Most people don't want third party Reddit apps because they inherently like third party apps (some people do want FOSS apps, but that's the minority). People largely want third party apps because the first party app is terrible.

So, clearly someone likes the Reddit app, right? Those millions of 5 star reviews are definitely not fake/bought.

The Reddit app, for me, is garbage. I am surprised it's not better; it feels like the devs aren't really using it.

definitely

Also, I don't think it's at all controversial to suggest the video player is one of the worst I've used. I dread trying to load up native videos on desktop (new or old design), I can't imagine it being better on the app.

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those are the biggest issues that will never be reconciled. Others include features you probably don't care about unless you're a power user. Ability to filter posts/users. favoriting certain subs, various mod tools that STILL have no alternative (even on desktop), proper responsive design for tablets, an actual other discussions option, visible flairs etc. I could go on all day with nitpicks (each of which I requested to reddit at some point years ago. Some of which were promised but never realized).

There is an api you can use to make a third party client, last I saw it's actually just the same as the bot api but you just identify as a "human" instead.

Users risk getting banned for "self botting" if you do this though. AFAIK there is no option to pay to do this either.

Not surprised at all this angers the power users.

Twitter is charging for their API, Reddit is charging for their API, and people don't like change. I'm not sure where I've had "sarcasm or the presumption of stupidity" but that was certainly a strange section to add to your comment.

Most people believe that charging for the APIs is reasonable. You might be missing the primary arguments going on about egregious costs and unreasonable (and often unexplained) timelines.

I am quite okay with the planned API costs, timeline, and communication. How were you affected by the changes? I read the Apollo guy's posts, but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.

Edit: Also, I'm curious how much you'd be paying.

If someone really likes my project but really hates me (or vice versa) you can fork my project and keep going. Take all the progress I contributed to and make your own ball.

Reddit, not so much. Maybe you can clone the high level design, but the people wont follow. It's not like OS where contributers are well, contributing. Most of the audience is passive browsers.

in the same way Spec work is a "volunteer position", sure.

> It is not “unpaid” labor, and moderators acting like they’re doing anyone favors is ridiculous.

I'd love for the mods to walk and show how correct they are.

>tons of people from the community will step up.

yes, because reddit never complained about power tripping users eager to be in a position of authority and praise how they make the site a better place. Surely hiring one of those in the midsts of a revolt is the best scenario.

I’m sorry you’re upset about this, but mods are just users who enjoy running communities (or worse, are paid by an org to curate some mentality.) They are not Reddit employees nor do they improve reddits bottom line. They are just users of a platform, but unlike general users they are the one demographic it’s easy to replace since users tend to think they can do better by default.

could not disagree more. You could not pay me to put up with the riffraff of spam, angry users who don't care about me, and maintenance of tools that are not even suppotred by the site, despite relying on them. At least I have a bit of social pressure on my side as a cashier keeping people from throwing punches (a bit).

Someone crazy enough to do that for free isn't someone I let go of (from the perspecive of a profit seeking executive). I can change algorithms and bargain with Google to get more traffic from "general users".

But I guess we're talking past each other. You seem to see all mods as power hungry and foaming at the tooth to moderate a bunch of users. Sure, you can find SOMEONE, in the samw way on how you can find someone to do odd jobs on the street. That's not equivalent to a proper experienced moderator who has already hit those growing pains. Trying to rationalize this with you is like trying to rationalize at work why you shouldn't lay off experienced talent. I'll just shake my head as the company spirals down and points fingers instead of looking within and thinking "maybe we should value our workers and try and keep them happy".

Every app of choice I'd use for reddit is shutting down in a week. I don't like the supposedly official app.

I already disdained reddit for several reasons over the years and this is the camel that broke the straw. I have no issues paying for good service (I bought a SomethingAwful account over a decade ago, and I donate to Tildes) and I don't think reddit is a good service, in its platform, its community, nor its general paradigms. It is not moving in a direction that I want to support. If that means a lonely migration to a new community, so be it. Not the first time, won't be the last.

>but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.

and reddit didn't benefit from that free labor at all.

