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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

Seems unlikely. How many people have installed AMP blockers specifically on ios15? How many people have installed AMP blockers on any other platform that's not being UA-sniffed?

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Amplosion got a big boost by being made by the same guy who did Apollo (pretty much the de facto Reddit client on iOS).

I don't get bothered by AMP pages that much, but I paid the few euros for Amplosion just to support Christian's work and give a middle finger to Google's attempts to take over the web.

Apollo is not the defacto reddit client. Reddit's own app is.

Reddit's own app is an adware & malware that happens to display some Reddit content.

Source for the malware claim?

I believe (s)he wanted imply reddit's official app displays a lot of inline advertisements and other stuff that makes it difficult to determine what is legit subscribed content and what is sneakily inserted by reddit.

Maybe I am wrong.

From Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia:

> Programs are also considered malware if they secretly act against the interests of the computer user.

There are two criteria that software must meet to fit this definition:

1. The software must act against the interests of the computer user.

2. This must be done "secretly".

I unfortunately do not know much about the Reddit App for iOS so I can't make a judgement as to whether it fits definition 2. I think I can say with confidence it fits definition 1.

It tracks you for advertising purposes. That's malicious in my book.

It doesn’t advertise to you in secret (how would that even work?). The ads are front and center. It’s user hostile, but not malware.

The ads are. The data being collected to target those ads is not.

I guess a non-malicious way of collecting the data for ad purposes could be to collect it locally and offer the user to review it before sending it off.

I'd be happy if someone would bake mobile teddit or other "proxies" app. I know site still works but this could be done more handy and with aiming at additional features, like pushing yt videos through invidious "pipe".

Nah. Reddit’s client is the official Reddit client, but Apollo is the de facto one for people who want to actually use Reddit.

Also Apollo now has a Safari extension which will automatically redirect Reddit links to Apollo. Previously this was a manual process after the page already loaded after telling Reddit for the umpteen-billionth time you want Safari, not the official Reddit client.

This. I think I would actually give up on reddit without apollo, the official app and website are user-hostile. I wonder if they will tighten the API up and eventually kill third-party clients.

If Apollo is the interface, what is Reddit besides a JSON document store and object storage for media? Once Apollo is big enough (network effects, critical mass, whatevs), it could spin off of Reddit as the backend (Cloudflare R2 for objects, workers and KV for comments). You can even backfill from the numerous Reddit archives (Internet Archive, Pushshift, etc) out there.

(Apollo user with an interest in a distributed web platform)

When it was just text, Reddit was cheap enough to run that it was kind of questionable why they needed so much VC funding.

> If Apollo is the interface, what is Reddit besides a JSON document store and object storage for media?

A community, or if you prefer, a community of communities. That part is essential.

Yeah, agree. I'm arguing for disintermediation of the community from the corporate entity attempting to squeeze as much value out of the community as possible (and in the process, being a hot potato from one company to the next). Communities deserve better (Stackoverflow and Wikipedia come to mind), and the technology primitives are stupid simple. Perhaps I've been reading too much Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow lately!

Philosophically? Sure. But with how the masses act and behave and take interest in, getting the critical mass of non-technical people you would need to make it work is a massive hurdle.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit will skate by with inertia for years to come no matter how suicidally they behave because they have mass appeal. Losing one audience doesn’t matter because they have millions of other audiences. You start up a social network that interests mainly technical people and the journalists that report on them, well it’s just not going to thrive because after the honeymoon period is over, the network just starts to look stale and slowly die off. E.g. Google+.

I concede these are all good points and I genuinely appreciate the discourse. Speaking only for myself, I see the challenges as:

1. Preserve the content and culture of these platforms for users and future historians (in the case of Reddit, Pushshift and the Internet Archive). UGC ("user generated content") belongs to users first and foremost.

2. Continue to find opportunities to reduce the moats of incumbents and the friction of standing up alternatives. If a site disappears, there should be little impact to anyone other than employees and shareholders.

3. Be ready to jump in and scale up when incumbents misstep (Signal and Telegram seeing huge membership jumps during Facebook's extended outage earlier this week, Digg's redesign helping Reddit's growth, etc).

