Reddit's proposed API changes and the continued existence of RedReader
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
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".
I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
And this is frustrating to me as a user, because Discord is much more of a pain to try to search and navigate.
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].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/elG_zyZya5g
- 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.
I miss the heyday of programs like Trillian.
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.
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.
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.
You have to cater to them in some way shape or form or they're going to find a platform that does.
That's how reddit got popular in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a citation for that claim?
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 wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
I guarantee you Reddit makes most of it's money from astroturfing. It's why they'll never go public, they don't want to open their books.
You can't look at r/Politics, WPT, etc and tell me those posters are human.
Longer bit in a recent response to a thread about Reddit's increasing enshittification:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
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.
They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The people make content.
The people post content to groups they're on.
The people are the moderators of those groups.
But reddit profits.
Seems like the old federated solution is better. Capitalizing on people socializing and doing stuff just seems wrong, and I'd say IS wrong.
I wonder what it'd take to rebuild Usenet and get easy access for the masses, like Mastodon has done?
Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.
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.
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.)
Why not? Third part apps can be registered to open reddit.com links, so any mobile search would end up there.
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.
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)?
Signed, third party app reddit viewer.
Do you expect the website to be free of ads for you, and how do they sustain themselves? engineering work? cost of infra? r&d?
Would you pay to browser reddits ad free?
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.
lemmy?
OK, now they've fixed their scaling issues, what needs to be done?
They certainly haven't made any positive frontend improvements.
Can there be no such thing as a finished product?
From a quick google, they have 55M daily users.
How much data would the average one use, and what would that cost? What about the other costs?
How much would a not-for-profit reddit have to charge users for an ad-free experience?
Damn, imagine a stripped down donation-funded text only Reddit clone run by something like the Wikimedia foundation or Archive.org.
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
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.
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.
HN also has a pass for now for the same new tech reason
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.
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.
(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.)
It does: https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/ma... but the OAuth client-id is issued to RedReader, meaning that when QuantumBadger's api access gets nuked, there goes RedReader
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_)
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?
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.
It looks like this is going to kill RedditSync.
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.
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.
Some people fine Lemmy a good decentralized alternative, there is also tildes.net but they are more left inclined.
There was a nostr alternative called nvote but the development is stopped, kind of dissapointed.
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.
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.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/imagus/immpkjjlgap...