Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
I seriously think this is just reddit finally thinking "yup - we've won - time to start acting with impunity for anything that cuts costs (like not maintaining a public API) or increases even the smallest bit of revenue (like managing to convert 1% of apollo users to first-party-app users while alienating (no pun intended) the rest).
Reddit is also betting that the 'sticky' users who contribute won't leave. And I think they grossly underestimated just how fast content creators can abandon your platform for a more friendly one.
I also surmise that the API charging is to claw money back from aggregators and those YT shorts and Tiktoks that badly read a post and some comments along with an unrelated video. And also killing 3rd party API clients also helps adblocking efforts and control of the 'narrative'.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/13xydtw/the_leg...
https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/comments/13y7iit/made_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Baking/comments/13ybcbk/first_time_...
Far more sensible is to charge the apps, and have them monetize with their own ads.
This would still hurt free third party apps, but I'm sure power users wouldn't mind paying $1/month to keep their favorite third party app going.
Instead, Reddit went for insane API pricing that app developers can't realistically afford at the subscription rates people are willing to pay.
This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.
Are you curious about what information is being sent through your house between 10KHz and 6GHz? Curious what your water meter is broadcasting to the neighborhood? https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/
Feel like some short videos of animals being adorable? https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/ (or any of the related subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/wiki/relatedsubreddits/)
Want to find out about things in your city? eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/
Into plants? https://www.reddit.com/r/plants/
Play guitar or are thinking about it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/
How do you open your messages with Facebook on mobile? Everytime I try it wants to redirect me to the app that of course I don't have. The desktop mode is just horrible to use on my Pixel 6 (I find the screen too small).
This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.
I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul.
If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself
Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?
> invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is
They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss.
> try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that.
I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.
Mostly features.
3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.
Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.
The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.
I paid $5 to get rid of the ads anyway.
All squids are already damp.
Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.
It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.
The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.
It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1
The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.
A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.
I don't think traffic is indicative of whether a site has outstayed its cultural relevance (or efficacy).
I imagine HN readers can list off any number of sites that were in the top 10 traffic-wise and then suddenly were gone.
Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?
But I think in truth they can do a lot before really destroying themselves, closing 3rd party apps is going to be barely noticable. In theory we could have some sort of decentralized dApp alternative, but since everyone working on that sort of stuff is a borderline criminal scam artist I don't see anything real will ever come out of this grift.
The struggle is that it takes more than love of a subject to bootstrap a community. I could see someone broadly succeeding by building modern forum software alongside an optional discovery platform that links forums together. I know there are federated platforms out there, but I think a large portion of them have lost the thread of the user journey in attempts to meet the technical challenges of federation.
My vision is more of a combination of the best of Reddit, online courses, blogging, photos, video, learning games, and simulations. More of a slice across many different types of app, tuned to the topic at hand that interests me. It's fun to work on, even if my progress is slow.
Reproducing r/nuclear seems like a nightmare scenario. Lots of arguing. Tough to control the tone and screen out-dated information. It's the classic problem with social media, discerning the difference between reality and myth. Plus, reading through screaming matches is not a fun way to learn.
Aggregating these smaller nightmarish sites, who wants to do that?
That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).
Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.
I'd rather see a newer Usenet protocol... Say something that also integrates with the Fediverse. But there's no "money" for open protocols, even though companies again and again try to emulate "Usenet, but profitized".
This feels like a longer tail of the image hosting problem, btw.
Here is the video: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
For the most part, people are fine as long as the boat does rock TOO much, and for the most part Reddit's boat hasn't rocked to the extent Digg did back in the day. It may not even be possible for that to happen with the current population of users. Digg's exodus happened in 2005-6 right before the big boom of social media in 2008-10. The users were generally pretty saavy back then.
These days? Everyone uses social media, and inevitably with any mainstream, most people will only use it very casually, perhaps amongst a small friend group or for very casual browsing. They never comment,they may never even check comments. As long as the content comes, they won't even be aware of the sausage underneat from power users. But they are also the real lifeblood of the site.
These sorts of sites may be too big to fail now. You can't promote a site based on "hey we're not X". It just needs to have the right content at the right time a la TikTok. Sadly, one big incentive of that may include monetizing people for making posts and participating, and that sort of goes against the whole premise of the classic internet forums of the 90's/00's
The only way to launch a competitor that is profitable is by going the Google/Meta way, but then users will just stay on reddit. Otherwise you need deep pockets or lots of VC money, but why would they invest in reddit clone that will just end up in the same place that the original finds itself in?
As for the corporations, you need them and their ad money, unless you want to run a subscription model. But that doesn't work either, because the majority of users will just stick to the free sites if you try.
Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore.
We need to go back to purposely small communities.
Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.
The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.
Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.
I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.
> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.
The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.
I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.
I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.
>We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.
Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.
Now these communities are on Discord, which is not the friendliest to look for archived knowledge. If Discord can solve the UX for knowledge share, I can see it as the product with the better chance of replacing Reddit.
Have been building an alternative at https://sqwok.im, the twist is that it uses realtime chat instead of comments, and no voting currently.
Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs".
What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use so that they don't start mining us for ad clicks as soon as they think they can get away with it, because as long as users are going to insist on everything being free companies are going to need to do shit like this to us at every opportunity.
This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)
There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.
First they said no one had to pay, and they subjected us to ads... Then, they said, well, you'll have to pay, if you don't want to see our increasingly annoying ads... Then, they got our money. Then, they decided to subject us to ads, again...
