Don't let Reddit kill 3rd party apps
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
Can you you be specific about the metrics you were asked to boost?
> My guess is their leadership is pressuring the company hard to boost their numbers, no matter the long term cost.
The leadership just want to cash out quickly with the IPO, then it will be someone else's problem.
To solve this they were building out a huge ad relevancy team to target ads at users using posting history, similar to Meta/LinkedIn/etc.
Ironically I now work for an email marketing platform company, but it’s great work and we just provide the tools to annoy people. It’s our customers that actually do it (I know, I know).
My $.02 CPM is that yes, Reddit can improve their rates by improving relevancy. But they don't capture anywhere near the volume or quality of signals to inform relevancy models as compared to others in the space.
From their privacy policy it looks like they may engage with vendors who enrich data that can be tied back to a hashed identifier. This seems in sync with the increased pushes to create accounts with emails (one of the main identifiers the industry relies on) as well as use the app (to get a MAID, though those are increasingly worthless for identity resolution vendors from a match rate standpoint).
Reddit is in a tough spot because a huge chunk of their users want to use them anonymously, or with minimum PI provided. This leaves Reddit in a position of needing to either push harder to get it (like if they added profile fields to collect more PI), or infer it from modeling based on the subs you visit, content you read or post, interactions with other users, etc. Which puts them in the crosshairs of privacy bodies depending on how far they go.
This is all my own personal opinions and conjecture.
If you talk about buying a car on some random app, chances are that you'll then see ads on Facebook about used cars. Facebook gets to know what you do elsewhere, and offers advertisers extremely precise (and hence more valuable) targeting. That's what Reddit can't do.
Even back then, 100% of traffic Reddit ads was coming through Mobile, which explains why they really want (need) users on their mobile app. Desktop users just don't click ads, and mobile users using other clients don't see Reddit ads.
The tools available to me back then to run Reddit ads were a joke compared to other platforms, but with user acquisition was costing me around a dollar per user, I didn't really care!
It turns out paying employees and business infrastructure requires money in a capitalist society.
Free only works when someone else is paying, until they don't.
It's about too aggressive monetization vs. user experience and the loss of visitors/ad targets, not some "yeehaw things cost money"
We should have solved the problem of bandwidth costs another way - taxes or paying individually for each thing. People keep saying the internet failed. No, the internet has been working perfectly while a bunch of bridge trolls came in and setup shop.
"No. It never does. I mean these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might. But......it might work for us."
I ask a coding interview question where I tell my candidates "Assume you have to do everything in memory; there is no database - you just receive events; everything is in one host, or multi-tier architecture." That's because it's a test of their ability to reason about data structures, and implement a short (20-30 minute) algorithm.
In real life, there is no way the "feature" I ask them to implement would be done in memory, and the data would naturally be in a database. It's not a architectural design question (i have others for that), it's a coding question.
I should hope nobody comes out of it thinking "wow, the engineers at this company are under pressure not to use databases, or have durable L2 caches"
I suspect you are reading into the constraints of an interview question, and the effects on the consumer was just not relevant to the technical concepts they were trying to evaluate.
They're trying to saw off the table legs while they're setting the table for their big meal.
And I came from the link in this post which was supposed to go to old.reddit
That’s how dire things are. I have been a reddit user since 2009, almost 15 years. But I’m not a nostalgic person. As awful as it has gotten it’s still the place where most discussion on the internet happens (and has happened for over a decade.) That can’t just be replaced overnight. They’re sitting on a huuuuge amount of content that is fully indexed by search engines too. This would be a huge blow to the internet in general I think. All so they can have a Groupon style IPO.
I may be wrong in this case, though.
Edit: oh no, that seems to just point to the desktop old interface now. Weird.
I bet it's only a matter of time before old goes
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11zso11/an_improved...
imgur has gone to shit as well. I'd imagine the trend is happening across most sites with surveillance as their business model.
I also don't understand why discussion of this topic rarely touches on adversarial interoperability? Explicitly published and versioned APIs are a nicety. If companies are going to choke them, then why not just use the same API the web interface uses rather than paying the Danegeld?
But why would I need javascript to view a JPG?
2. Because the number of people who disable JavaScript is a rounding error.
So at least they did that right. imgur has been failing hard at this for ~5+ years.
They don't want hotlinking so the image data doesn't have a permanent url. They only want the backend to be responsible for sending image data. This then requires an image viewer written in javascript. This is not a bad design. This is fulfilling business requirements successfully and efficiently.