This is always such a weird angle to take. That some dude paid 2 other people part time and hes stealing from a billion dollar coporation who employs 2000 people as is. Shocker that one is profitable and the other struggles.

>uch as updating CSS flair based on a remote set of changing assets

yeah, remember when reddit said it would implement native flairing? Glad you did that work for them (likely built on the work of others' free labor).

I was affected by twitter’s API changes multiple times between January and now. The tangible affects were from their technical mistakes (suspending my apps multiple times and then reverting the suspensions; creating their new API tiers but not actually putting me in one of them without my direct intervention). The less tangible affects were their multiple announcements of pending changes with no timelines or prices, which sowed confusion and were a huge waste of time to think about.

In both cases, reddit and twitter, it takes no effort to see how these API changes could have been more professionally rolled out.

Obviously for FOSS apps they can't stop someone from recompiling the app with their own API key baked in, but the barrier to entry there is significantly higher.

Now it begs the question: why not force 3p apps to show ads to non-premium users? I imagine control is the answer there. Easier to show to adverts how good one app is doing then verifying proper ad placement in every 3p app.

Given how antagonistic reddit has been to 3rd party apps during this one can assume they would make this explicit if anyone tried.

People are upset because reddit (with the jerk in charge) are screwing them over. And they are not only screwing them over they are lying through their teeth. On a platform that has 0 value without the work of the users generating the content.

Twitter? Twitter is a dumpster fire. Reddit will join it soon.

Seriously. Either take part in the discussion and respond to the points being made/learn more or stop trolling. This is not the place.

the thing that should've clued you into this is how emotionally-charged and defensive the language used by these people is (let alone the desire to stage a virtual "protest"…)—once you see this pattern, it's easy to identify going forward.

It is almost universally understood that no business can operate at a loss, inducing by those who are moving away from Reddit. That you cannot understand this is the "presumption of idiocy" that was mentioned.

The majority of kids these days have been stockholm-syndromed into loving closed gardens like Reddit or Discord. Nobody taught them to that companies and closed gardens manipulate them for their own power. Open, decentralized communities are dying because of it.

Absolutely untrue. The number of things you can't do with Discord vastly exceeds nearly every chat client out there that precedes it. Want to watch multiple chats? Fuck you. Want to filter notifications by server/sender/other criteria? Fuck you. Are you a power user? Fuck you. Do you want important content indexed by search engines? Fuck you. Want to break a conversation out into its own window? Fuck you.

Oh but hey it has a cute logo and you can post gifs. Because apparently people need to anthropomorphize their computers and are incapable of expressing themselves with their words.

"kids those days" using MySpace/FB/Instagram 10-15 years ago?

or "kids those days" using AOL 25-30 years ago?

After maybe a brief window from approx 1999-2004 of migrating from AOL's walled garden to disparate forums and such (at massively smaller scale), it's been moving from one walled garden to another for basically 20 years now.

Anyone who wants to change that would be really well served to think about why that has been vs just tossing around stuff like "stockholm syndrome" and "nobody taught them." I don't think "the kids" are nearly as blindly trusting in things like the TikTok algorithm as you think, I think the choices are much more complex than just "if only someone would tell them the flaws they'd all move."

To say nothing of the fact that the cultural zeitgeist has changed from kids distrusting "the man" to kids openly bragging about sponsorships and "influencers" whoring themselves out for likes and free product. Content that was accessible, linkable, archivable, and searchable now lives in millions of miniature jails. And then we get something like the Reddit apocalypse that just happened and now the internet is missing vast swathes of vitally important information, because one stupid fucking CEO wanted to take his company public.

So yes, kids these days.

I personally don't place nearly as much value on diversity of clients to access centralized services as you. Isn't that exactly what led to that "Reddit apocalypse"? An illusion of openness with a giant corporate SPOF, just like all the other ones? Chosen by the kids of 10-15 years ago? If not for the transitory nature of Reddit becoming popular as the surge of the mobile migration catching people off guard, you probably never get the same appearance of openness in the first place - but as long as the content was centrally hosted, it was the same closed-garden story. Same with all the old no-longer-viewable picture tweets that relied on one or another flash-in-the-pan image hosting service... Reddit, Twitter, all of them were never anything but walled gardens, and people in the fading non-walled-gardens in the last 2010s certainly called that out.