Yes and that will most likely work great the same day that communism will. If users pay X the corporation wants X + Y. It is an age-old problem from way before the internet. Can you name one company that is okay with a healthy profit that doesn't get better over time? For example if they take costs and have X profit, will anyone still say X is fine with 100 times more users? After all it should become cheaper per user and theres zero reason the profit should go up. In my opinion the only way that will happen is with governments doing this - and not a government like in the US but more like Norway.
Its going to be a tough road for anyone who wants to create a public web forum at any scale especially if they get brigaded.
The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on before, that the companies will cling to it even when people are begging to pay money to get rid of them. These companies make virtually nothing per year in ads and make up for it in scale.
Latest easy stat I can find [1] is $350 million of ad revenue in 2021. Certainly this is less than $2/year from most active users. I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money.
I don't understand why these companies are so insistent on bending their entire platforms around ad revenue to the exclusion of all else, when "all else" is so much money for someone already scraping pennies from people. Besides, a lot of ad spend was tied to ZIRP; I would think that while the ad business as a whole is certainly in no danger of disappearing, now is a great time for any ad-focused business to be diversifying because spends are very likely to go down in the medium-term, if not the short term. A lot of economic signals are flashing "recession" and ad spend tends to get hit pretty hard in that context. A solid base of subscribers paying real money for your service is a better foundation to go into that sort of economic environment than being solely dependent on ads. (Obviously, a recession will hit your subscriber base too, but that's stickier than ad spend I expect.)
(And an obligatory observation that they are shoving ads in your face, tracking your every move, crafting something you spend hours a week on to increase your advertiser profile value in your every interaction, deploying every addictive psychological trick they can think of to keep you active, and fundamentally polluting at a deep and profound level the entire social sphere of damned near the entire species... for pennies a month. That's all. Pennies a month. They're not even making the money you think they are. They're doing all this to you and the collective social sphere for a few pennies a month.)
I think we've seen with Twitter that third-party clients are not the majority of users, but rather a vanishingly small yet more technical and more enthusiastic group of posters.
That might be different for Reddit, since Reddit's app is broken and stupid in many ways that the official Twitter app was not (though it, too, was garbage), but I think it's still relevant.
They already have monetization in the form of Reddit Gold and awards. You can pay for premium right now. Also, people are _really_ reluctant to pay for services they get for free; take a look at the recent thread about YouTube ads [0] and the lengths some people go to in order to justify watching the content for free (while blocking ads, no less).
I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I'm pretty sure you're overestimating how much people are willing to pay Reddit directly.
It was much easier for Google to try this with YouTube because they had plenty of revenue outside YouTube.
The problem is that their app is awful. Why would a power user pay Reddit to remove ads when Apollo can remove ads and provide a user experience that doesn't make you want to rip off your own fingernails?
I don’t understand all the hate the official app gets. I understand there is telemetry but i have pi hole to block most of that.
It has ads sure but I don’t really see them anymore, your adjust adjust around them.
One thing that annoys me is that notifications can be buggy. Sometimes you have to reload to see the activity in your inbox.
Spying on users, injecting ads, and dark patterns. Or you could just uh.. not have any of that?
I open the app right now and scroll a few posts down, I have a big post-sized box in the feed asking me "What do you want to see more of?" and then a bunch of topics with emojis as options to seemingly mess with my feed. Scroll a few more, and past an ad I see a post from that's "popular in my country" from a subreddit I'm not subscribed to. You click into a thread and it tells you how many people are "here" (I guess viewing the thread? Why would I care?) I've got 6 notifications that Apollo didn't show me which turn out to just be suggested posts from random communities, suggested subreddits to subscribe to, and notifications that my comment got X number of upvotes.
Also the UI/UX on video threads is unintuitive and annoying. As soon as you click into the comments it starts playing the video at the top of the screen, only allowing comments to take up the bottom portion of the screen. And if you click into the video it makes the comments disappear into the bottom of the screen which is fine, but then you think "swipe up to get the comments back" but no, that just swipes you into a random other video like TikTok.
Using the reddit app makes it feel like you're not using reddit.
The reason Apollo is so successful is because it gives users all the fuss without the noise and Reddit is pushing down noise more and more.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BikiniBottomTwitter/comments/13xk3l...
My solution was to spin up Nitter and Proxitok on my docker host and set the appropriate redirects on my laptop browsers and Kiwi browser on Android devices. A total of 15mins of work and now I can look at all the links my friends send like browsing in 2006 again.
The sad thing is all browsers can reflow text, they just demand websites add a meta tag and will otherwise emulate a larger desktop-sized viewport. This is even more ridiculous now that these browsers also hava a separate desktop mode that also enforces this behavior even with the tag but still couldn't be bothered to fix the default.
I would add quickly that I am aware of the ability one would have to discover other kinds of content on USENET, but rule one forbids talking about it. So barring that, what is the best way to discover interesting newsgroups and participate in them?
The main issue is most unmoderated groups are overrun with spam. Most news readers don't do a great job filtering that spam so for every ham post in a thread there can be dozens of spam messages. There's also effectively no enforcement of any group's etiquette so even ham messages tend to be pretty low quality.
Usenet is just a message distribution mechanism. There's just a lot of small world culture around its management. It started in the era of small world Internet so that's understandable but it's definitely a quirk of the whole structure. You have to know or get to know the right people to start groups or get them carried or manage their moderation.
One concept that tech companies seem to have completely forgotten is brand equity. They will squander long-term reputation for short term gains due to, as you said, downward pressure from investors - which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but they’re sacrificing long term gains for short term ones.