EDIT: efficient for the business not for your browser
- imgur.com
- btloader.com
- ccgateway.net
- cloudflare
- google analytics
- media-lab.ai
- sascdn.com
- scorecardresearch
- stretchsquirrel
- amazon adsystem
- assembly exchange
- run.app
3 of these, imgur, cloudflare, and medialab appear to be the minimum to load the image, and also seems to make everything on the page work (upvoting, commenting, etc.)
I don't think it's efficiency even on their end they're looking for, its tracking and revenue maximization. Which is the reason I block Javascript.
EDIT: actually it seems like you just need imgur and medialab unblocked, so just 2 of the 13.
These are not mutually exclusive. In fact both these things are the whole point.
> EDIT: actually it seems like you just need imgur and medialab unblocked, so just 2 of the 13.
Yeah exactly.
Mobile apps go into stores. App stores (especially the Apple app store) have many rules about UGC in apps. Including rules that may be incompatible with ToS of your service. Like the rule saying that NSFW content must not exist.
On your website, on the other hand, you're the king. You set your own rules. There's no one to tell you what can and can't be done unless you're breaking laws so hard some government notices.
So by virtue of that, there's usually LESS content available in the app than on the website. This, though? You have to look at this content in the app BECAUSE it is unreviewed? This is bonkers. This is completely backwards to everything my own experience tells me.
This is just a lame excuse to make you install the app.
But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.
Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances
Any sort of game or seasonal “interesting” thing like /r/place could very well be mobile-only
At the very least, they can get the default mobile version to a good state, remove all the artificial blockers and nags they’ve put in place, set it to maintenance mode from a product perspective, then only add UX improvements and new features to the mobile apps. The problem is they don’t even seem to make UX improvements most of the time… just UX annoyances
For a lot of software companies, the best thing they can do for users is to simply stop making their products worse.
Those users also create content and commentary which keeps the site alive...
Reddit is also restricting NSFW content from the API. It isn't clear how much content that will remove from apps, but it could be substantial.
Both of these together poke some holes in Reddit's claim these changes are just about recovering costs.
reddit has only gotten worse in the past years and even if we manage to somehow "coerce" them into supporting 3rd party apps, the core issues will remain and will re-appear under a different form.
We've had forums before and centralising *all* into one place never seemed like a good idea.
Let's simply stop supporting user-hostile companies.
(yes, I know my comment might be perceived as "simplistic" or "narrow", but we, the users, made reddit what it is today - we also have the power and duty to undo that)
Not really. Sometimes 'simplistic' comments contain the most bluntly valuable insights :)
So the long tail of hobby subs are probably just noise and operational burden. So if they're wanting to IPO, they probably want to cut costs and focus hard on ad revenue. I'm guessing banning nsfw stuff is probably in the works too.
Also, backslash is not that large, there are only about 60 subs supported protest so far.
Even stack overflow doesn’t make me click “read more comments” to show full content of the thing I’m looking for.
How many times have I read a comment about a library error, quick scrolled, and found myself now reading some crap about Harry Potter?
Reddit is digg is slashdot (and even slashdot kept niche quality standards over time)
In my experience, the people in that community want to keep it small, and private. They don't want folks not like them, around.
A good way to ensure that happens, is treat anyone that raises issues about the way they are treated, like crap.
We won't stick around for abuse. The people that are gaming the system, will endure it as "cost of doing business," but the folks that want to get something from the community, won't stick around.
I hardly ever ask any questions, anymore, and have absolutely no interest in visiting, just to answer them.
At one time, I was quite enthusiastic about SO, but no more. The shine wore off that knob, long ago.
They got the community they wanted.
Ideal would be hn style sites, decentralized like forums, and managed by individual communities. Then, stick to a standard, unlike the old phpBB, vBulletin, etc, so there can be some level of access by API.
You wouldn't say radio is useless simply because there is a genre of station you don't like.
This situation is more like if all of the radio stations were owned by the same company, were all jam-packed with the same crappy advertisements, and it was quickly becoming evident that the only way to listen to any of the stations would be through the crappy radio offered directly by the company.
this is a symptom of the site redesign/official app (presumably, I don't use it) - you don't see this behaviour in old.reddit or in the unofficial apps (I use Relay Pro).
