrolled a bit, and downloaded HACK because it looked the most promising :)

And now I’m posting my first HN comment on this app to the dev hahah.

Haha thanks! Glad you could find my app easily!

commenting from HACK rn!! it reminds me of apollo in a good way :)

There's a list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13x9sy7/now_that...

Note that all of these are still centralized, so still subjects to similar issues. Once again selfhosting is the best xay forward

digg :)

"We're" not stuck unless your career is in social media, in which case yes, they will still be the most popular sites and the best way to reach people.

But for the rest of us, there's always a choice to foster a new community. Whether there is enough for that, and if a server is ready for that load, are big questions to answer though

And that’s fine. We need less low effort rage bait, viral influencer influence on the economy.

The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.

It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS

We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.

All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk

If you work in social media, you can probably afford a subscription based enriched app that pays the API fees.

It's the normal users that suffer. Hopefully that suffering will hit Reddits usage/cash flows enough to make them u turn.

* * *

I have no idea why, but I can only stand to use reddit in "old" mode. Even on mobile. It's completely 100% unusable in any other format. I've tried to use their app and standard mobile website, but I can't make heads or tails of the hierarchy of content.

Any tips on using old reddit on a phone? Constantly zooming in to press unfriendly-for-tap buttons make it a chore, compared to Apollo.

That’s the way.

The alternative is the god awful updated site or their app. I hope you like adverts.

There could be a userscript for a better reddit UI if someone cared but looks like nobody does. There's also Reddit Enhancement Suite but I don't think you can use it on mobile.

If you don't use old mode in a mobile browser, they block off 1/3 of your screen with "Are you sure you don't want to use the Reddit App?" Pretty sure I don't Reddit.

Wasn't there something called `teddit` that was written in nim that did a better job of removing all the js crap that makes reddit terrible? I would imagine everyone will just move to that if possible. Although perhaps that may also be affected by their idiotic API charge junk.

Yep https://teddit.net/ although it’s quite slow. There are other alternatives out there too.

Decentralization doesn't seem like a bad idea now?

Only if there was a way to host websites where no central authority ever owned the data and the people who ran relays got paid in some form of cryptographically secure crypto currency. Frontend clients that made requests would need to pay in the same token to avoid abuse.