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Comment by Gordonjcp | Hacker News Reader

How exactly is reddit going to be "unusable"? I mean, apart from the general low quality of posts in a lot of subs?

In particular, third party apps like Apollo are popular for moderators because the default tools from Reddit are just hard to use, especially on mobile. Thus, I think the big impact to reddit's model is to actually drive off a lot of moderators.

i.e., I've seen a lot of comments like this that makes me think this is going to be a real problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/comment/...

Personally, this is what bothers me the most; subreddits that are strictly moderated are usually useful, and ones that aren't are just not worth regular time.

This is also why I'm not really sure about usenet or any other replacement, because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.

> (...), because moderation is still the hard problem to get right.

Why not try AI?

While I do think AI could greatly help moderation, someone has to implement it, to be responsible for trust issues. And, right now, I'm not sure Reddit will be that someone.

And it's even more unclear is who would do that more generically where it could be used on a platform like usenet

Every community has tons of people that would take up the moderation mantle

I think this is out of the complaints about API access costs and those using third-party clients will "just stop using reddit" which I'm not sure is actually going to happen as broadly as folks may believe

But it might.

I have a bias here, though... I got fed up with Reddit and quit it entirely a couple of years ago, so I can easily see why others would bail on it without a great deal of prodding.

I suspect it'll be like a lot of things, where everyone says they're ditching it, and they are not ditching it.

I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.

> I don't really understand why people use an "app" anyway, when browsers exist.

Reddit from a mobile browser is one of the most unfriendly sites I've ever found.

It also consistently insists, breaks functionality and nags you to try and get you to use the app instead of the browser. Its barely useable from a mobile browser.

I refuse to download the app out of principle. I just manually go into the URL bar and add "old." to get the classic experience.

They can steal a lot more data from you using the app, that's why they insist on you installing it.

I avoid native mobile apps for anything but the most essential for this reason. If it wasn't for the cars and public transportation I'd be using a feature phone by now.

Because Reddit's web experience is shit. The apps exist to make using Reddit bearable.

It works just fine in a browser.

You make think so, but it's a minority opinion, particularly among people who use reddit a lot.

Can you give an example of why?

Im not going to stop using reddit, but I'll use it a lot less. I primarily consume it on my phone using Apollo when Im relaxing. I would likely only use it on my desktop and that would become infrequent at best.

A part of me almost wants the API changes to happen. It would free up more of my time in the evening and provide a little bit of schadenfreude. But honestly, I should just uninstall the app anyways.

The official clients suck, but that's not currently a problem because there are quality third party clients you can use instead. But this change is going to shut down the third party clients.

If they also stop offering old.reddit.com I'm convinced the place will be a ghost town like Tumblr in a matter of weeks.

The new Web experience is horrid. Intentionally bad it looks. Maybe it works if you just read the posts and maybe few comments, but trying to go any deeper in conversations is just not possible.

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