That’s great but that’s an archival project, not a social network. There’s room for smaller networks to exist on the fringes but we’re unlikely to see a Reddit that looks like Reddit overtake Reddit on its own merits. The same for Facebook, or TikTok or Twitter.

I wonder if Lemmy instances are similar enough that the app could just be pointed toward them.

They should just hire the guy. I wouldn’t mind Apollo with ads from Reddit official.

Well Twitter on iOS started life as Tweetie which was an absolutely fantastic client on both iPhones and Macintoshes. I wouldn’t call it that now, even if some of the original Tweetie code is in there. Apollo with ads doesn’t seem like it is in Reddit’s business plan and after some time I think Apollo would go the way Tweetie did.

Edit: Something from the dredges of my memory just came back up and reminded me of something. The official Reddit client did start life as a 3rd party client: Alien Blue. [1]

So the real risk is Apollo becoming the next Alien Blue. Personally I would rather it stay independent.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10/16/reddit-buys-unoff...

The official Reddit iOS app is already the result of Reddit buying an existing, excellent third-party app (Alien Blue), which they proceeded to ruin.

I have no issue with the official Reddit app and I can use Reddit just fine.

> Apollo is not the defacto reddit client. Reddit's own app is.

Reddit's is the official client.

> Defacto: in fact, or in effect, whether by right or not

I think in this case the validity of the word "defacto" depends on your sample population. Apollo is very popular (and a fantastic reddit client, I wish there was an equivalent for HN) but I can't imagine it's marketshare is anywhere close to even 50%. Among tech enthusiasts I'll bet it ranks pretty high. Similar to an app like Overcast. If you poll HN or other tech communities I bet it's well represented but in the broader ecosystem it's a small fish.

Reddit pushes the official client hard from the mobile website. I'm sure its marketshare is huge.

100% agree. Thanks to Safari extensions (and the afore mentioned AMP redirector) you can now jump right into Apollo from a Reddit link and it's the best experience.

I hope the marketshare of the official client is at the very least high enough to prevent them from crippling APIs so third-party clients are gimped, like Twitter has done.

God forbid they add a token limit

I don't care too much about AMP links but I bought Amplosion just to show my support for Christian, the author of Apollo. That app alone makes Reddit bearable. The official Reddit app is terrible and actively harms the browsing experience and makes it harder to find actual useful content on Reddit as opposed to all the pushed spam content.

For anyone on android, "Reddit is fun" is hands down the best I've used.

I seriously don't see how people put up with the main app + non old.reddit.com site. It's just miserable and ad filled.

Soon they won't have a choice as old.reddit.com is already set for deprecation. The whole site is an advertising platform now.

I actually generally like AMP, but I paid for the extension because AMP breaks native app URL listeners, so from an AMP page it's impossible to open the page in the native iOS app e.g. YouTube or Reddit. (FYI, free AMP blocker extensions quickly emerged after that paid one went viral.)

People who

- use iOS 15 (including betas)

- hate AMP

- still use Google for search

- went to the trouble of finding and installing such an extension

is probably a number that rounds to 0.0% of Google searches.

Not meant as a critique of the extension writer, just agree that this explanation seems highly implausible to me.

I agree – the number is probably insignificant, but I don't think you have to restrict your estimate to people who hate AMP. Basically an average iOS user (likely using Google as it's still the default last I checked) who in the past installed an extension to block unwanted content (ads/malware/etc) may be blocking AMP links without even knowing what they are.

How many normal users have even heard of AMP? Even among those technical enough to know or care about AMP, how many have installed and use these plugins? I haven’t.

I don’t see how blockers installed by a small percentage of techies would have much impact.

While it's only a Bezos number, a paid AMP blocker (perhaps from OP?) was in the list of top paid apps when iOS 15 went live.

Question might be if it inspires more blocking elsewhere.

It is pretty bad news for AMP that Ampolosion exists. It would be even worse if Samsung noticed that popularity and implemented something similar in their browser, perhaps even by default.

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