Nor is thinking everyone else is a sellout anything new. Certainly not newer than the 90s. The target of that message was the huge number of people who always did buy the pop products in the first place. Nobody would care about raging against the machine if the machine wasn't dominant. And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.

I'm OK with the patchwork of image hosts fading out because they are archivable. I can still right-click to save what interests me, and the image is hosted at a URL anyone could punch in or scrape. Except more recently, where we all apparently hate bots and we've let our bandwidth providers become highwaymen for a resource that is supposed to be free.

I'm not saying this stuff needs to be immortal, it just needs to be distributed, archiveable, linkable, and accessible from the client of your choice. Reddit suppresses scraping and nobody seems to have anything cached in an accessible way, at least judging by Google results.

> And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.

Where there is an effective ecosystem that avoids "The Man" I think you will still find those people. They are not highlighted or lifted up by the masses. Instead most folks will make the contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life. I know this because I did it too. But I am much happier having weaned myself from its bosom.

Yeah, it's not just "kids of today", is it? Almost all of us have chosen convenience over distributed, decentralized, robust, linkable, exportable platforms at some point.

All the way back to the days of those corporate media and commercial advertising sites inside of AOL bringing more new users to the web than plain Usenet.

I just don't think it's despicable at all. Running a discord channel instead of hosting a web forum? A lot easier to spin something up quickly with multimedia capabilities for a community without technical knowledge. It could all go away tomorrow, or slowly get shittified... and people will move on to something else again.

People having to ask questions anew that have already been answered in the past? In-depth knowledge of yesterday's culture fading away? To me, that isn't a high price to pay. I talk to people on HN (walled garden), some others on forums (a mix of corporate walled garden or independent ones), some others on Discord (walled garden), it's all good enough IMO. Certainly not a moral failing for anyone. Saying something like "contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life" doesn't make me think you're any happier for avoiding it... those are not the words of the content.

Yet the original Reddit, Usenet, was right there as open as decentralized as can be and they flocked to the walled gardens anyway. Kids those days.

Which resulted in most pages being a horrific travesty in terms of readability.

knowledge. Kids in the myspace days were relatively safe. The dark patterns of Facebook weren't public until well after it became the social media website.

If reddit/discord kids choose not to heed this knowledge, this is on them. They should be better at googling and consuming news than the Myspace kids were. I'll hold them to a higher standard.

>or "kids those days" using AOL 25-30 years ago?

in the early AOL days there wasn't even an easy way to receive online transactions. People who had AoL had it delievered to them on a disc, bought or given to them physically. There could be viruses, and the 90's internet was truly the wild west, but this was well before the mantra of "the Internet never forgets" was really something to worry about.

>it's been moving from one walled garden to another for basically 20 years now.

I don't have issues with the concept of a walled garden. But I'm not a fan of putting all my eggs into one basket. Even if we have a truly benevolent ruler, they may one day pass away and transfer power to a tyrant. Always have a backup plan.

That's my issue, it seems the internet is closing off more and more and converging into a few critical points of operations. Seemingly forgetting the idea that every empire falls. I don't care if Reddit devolves into a glorified eternal commercial, I care that no one is prepared to properly move to something else, anything else.

There are several different use cases for Reddit. One is low-value media consumption, similar to TikTok and the primary usage of Instagram. /r/aww is that sort of thing. New.reddit and the Reddit app are optimized for this use case, and you're probably right that any friction between the viewer and the next picture of a cat being cute will reduce engagement considerably.

Another is discussion forums around a common interest, often a niche interest. The small fraction of users who post original content and answer difficult questions are a big driver for these kinds of communities. When those kinds of people decide that Reddit is no longer acceptable, communities built there will wither. If those people move to Lemmy, people will put up with a bit of friction to follow them.