The solution here would be to have mature/smarter/more savvy CXOs/founders who know how to manage expectations for growth. There’s plenty of organizations who are capable of setting multi-year growth plans in place and getting their investors in line.
This is probably nigh on impossible if you’re venture-backed because most of these guys are looking for sugar, not complex carbs.
How is that not a bad thing in and of itself? Squandering reputation is accomplished by doing bad things.
It's a trend you see across most internet companies. We've seen it with Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and Discord has been going down that path now for the past year or two. That's why we're seeing so many ads for Nitro and features gated behind Nitro.
iOS has a standard browser extension system, and other iOS browsers support their own extension system. https://insightbrowser.com/
I think all of the major iOS browser competitors (chromi, firefox, etc) still use webkit for now, and are pretty limited as a result
If I have to wait to go to my desktop to see something on reddit, most likely I’ll forget about it and not visit at all. Or I’ll go through the old.reddit on mobile which isn’t great.
But it’s only a matter of time until they remove old.reddit.
Perhaps web scrapers can come to the rescue in some way? Maybe a self-hosted instance of a scraper that pulls the data for each page you’d like to see, kind of like a proxy between your client and reddit? Would be a fun project to try out.
This is more or less what Nitter does for providing alternate twitter frontend https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
Teddit: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit
Libreddit: https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit
Scrappers will be under the same constraints as everyone under html. The html site is hostile to exploration unless you pay the API.
Oh don't worry, that's by no means an oversight.
The feed random refresh bug never went away and somehow managed to get worse. Right as I'm reading something it'll vanish without a trace. I probably see this five times per day.
Sometimes I'll find my app on the "Following" feed even though I never actually switched to it (I'm weird, I actually enjoy the For You feed a lot).
Sometimes the content clearly hasn't refreshed because I see new things on my desktop that aren't on my mobile app.
The quality of the content has taken a sharp nose dive too. Almost everything is useless threads from "thought influencers", memes, or completely random posts that I have never interacted with ever in my life (anime memes? a thousand posts about the barbie movie)
The quality of the replies is awful now that blue check users are all at the top. It essentially made it "pay to be seen" rather than having the more interesting replies at the top. This makes me the most sad I think :(
Aside from that though, it feels like roughly the same app but with some small tweaks here and there.
The fact that I was getting notifications on my phone to look at a tweet from a Blue Checkmark that I didn't follow says otherwise.
It didn't happen to me once before he started charging money for blue checkmarks.
>You have to go into your settings
Too late, app deleted.
Reddit was heading in this direction long before Musk was involved.
Given how aggressively they push you to use the app when you visit the site, this is likely accurate. However, I have Firefox (and therefore proper ad-blocking) on my phone, so nah, I'm still good, thanks.
Besides the screen having either too much or too little info, depending on if it's designed for the desktop or for mobile, it's usually unsafe since you can't run uBlock Origin on the Apple browser...
This HN thread a few months ago about the removal of i.reddit feels prophetic.
People "don't want to deal with" the messy world of open standards, of different web forums for different things, federation... I mean, I get it, but that just ends up meaning they fall for the same twitter/myspace/facebook/walmart.com trick again, over and over and over.
Somebody else posted the enshittification link — that's what is happening here. Like it always does.
The AI thing is an obvious red herring anyway. Plenty of ways they could address that without harming third party clients for human readers, but they want to strangle those clients. As twitter did before them, as they all do eventually.
They tend to do it as soon as they feel they've tricked enough people to investing enough of their attention in them that the users won't just leave. Which in reddit's case they probably have, considering how often search engines propose adding "reddit" to whatever my search string is.
What's the official public rationale for that move?
And what's the corporate-internal rationale, if anyone who knows can say?
(I can imagine a few reasons other than simply to take away more user base of third-party apps, but I'm curious what the truth is.)
(Aside: Both openness and NSFW seemed to be significant parts of Reddit from early on. I recall very early on, briefly looking at Reddit, and I noted with amusement that they seemed to be slying using NSFW to help boost adoption. That might've even been before subreddits, or maybe it was an early subreddit.)
It's technically a nostr client, but it allows you to search for and follow posts about topics from Twitter (through Nitter RSS feeds), Mastodon (through the native Mastodon RSS feeds), Reddit (through subreddit RSS feeds), and Bluesky (through a bridged RSS feed).
This way, you can focus on following the topics you're interested in, and not have to think about what platform/protocol holds those posts.
However this is worse than regular ads.
Honestly, I wish those platforms(all the social media) were transparent and pay for use. When it's free the experience sucks for everyone, can you imagine if we had the tech in the telephone era to inject ads in phone calls or reduce connectivity to those who talks stuff not kosher in the current political environment.
As a thought experiment: how big would the network have to be for you to start considering paying for access?
The Fediverse (Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, etc) is already clocking in at around ~10M users. How much do you think it would be a "reasonable" amount for a service provider to charge for an account?
I get what you're saying. I acknowledge I am an anomaly in being willing to pay at all. I just wonder if maybe it was the wrong time ($50 was certainly and still the wrong price IMO) for a paid social network to be successful. Perhaps it could work today with a small subscription.
Now, let me try again: go to https://communick.com/packages and tell me if you think that what I am charging for the basic access packages is unreasonable.
Why do I even want to be on Mastodon, let alone pay to be on it, let alone pay someone who is rent-seeking on top of a platform and content they aren't responsible for? Can't I get access to the social network direct from the source, for free?
For free? No, you can't.
- You (or someone else) will have to develop the software. The source code doesn't just show up magically on github.
- You (or someone else) will have to test the software, triage bugs, help with documentation, etc.
- You (or someone else) will have to pay for the servers.