The biggest problem with the media's complete abandoment of all principle in continuing to treat Twitter as a high integrity platform is the message it reflects to all other social media platforms : your users are captives. They can't leave. Once you have enough of a network effect going, no amount of disreputable behaviour or abuse is too much.
In my view, it's becoming imperative that Twitter (and now Reddit) actually fail to save the internet. (You could put Facebook there too but I think these days it's actually lately been more benign than the other two).
It's probably a mistake to rely on things like that for socialization, communication, or creating communities. I would like to see federated technologies take off; there are at least two Reddit-alikes using ActivityPub, Kbin and Lemmy, which seem to federate with each other smoothly. They're currently much farther from critical mass than Mastodon (though they sort of federate with that too).
Businesses can certainly be "successful" with premium services, especially at Reddit's scale. What's happening there is textbook greed, where leadership chases hockey stick growth. At this point they must understand that this will be the downfall of the service, yet they're intentionally willing to make that sacrifice for short-term gains.
Good riddance. There are plenty of other services that can replace Reddit. The circle of the web.
Both platforms have long been problematic in terms of bias and toxicity, with Reddit also particularly bad with its UX in addition.
Now Reddit wants rent to compensate for the lost ads. My guess Reddit also noticed most people using Apollo doesn’t create content, so Apollo users are just extracting value from Reddit.
I’d like to see the hard numbers before having an opinion about who yo be upset with.
I can't see the relationship between Apollo and Reddit as singularly one sided.
If content is created in the woods and no one is there to view it, did it create value?
You don't have to create content to create value. You can also promote the platform and grow loyalty, something possible with Apollo.
Reddit could still encourage third party clients and also monetize them in a reasonable way, but they have chosen to be unreasonable and will almost certainly kill the market for those apps.
How did you come to that conclusion?
His app is not providing cash in the form of direct payments or advertisements. His app removes the aggressive account creation, the official app has.
What value does this create for Reddit?
* The API access charges about 10x the price compared to the revenue per user they would expect if the users accessed reddit via web or official app.
* There was 30 days notice of the new pricing. He has many customers that pay per-year that he is going to lose money on until renewal.
* The price is too high. Compared to similar platforms that charge for API they are charging way more.
* An individual from the company called him out for having 'inefficient' code, which he took personally and mounted a good defense of his usage.
* The API is losing feature parity with the first party website/app.
* Reddit is itself building a bigger business on the backs of reddit users generating content. Many of those users use a 3rd party app. In fact, 3rd party apps were largely responsible for transitioning reddit into mobile usage. They seem to be overstepping their position in the ecosystem.
He could just request 100 posts first, halving the API requests, but the app would be less responsive.
Your comments seem to have a confidence level that their content doesn't justify.
That’s too late to be sending the request if you want the premium feeling of no loading times while scrolling, especially if you also want to do rich thumbnails of media.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/comment/...
This is just the third party developers' made up estimate and is not confirmed at all.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/kf4ucn/thanks_to...
Please don’t give me that “he’s the only one working”.
I have a lifetime Apollo Pro Ultra license and there’s literally no way in the app for me to tip him more, but I totally would if there was.
That said: least for me, I've found that some equipment actually does make me more efficient as a dev, even if I don't "need" it as the bare minimum to do my job. I could do my job on a 15 year old ThinkPad. But having a modern computer with a nice mouse, keyboard and a big external display makes a measurable different in my productivity
This is also talking about an iOS dev saying this would help test for iPads. How exactly does any of that make sense?
The app became borderline unusable on phones with low contrast ratios (non-oled)
He isn’t opposed to paying for API access, but he feels the rates they are charging are exorbitant to the point of being designed to forcel 3rd party apps out of business, not extract value from them.
I’ve already seen one subreddit threaten to shut down because the mod moderates it using Apollo and is unwilling to use Reddit’s UI or app.
Having said that: Can you really blame Reddit here? Reddit is company which is trying to make money. One of the ways it does that is by building its own app and selling its own ads and showing those ads on its app which it controls and in the way it wants.
Whether or not we agree, and whether or not we think it's the right move, you can't honestly be surprised by this can you? Facebook doesn't have a 3rd-party client. Twitter stopped having 3rd party clients. This is how the game is played.
The mobile app is fine. I use it every day. Is Apollo better? Maybe? Will most of Reddit's users care about this? Doubtful.
