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Comment by bazmattaz | Hacker News Reader

I’m a bit hesitant to admit that I use the official app for Reddit and have used for years. I’ve used the browser extensions before and have tried Apollo app but I never got hooked.

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.

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I've certainly used worse apps over the years. My biggest issue is there's just too much shit that Reddit's tacked on over the years that I don't care about. Chats, live streams, live threads, etc. They also harass you with notifications to "check out new post in x sub" and "maybe you should check out this community" and "your post got 5 upvotes!"

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.

Here is a very illustrative post/thread showing a comparison of the official Reddit app and one of several alternatives, in this case RiF. The contrast is striking. You be the judge.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BikiniBottomTwitter/comments/13xk3l...

"Really, once you get distracted, the pain of sitting on a nail just goes away!"

Spying on users, injecting ads, and dark patterns. Or you could just uh.. not have any of that?

Users will be spied upon in any app if they're authenticated. The ads thing is silly. How else do you get free content.

Reddit isn't providing free content, the users (or whoever the users got the content from) are the ones providing the content. None of them are paid. Reddit is only a host and would ideally be replaced by a public utility or community-run alternative.

People miss the forest from the trees when it comes to social media claiming the users make the community. While it is completely true, it's not the complete picture. The communities have to be fostered. I'd be willing to make a bet that any alternative websites and/or communities will not rise up to replace Reddit because it's hard to foster a social network. Way harder than the individual parts of moderation per subreddit. The people who think otherwise are most likely living in a fantasy Utopia

Apollo is and hopefully remains still a thing. I don’t see a promotion of the shit Reddit app here as acceptable because if it’s mobile we’re talking about - unless you have something like Tailscale running on a NAS at home - the pi-hole and ad blocking point is also moot.

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.

you're on HN. The majority opinion here is bound to be a hot take. Reality is the official app isn't THAT bad.

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