- You (or someone else) will have to do content moderation
None of these things are free. TANSTAAFL. If you are using it, it will cost you something, it's up to you if you want to pay with your money, your time, or your data.
Come to think of it, did you write all of the Fediverse software you are using? Are you paying those developers monthly? Or did it... appear for free on GitHub? The sense of entitlement here is something else.
I think you would do better if you spend you time thinking of a value proposition instead of being irate at people and demand they pay you. I have no proof you would not be using my data, and I would be linking that (with a credit card) to a real identity. Promising me you won't do that is not a value prop I care about.
Yeah, I am. But you know how? By charging for access. It is surprisingly effective at keeping trolls away.
> Are you paying those developers monthly?
Yes, I do support / contribute to their patreon and I also have a couple of PRs on Mastodon documentation to my name.
Time (and my allergy to PHP) permitting, I am also planning to work on Pixelfed and their LDAP authentication.
> I have no proof you would not be using my data, and I would be linking that with a credit card.
You can pay me with crypto as well.
I keep running https://communick.com because I am stubborn and because I can afford to, but honestly I've pretty much have given up hope that the basic services (Mastodon, Matrix) will ever reach enough users to be able to pay for themselves.
I have a faint hope that mobile hardware, software, and networking may eventually improve enough that federated communication nodes could run directly off the clients themselves.
The technical requirements are far from impossible - without even going for a Linux phone, you can run a nginx web server on Android via termux, and use dynamic DNS and/or IPv6 to stay discoverable as you move through cell networks. And hardware-wise, the power is plentiful, although I don't know how bad the battery drain would be.
But of course the experience has to be as easy as click link -> install Mastodon app -> have your own instance running off your device, with nothing but a subdomain in the cloud. Anything less and it's a non-starter.
The problem is social, not technical. A p2p network will have problem with reputation and moderation. Only the super technical people will bother to deal with trying fighting scammers and trolls. The only alternative would be something pay-to-play to make it costly, but then those people paying will also want the conveniences and benefits provided by a system with some central authority.
I reported multiple comments calling black people "subhuman" in various ways, or the "clever" variations of "stop noticing things" that Nazis write. It's lucky if reddit gives them even a time out for publicly posting their racist delusions, let alone the permanent ban they deserve.
The last I was on reddit, I was moderating a small subreddit. I had to maintain a regular expression for all the various ways people would write slurs so the poor-quality automated tool would remove comments. There wasn't anything at the administrator level that would remove that or any of the people when they are writing it to be racist.
There was a bot you could use to check a user's comment history for hard-Rs. Useful for trying to determine if someone is unintentionally ignorant and might be open to an explanation, or deliberately ignorant and putting on a temporary facade to waste everyone's time and energy. That tool is something that did get banned, for reasons.
If Reddit is asking 12000$ for 50M requests, then a regular Reddit user (344 reqs/day) would be paying around 2,5$/month, which seems more reasonable than putting the burden on the 3rd party developer.
Which is less than I pay for premium. If more people would just, I dunno, pay for services they use regularly, Reddit wouldn't have a problem.
To give just the most recent example: They PMd everyone in Germany about their great new subreddits (Big US subs with the names translated to German), filled with bots posting successful posts and comments from those big subs, auto-translated.
Yeah, that’s a quirky anecdote when Reddit started 17 years ago, it’s a lot less quirky when you do it now.
All the moderators are unpaid 'workers'. And their quality can be abhorrent to the extreme.
Basically reddit is the perfect example of getting people to contribute content and work for free. And when people are run off, so does your content and your moderators.
I moderate several subs, some of them rather sizable. I do it because I want a quality community, not because I want a payday, I probably average 8-10 hours a week moderating which often overlaps with my active participation in the communities. No one is forcing me to do it, I do it because I value the communities.
I similarly give many hours a week to my church, I don't roll up "yo, pay me!" because that's not the point. I show up and teach a class, my wife shows up and leads young women's, we both go and clean the building, when someone needs help and we're free we're there, it's something we care about not a means of earning income. Same goes for moderating Reddit - anyone that thinks it should be a paid gig has no business moderating.
You gave anecdotes about volunteering at non-profit, like your church. I don't attend church myself, but doing non-profit things to help a community is definitely laudable. And I think the more we all do activities like that, we'd have a better community and eventually a better country.
But there is definitely a difference between non-profit volunteering labor (where the sum of your labor is enjoyed by everyone attending), and being a subreddit moderator.
Reddit is a for-profit company, where they derive their profit from 2 different areas: people contributing their personal content, and people moderating for free the areas of a topic. And real paid moderators get real money on other platforms. Why doesn't reddit? Cause they were able to get users to "make-believe" that their subreddit was theirs.
You're there to make the admins profit. And when your subreddit no longer does that, "ownership" is transferred rather quickly. Or your mod accounts will be mass-reported and banned. Or a whole host of other issues. Earlier on, seeing banned subreddits wasn't a thing. Now, I can stumble in from a Google search and hit a banned sub. And we're talking technical subreddits, not porn or violence.
And just how long have bigger subreddits been requesting better automod tooling, and never materializes?
Reddit sucks the oxygen out of the "community" to feed its profit, and provides scraps to make people think they're getting a good deal.
We're now seeing the furtherance of this with this laughable API bill. And it's not targeted at Apollo, btw. Head over to Youtube shorts or Tiktok and witness just how many "bot reads a reddit post with top 2 comments, with unrelated minecraft video". "Scrape-add video-upload" is the big thing I would bet that reddit's trying to stop without paying a pound of flesh.