Is it? Twitter had a golden opportunity in its early stages to become the message bus of social media before it killed 3rd party apps. Looking at twitter today I can say for a fact that stunned their growth and now they are just a zombie.
Monetizing your service doesn't have to mean killimg 3rd party app. Also, keep in mind that the users of Reddit are what makes Reddit Reddit. You fuck with them and you'll end up with a ghost town. How are you going to monetize a ghost town?
Can you really blame Microsoft here? Microsoft is company which is trying to make money. One of the ways it does that is by building its own browser and locking users into its platform which it controls and in the way it wants.
EDIT: And sorry, I know you're not defending or excusing Reddit here. My comment is just about how we sometimes mistake "what a company obviously will do" for "what standard a company should be held to"
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
Acting against the interests of their own users will make the platform less valuable in the long-term if moderators and users lose trust in the platform.
I’m assuming it’s the user base; most attempts I’ve seen are either empty or focus on non-mainstream and often controversial content.
Are there ways to address that? Or is there something else?
As for the usage.. there's some, but it is niche. The average user just won't move unless something goes from so-so-satisfactory to offensive. This is how mastodon got its (seemingly brief) user spike.
An idea: Twitter has lots of users, maybe Elon could build Reddit-like features into it.
And they've been about as successful as Google plus.
It's indeed the community.
I think one problem people here underestimate is the cost of running the required infra. I seem to remember voat fell under it's own weight?
To me that starts to sound a lot like each subreddit could be replicated as an instance of something like Mastodon, and you're really only some kind of shared user database away from being able to make something that functions exactly like Reddit, but without any corporate control.
Consider the fact that their CEO (admittedly!) abused his admin privileges to fraudulently impersonate users, posting fake messages AS them, expressly to frame them.
We would not know about it, and he might still be doing it today if not for some observant moderators. But nothing happened to him, at all - in fact the people and subreddit he hacked were themselves banned.
THAT is power. THAT is what is meant by "big tech".
Reddit's was $10B in their most recent funding round.
It's "big"
And even bigger if you look at user base/reach
That might be what Elon paid for it but, if all the recent news articles are to be believed, it's now worth less than 1/4 that.
No, its not; not being traded on the open market, it doesn’t have a real market cap. It may have once had a $40B market cap, but that doesn’t mean it does (or would if it were on the market) now.
In December it went down to $8.5m, valued at around $20m at the time of the acquisition:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/fidelity-marks-down-value...
And more recently it's dropped to about $6.6m:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2023/05/31/twitter-wo...
Implying a valuation of $15b (6.6/20 * 44).
The Apollo developer tested the official Reddit app, and it makes a similar amount of API calls: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...
Benchmarking Apollo against the official app is not that useful since we don’t know for certain what APIs they use.
By releasing an API, and letting third party developers pick up the slack, the community grows and the main company doesn't have to invest as much themselves into this annoying UI stuff. And even if their own efforts are misguided, there are other options, so people stick around. Once they've decided they got all they need from the third parties, and users are too attached to leave, they cut off access. It's a rug-pull from under the people that helped build the community up so I can see why it feels like a betrayal.
While they have technically not 'cut off' access, they chose their pricing for a reason, and it will have this effect. As to whether third party apps are superior, to me that's a side issue - if main-Reddit makes a user-hostile decision, their site and app won't support ameliorating that since it goes against their plans. Third Party apps can and do, which is beneficial to users.
I see the argument that this openness makes the service harder to monetize, but it's not as if Reddit (or Twitter) ever gave it any actual effort. For example they could mandate that API usage past some threshold requires the app using it to present ads delivered by the API, and if users want to get rid of them they could subscribe to Reddit Premium. I don't think there'd be much resistance to this from heavier Reddit users — most realize that the free ride wasn't going to last forever, but the prices being asked for now are outrageous and many times greater than what Reddit is losing to users not seeing ads.
How would you make a better app?
For the API I think only someone with access to Reddit data can answer that. They likely have internal reports about why they chose this price point - that would be the starting point for any conversation I think. One example - if app users are highly motivated and produce a lot of content and engagement for the remaining (ad-viewing) users to interact with, then free might be the sensible price. But I have no idea if this is the case. Being able to design a pricing scheme is not really a prerequisite for being unhappy with things changing anyway, feedback is important.
What is a path for something like Reddit, supporting 3rd party apps, obviously showing ads in whatever feed gets served, but also being able change where and how ads are shown, or change monetisation strategy? I see a lot of handwavey and simplistic remarks, but how exactly, then?