But still, I'd start looking for other platforms to move your userbase to. Just casually set up offsite operations along with your subreddit, and steer users to all non-reddit areas. (Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, even Facebook) Cause when Reddit finally goes Digg v4, it's going to be crazy.
The shitty thing here is iOS/Android devs that do find a way to pass through to cost might price themselves out of the 15% tier even when 90%+ of the money they collect (after the Apple/Google tax) is going to just be handed to Reddit. That might screw up the economics of any other IAP they have (to unlock features or what not).
They can raise prices to account for the extra 15% loss but still sucks. Apollo alone would hit Apple/Google's 15% rate limit in less than a month and even if it lost 19/20th of it's users it'd still hit it for the year given his estimates.
If companies can be profitable with just subscriptions, they wouldn't need to sell ads. And yet the NYT, FT and WSJ blanket their subscribers with just as many ads as they do for non-subs.
In any case, Reddit has no interest in pivoting their business model away from ads to paid subscriptions. This is a dog and pony show they're holding prior to "making the difficult decision" to eliminate 3rd party competitors.
API clients would be able to identify ads in the feed and just not show them. "High-profile" apps will be required to show them at risk of Reddit terminating their access, but the long tail will just ignore them.
Reddit and advertisers won't get the same "audience measurement" analytics data, and third parties I imagine would be pretty reluctant to dump some privacy-invading third party sdk blob in their app, especially when they don't really benefit from it.
Also, one of the attractions of third party clients is lack of ads. This'll turn users away from them.
It's pretty crazy that a site like Reddit needs this to target ads effectively. You often have your interest groups already self-sorted thanks to subreddits.
Meh. Serve ads as JS chunks, measure views; if things don't tally up between api requests and ad hits, you have a word with the developer. There aren't that many Reddit apps with significant amounts of users.
That way reddit gets paid, you avoid having to deal with ads and the developers don't have to absorb an astronomical and unreasonable invoice for API access.
It's ridiculous to claim that "Apollo" generates reddit traffic. Reddit users generate traffic, via web client of choice.
What's everyone's deal with the app? Beside the removal of ads of course, which is understandable but undefendable.
Overall what I disliked was that they didn't have the same polish in the navigation.
On the official app I feel like everything that is going from a list of thread to the comments, to collapsing a comment, to going back to the subreddit, etc. is super natural and polished and I didn't feel the same on the others.
from YouTube back in 2006 - based around videos
to
and the newer ones such as
- Discord
- TikTok
- Mastodon
etc.
even HN
Then there’s the issue of getting permanent “zero tolerance” bans for comments less than racism or other discrimination or hate speech. Honestly I kind of appreciate where Elon Musk is coming from lifting bans on people like Donald Trump… of course in typical human fashion, he bans people on Twitter for MUCH less than hate speech- like tracking his private jet or being critical of his thoughts or actions. Unfortunately, I have yet to observe anyone with authority who A) advocates for free speech and B) doesn’t restrict it when it’s content they don’t like.
Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage.
Some part of me hope that Reddit will kill all third-party apps and remove old.reddit, so I'll stop using the site.
That's another interpretation. You'd think ad buyers would have a problem with this, but I guess not.
I've begun dragging a small "ultraportable" laptop with me, because it makes a lot of things bearable again: youtube, reddit, stackoverflow ... I'm not sure why people treat mobile users so horribly bad, but here we are.
Alas, no, I wouldn't think that. :(
Maybe because those people "don't care" about usability, or better said, never got to know what this even means. The young generation was socialized on mobile. They just don't know better so you can treat them like that without consequences.
Supposedly supposed to get side loading later this year which hope to god means Firefox with extensions on iOS
I guess there's no money in that.
Tiktok and Instagram is the kind of design they are used to.
Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.
If you just reshape shape old.Reddit.com it wouldn’t be a horrible UI/UX. Maybe not great either.
Back button is effectively broken with constant reload of front page. 2 links you wanna read? You need to click around carefully especially on mobile if you don’t want the page to reload and show you a different set of stuff.
I can’t imagine people will tolerate this when they’re forced to use this UI and not their favourite app.
It's also the cards.
Old reddit was designed for a larger monitor (laptop/desktop) and mimics the best design practices on that device over the past couple decades of bulletin board/forum software; makes sense why people like it so much
Design decisions aside, the site performance is horrible. I don't understand why serving content is so difficult. I get they have large scale, but they've also had that for quite a while and employ enough people to solve it if they actually cared enough
In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit.
I would agree that the lack of link colors make it slightly more annoying to read compact mode on the new one though, compared directly.
Old reddit has 25 posts per page and my screen can fit 14 vertically at once.
Around 2007-08 I read in a(physical) Brazilian web design magazine that you can have two types of design: - for short, ephemeral experience, your design should be striking - the user will just look at the thing once anyway, so you should capture the attention in spite of how ease of navigation. Eg. a website for a rock band tour. - for experiences that will need to be repeated lots of times (eg. using a corporate system, reading the news), you want the design to be boring and predictable.
I think that minimalism has been used to push interfaces that reduce information density - regardless of how the density would be useful in that context!
After the original Material Design video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrT6v5sOwJg the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this. After some time users got used to that kind of look and now sites with high density of information look alien.
Do you mean like... HN?
I meant that HN is very popular without having an amazing user experience, specially on mobile.
What is your complaint about mobile?
I'm typing this comment on a third-party app (Hacki) I'm trying out for the first time, so that's another option.
The arrows could be better, but they aren’t actually an essential part of the site from an individual user point of view. They are there to help HN. If they decided that getting this help from mobile users isn’t a priority, that’s fine.
Due in part to the excellent UI and user-friendly reading experience, both on that mobile app and in a browser on my laptop, HN is the site I visit most often every day for a pleasant break to learn new things.
Reddit on the other hand is something I look at maybe once a month, where I'm reminded each time it's disorienting and hard work to use, so it's not somewhere I go to enjoy a calm read. So for me Reddit is just for finding specific information from a search result then leaving.
The Reddit UI has a lot to do with that. It ties to the "randomness" of the content. HN content also has randomness but because of its UI you can skim a lot in seconds so it's easier to pick out things of interest with low stress and just enjoy them.
Typically I glance through the top 100 to 150 headlines of HN to pick a few of interest, several times a day. It takes about 10-20 seconds to read those headlines, and to know I'm done - which is very different from scrolling-oriented sites which deprive the reader of perspective. I can see how this might be different for people who cannot skim text quickly or who find that difficult, or who are trained to infiniscroll through things showing only a tiny number of large cards on the screen at a time. The latter is how you destroy perspective.
I had no idea it was gone from the Play Store or not updated in a long time - or maybe I forgot soon after installing. I'm using the version installed via F-Droid.
The good news is it still works :-)
It has a lot of forks. I wonder if anyone's developed it more.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simon.harm...
No way to keep up with new comments on a post (Reddit doesn't have this either).
No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).
Ever-increasing indentation makes deep threads hard to read.
Generally hard to read and hard to click on mobile.
None fatal, but also none particularly tough to fix!
I'm pretty sure this is intentional in order to avoid shallow discussions and not grab too much attention. I actually like this, but I agree with you that it can make it harder to get answers sometimes and you do miss some replies, on especially older comments.
Not sure what you mean by this, the lists of posts are very obviously paginated, as (admittedly a bit awkwardly) are larger comments threads. Maybe you mean auto-scrolling pagination?
> No notifications on reply, so it's difficult to get answers to clarifying questions (/threads helps but isn't it).
While not a HN feature, there is a simple solution - http://www.hnreplies.com/
The lack of response notification is a feature, though yes, it can be annoying, and I find the degree to which comments or questions go unresponded is ... disappointing. That said, notifications abuse by modern Web / App systems is rampant. I'd like some sort of middle-ground, perhaps a responses / notifications link which would consolidate these. "Threads" is the closest there is to that, though it includes all a person's comments whether (newly) responded to or not.
Mobile experience is pretty poor, agreed, though it's sufficient for reading logged-out (my preferred mode). Composing text on mobile devices is a category error.
Deep threads (and greyed text with downvotes) is a very intentional site design. pg's discussed that in the past, see:
"What I've Learned from Hacker News" (2009) <https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
Discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053>
And four years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923>
Some of the site styling can be overridden with CSS. I apply the following on desktop:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd
There's also a dark mode I've created:
Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH
- Long threads become unreadable due to shifting right with no end as replies come in, occasionally becoming comical
- Supports just enough markdown (asterisk italics, indented code blocks) to lead people to think they can use all of it (want bold, or in-line code? You lose.)
- Code blocks are unreadable on mobile since they cannot be scrolled
- Despite being an obvious design choice, breaking accessibility by reducing the contrast of unpopular comments is a deficiency.
I’m not sure why it’s user base doesn’t seem to understand this. They have to make UI changes to make money. It’s either that or everyone pays for subscriptions.
2. The AI threat is real.
It’s not even remotely fair that the large tech players of the world get to train their models on others content for cheap. It’s sad what’s happening to Apollo but they need to beef with Microsoft and Google. Reddit does not owe that guy a cheap pipe.
It’s no different from any other situation where market conditions shift and impact existing models.
Yes, it sucks but welcome to capitalism.
For the record, I am not happy about it, but I disagree with your assertion that LLM is not part of the consideration here.
Give it another 12 months when the rest of the web has been gunked up with AI written crap and reddit will be one of the few reliable sources of useful opinion out there.
Hell, it is right now given how frequently I and others append "reddit" to our google queries.
You need to append "reddit" to get any useful result, but unless you're on desktop, the mobile site is essentially broken if you're looking for answers. The app nag is omnipresent and the comment section is always broken after 2 or 3 comments with a "show more" button and lists of other posts.
If information is hard to glean from reddit, and the rest of the internet is AI blogspam, what is to be done?
Ironic for Reddit to be angry at this considering the reason their company has any value at all is because of both the free content provided by users and the army of moderators who aren’t paid a cent for their work.
In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users and will make them less money in the long-run, or maybe even run the company into the ground if people starts to migrate to some alternative with non-sucky UI.
There's also nothing about the UI that's related to AI.
1. Make money while preserving the UI
2. Make money while destroying the UI
... then why would anyone bother to preserve the UI? It's completely irrelevant even in the best case scenario. But allow me to present another more cynical:
They both hate anything good/competent/well-made, and the users too, and also want to make money.
> In fact making the UI garbage will chase away users
When I first started reading reddit in early 2006, the web was a larger place with many thousands of fora. But reddit's growth was at their expense, most are dead or dying. It's depressing when you're looking for something specific, and you end up on one of the old phpbbs... no one's bothered to post a comment in months. If they have, no one ever replied. But in their archives, it shows that just 15 or even 10 years ago, an hour wouldn't go by without someone saying something.
They've solved the "chasing away users" problem by making certain there's nowhere to flee to. Some small fraction might just cut that sort of internet use out of their lives entirely out of spite, but not enough to matter.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
With the new soundboards, change of usernames and the likes, it's feels like it's starting the cycle.