Would a user subscription work? How much would you pay for an ad-free reddit per month? Probably can't be less than $20. Would it be viable? If not, how are these platforms ever going to exist?
Or is it never going to work and do we have to go back to crappy forums and discords and check 15 separate places? (RSS? never heard of her)
replace Reddit with whatever comes next that shows your favourite niche content you can't find elsewhere, all in one place.
The biggest thing they're lacking is users, and every time the big ones do something dumb, Lemmy servers get a bunch of new users.
They've been making mistake after mistake in the public free-speech sphere and nothing more than crumbs is left over from their inital base platform values.
I do get that they need to adhere to the advertisement companies to earn money, but I have to say that I am immensely disgusted by their lack of integrity and virtues.
Aaron Swartz will be happy to see them disappear from the public eye at last. And this will surely be in the right direction in that regard. I left that platform 7 years ago, haven't looked back.
Reddit is one of the first places I search for almost anything; if I'm using a search engine, it's almost always to "site:reddit.com <my query>".
- TV/Movies
- Gaming
- Sports
- Technology
- Politics
- Mixology
- Lawncare
- Home DYI
Please tell me, because I am genuinely interested.
TV/Movies has forums at dslreports.org, and people sort of discuss on mastadon.
Technology as Ars Technica, here, mastadon instances and hashtags, discord, and if you're talking work, stuff on mailing lists via google and others, and maybe teams?
I have mostly given up on politics - I can't imagine having useful discussions in public online anywhere anymore.
Home DYI had the HOYUZZ (??) forums I think. But again, that's mostly web based I think.
I'm not into the other stuff so IDK on those. I could imagine someone trying to build a competitor - I mean there is lemmy I think.
After having tried to make use of reddit by subscribing only to the smaller more focused subs as is usually recommended, I can say that for my own use case the results were meh.
I do keep a mobile client on my phone so reddit links will open there but my engagement is very very low these days. All the better because it's predominantly a very negative place.
To me HN is the closest to a degree. You need a system where users agree on what they want to see, and its not just a select few who enforce the system, but the community self-polices. HN self-polices quite a lot, though I wouldnt be surprised what sorts of mess the mods deal with behind the scenes, having moderated other communities elsewhere online.
It would be incredibly surprising for Swartz to have supported the kind of bait-and-switch tactics Reddit is employing here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
I’m keeping an eye on Wikipedia but the worst offender next to Reddit is IMBD. They aggregate information and reviews and ratings from users and for like, two decades? Share proper dumps of that information because why not…give back to the community. They wouldn’t exist without them. And then decide to strip those dumps of all useful information and paywall the rest behind some expensive API while what…expecting users to keep contributing?
They’re all scum bags and the whole lot needs to be federated. I’m already paying $30/year for mastodon (as a donation) and I’m sure this can work with Reddit as well. I hear the front runner is Lemmy but haven’t explored it yet. Now I will and I hope it’s good.
//
On a completely different subject, but to end on a happier note, I want to thank you for recommending citrulline a couple weeks ago. It's made a surprisingly large difference for me, and it hadn't been on my radar as something to even try before you mentioned it. So, thanks!
Here’s a link: https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/dietary-su...
Now back to IMDB…it really saddens me to see communities build really elaborate software around these websites just to have the rug pulled out from under them and turn their efforts into monoliths of nothing. We’ve had decentralized forums since the days of BBS’ (Usenet), spent 3 decades pouring knowledge into branded communities just to end up locked out of them and are now finally going full circle back into federated platforms.
I hope the momentum sticks because now we have the potential to democratize and open source AI but that’s only possible if the zeitgeist isn’t paywalled. I’ve heard rumors that Reddit execs feel miffed about not turning a profit from the recent wave of LLMs because for a lot of people it really is the front page of the internet and lots of information has been poured into it. If that’s the case, then it’s as the old saying goes “good things are often ruined by the few”.
It just keep happening and happening, too. https://thetvdb.com/ is the latest one I've seen. User generated content, open API (with request throttling to prevent abuse) for years and now some media company swoops in, buys it and goodbye free API! It's spitting in the face of their entire community and really infuriating.
What I do care about is a possible Reddit Exodus and them coming to Hackernews to censor the living hell outside of their world view. Not every comment section has to spiral into "republicans bad", "boomers bad", "cars bad", etc.