The first warning shot for me was when they pushed stages really invasively in the UI to compete with clubhouse. I'd thought the high rate of nitro subscribership might have stalled it longer, but no.
Discord is still at the beginning of the endhittification path so I guess it is not a super pressing issue.
I'd imagine that's quite mainstream, no?
(Of course I use old.reddit or a third-party client.)
What they want is lots of comments and little to no nfsw. Aka the metrics that are easy to sell to advertisers and to IPO with.
You can see every action taken through the lense of "does it affect IPO price" and understand almost all their choices. And because it is so transparent, its almost offensive when you consider their entire moderation happens with free workforce. All the mods see 0 benefit from the increased traffic, increase polarization and stalled content refresh that the website pushes, they get more work, less tools and more abuse but the IPO price is gonna make the owners rich
Yes, the greedy idiot MBA's whose idea this was.
At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases.
This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague directions of "this sounds good, do it!".
It's been years since he left for greener pastures, and we're still reeling from the consequences.
They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.
I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.
Reddit very successfully moved away from being the techy nerd basement dweller site to becoming a trendy young "normie" people site. Dumb everything down to shoot for the lowest common denominator, maximizing the size of your target demographic.
So hiring someone who probably loved instagram, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, but never used reddit (but had likely been to the site perhaps a few times before) is exactly who they wanted to redesign the site.
IIRC something like 95% of users are using the official app and/or the new website. And reddit has exploded in popularity in recent years.
I'm not convinced the redesign contributed to this. I think it was already happening prior to the redesign.
I think reddit's demographic still is young , and has always been so .
Personally I don't understand how people can use the new design. My opinion that it's terrible is one thing, but it doesn't even work. For the first few years I repeatably made bug reports, then I just gave up. The "new" design is slow as all hell, the video player doesn't work and if you want to read more than a few comments... well to bad, because 80% of them are buried and you don't get to read them. The redesign is five years old, it has been worked on for longer, and it still doesn't work.
Maybe it has attracted more people, if so, it's the wrong kind, because Reddit has developed into a cesspit of negativity. Everyone appears to have be depressed, poor, angry, hostile towards people not who thinks differently and most seems to be medicated. It not a good place to visit, if you want to keep your sanity. I'd rather debate politics on /b/ on 4chan.
I feel the topics on their have gotten less interesting. Especially in stuff like travel and cooking. I used to really like the travel content on their but it feels useless lately. It just seems to basic and low effort.
Reddit lives and dies by the moderation. Communities with very strict moderation often get a lot of flack for not allowing the low effort drivel. Communities that "let the votes decide" are overrun with low effort memes, waves of "DAE <super common opinion>?" and repost after repost. Often times to have a truly unique and useful experience with the site you need to manage your own content moderation with blocks/filters/etc. This is why there's a lot of inertia to the 3rd party apps and plugins we use, because seeing those as on the chopping block means we're going back to a wild forest of low effort dredge.
If Reddit Is Fun, RES, or old. gets killed off I'm going to leave the site. It will absolutely be difficult, but it will be for the best. I avoid certain subs that are massively popular because they mostly play on the ragebait engagement or outright ignore core issues solved by the moderation. Having that put back to the forefront of my experience will feel like re-opening Facebook or signing up for Twitter. No thanks.
Didn't that transition happen in the early 2010s? When I was in grad school a decade ago basically everyone I knew (which included many "normies") was scrolling through reddit when they were bored. I don't think the dumbing down really started until new reddit was introduced, which was 5-6 years ago IIRC.
There exists this entire class of business theory now based on the principle of hatred towards the users. Think about the products you actually like and purchase/use... how many of those companies' behaviors are completely inexplicable unless they hate you and want to punish you for buying their stuff?
PHB: "We hired a new CTO with no experience in our industry, because we want somebody who doesn't know what can't be done!"
Wally: "Boy, I went the wrong way on my resume"
It's called modern frontend, I'm afraid :-)
By the way the next iteration of Reddit web UI, which this time is based on web components with Lit rather than on React, is less garbage — at least in terms of raw performance. Design-wise it may still be horrible; but at least technologically, it feels like a definite improvement. You can check it out if you browse Reddit without logging in.
https://i.imgur.com/OSfzPDa.png
That was when I fully appreciated both that raw performance is important for me, and how truly horrible it was on the Reddit site.
It feels like Reddit is in the same place Twitter was pre-Musk. Kind of lost in terms of purpose/trajectory for monetization. Or maybe it’s the other way around: it’s where Twitter will be in a few years, stagnated because it was bought to be part of a larger portfolio, a bauble that sits on the shelf and doesn’t really have anything innovative going for it.
To me there isn’t anything interesting about Reddit anymore. I only use it to hear from people who claim to live in a place I’m living or visiting, or to get very specific troubleshooting advice, where I find a specific post using an external search engine. Mostly I think the culture of the site itself is annoying. Any time I stray outside of regional or technical subreddits it feels like I’ve accidentally landed in a middle school cafeteria.
That’s a big problem when you have thousands of employees. It’s like youtube or google. What can you really do with all these people?
A rational person would say fire them. But firing people feels wrong because growth is good and big is good. So the only solution is to make a project for them to work on.
The natural project for them is a UI change because it won’t break the product and it caters for their lack of ability. So that’s why finished products like reddit and youtube have a new worse UI every year for seemingly no reason.
One of the third-party apps effected is Apollo, which is the vision of a single, talented iOS developer/designer who isn't beholden to investors and the whims of every other team and committee within a large org.
On mobile, I can still read direct links to reddit posts that crop up on HN using Firefox for Android. Can't say same for the Twitter, which just says, "You need to enable javascript." Well, I won't.
I'm pretty sure they're going to kill off old reddit, which will 100% certainly mark the end of my 15 years there.
Old reddit supports neither resulting in broken links and broken code blocks.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
None of the real value of Reddit is coming from the parts of it that resemble Twitter or 4Chan.
Also count me as another person who abhors the "new" UI. Every once in a while I get bounced out of the old UI and I don't know how people do it. The old UI isn't my perfect UI but it's darn near close to it.
This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche group of people who use Reddit.
This becomes self-reinforcing as well, everyone else will feel alienated even if they do get over the hurdle of commenting, while those who fit the aforementioned mold will feel at home. Can't get much of a pulse, unless you specifically want to know what a very certain demographic feels once you filter out all the fanboyism and astroturfing.
Which is the bigger problem, someone coming to a niche place to debate, or someone who believes adding reddit to their google searches is going to provide them with better insight? I'd say the latter: they aren't conscious of the BS being pushed onto them.
Also kind of funny your comment is an exact demonstration of what I mean, that self-reinforcing style of "comedy" coupled with a nonsensical assumption.
Like OP said there's certainly niche subreddits.
What grew Reddit for me was the informed comments that were generally related to the discussion and often brought more light to a topic than the posted article.
With voices leaving Reddit the point or appeal of it is gone. For me at least.
Only if you use Google to search! ;)
What, did you prefer the site in the days of the Chimpire? Jailbait? Reddit's history has been the perfect case-study in the downsides of a libertarian approach to moderation. They've come to where they are now because every other approach resulted in horrifying racism, sexual exploitation, disinformation, and abuse.
I had a topic about the speed of light on askscience get deleted because the mods weren’t in the right mood that day. There is indeed a middle ground and we aren’t there.
Reddit’s model doesn’t work with what they want to do with the site. And things that worked when it had 1M, 10M users no longer do.
I do wish there was much more transparency around "power-moderators" though.
It used to be that clicking outside the central border of comments would navigate you back to the subreddit, but it looks like they have fixed that.
Please submitters, check before you submit.
And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content?
You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142418
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36143308
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144763
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147252
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36150373
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152476
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159487
> And the initial HN submission you linked to, "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing" -- does that in any way allude to its content?
It's literally the link quoted by "The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says"
So? The headline of the submission lacks meaning and provides no information. You would have to click into the link to realize wha the discussion is about.
> You're missing the point, which is that this submission is just the latest in a long string of duplicate submissions, some of which have already been marked [dupe] by the moderators.
My point is that this article sets up a different (and valid) discussion, provides wider context, and has a submission headline that gives human-readable context to the topic. (And the HN title has since been updated to use the article secondary heading to be even clearer).
The link you posted had a big discussion yesterday, but it has already been bumped way down from the front page. Other discussions on subsequent days (especially if new information comes out -- or when other developers affected by the change speak up) are useful and should also be encouraged.
Nonetheless: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> My point is that this article sets up a different (and valid) discussion
Different? No. The discussion is the basically same as before.
> provides wider context
Some of the other HN submissions I linked above also provide wider context. This is a dupe.
> Other discussions on subsequent days (especially if new information comes out -- or when other developers affected by the change speak up) are useful and should also be encouraged.
No, that's actually contrary to HN policy:
"Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Moreover, the other developer's link in the Kotaku article was also already submitted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147411
What's the 'original' source? One developer's specific problem with the Reddit API policy change?
> The discussion is the basically same as before.
Disagree. For one, it's active and on the main page. And, easier to jump in.
> No, that's actually contrary to HN policy:
That's for reposts. Our thread here is arguing whether or not it's a repost/dupe. I believe it is not.
> the other developer's link in the Kotaku article was also already submitted to HN
Ok? And with no discussion? But, again, this post puts it together, provides links to those sources, and tries to add some context.
You're saying this submission should not exist: "Please submitters, check before you submit." but I disagree and think it's valuable for providing more information, links to related content, and a place for new discussion.
Why does this post remain on the front page if it is so clearly a 'dupe'? Why has the headline been updated by HN?
Heck, you've even made me think that second-day update posts should be encouraged on HN. First-day posts tend to lack a lot of critical information and a lot of knee-jerk/hot take reactions. As of now, has anyone from Reddit come out to refute or clarify the claims of the third party devs?
Then let the moderators moderate, and you can choose a different hill upon which to die, so to speak.
They did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36167892
> you can choose a different hill upon which to die, so to speak.
I didn't die on the hill, I conquered it. ;-)
Not really. They did. But I hope playing pretend moderator was fulfilling for you.
For some strange reason, interestica (and now you) chose to argue with me about it, futilely, as it turns out. I wasn't the one dying on a hill.
My understanding is that the moderators often see comments pointing out a dupe, or pointing out that an article title is missing a (YEAR), and such comments are helpful. Indeed, I've seen them thank some such comments. Moreover, it's also a signal to other readers of the submission.
The official site is fine. I have one or two small gripes about the UI. The official iOS app is also fine. I have a few small gripes about the UI there, too. I guess I wish it didn't have ads but hey, shit's not free.
As for the site, the new redesign seems to have improved a little in the last few months, but for years it has been nearly unusable. On an Intel Mac JS was just far too slow and my fans would spin up on any Reddit page. It was like this for years.
The Reddit UX might be good enough on mobile, and might have gotten better on web, but users have been burnt hard. I know so many regular users who use alternative apps or the old site.