Comment by Arkhaine_kupo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arkhaine_kupo | Hacker News Reader

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Because it would not work.

See Apollo as an example. You have a single dev, with very fine apple ios ecosystem knowledge, who always adds the latest apple api's and listens to community feedback and makes the best app, he alone can make in whatever way serves him to learn new coding skills and community requested features.

On the other hand on Reddit official app, you have tons of product managers forcing developers to work on many features that are outright against community feedback. See things like reducing information load, or making ads indistinguishable from content. Those features benefit reddit but many users hate them,

Apollo has dense vs wide posts and no ads. Official reddit app doesn't.

The value proposition and the audience they are catering too is very different. Buying the app is not gonna fix the fundamentally opposite goals of both apps. Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that. it also wasted months of their time making some fake reddit nft side proyect that was dead on arrival.

I don’t know about your last point. Their devs can’t seem to get their website to be usable on mobile at all. Safari/latest iOS and the site has issues with zoom (it’s not desktop level of zoom but it’s way too small but only after you log in and make a comment or a post). Images and videos load about half the time. The site cannot for the life of it remember that I don’t want to download the app. Half the user settings are still tied to the old desktop site. Reddit chat does not work on mobile. DM inbox is a mess. Search UI is clunky as hell.

I understand their focus is on users downloading the app, but this is just sloppy poor craftsmanship.

This is almost certainly intentional. It's been a trend for a while for companies to make their websites as shitty as possible so you're basically forced to use their app.

Facebook is doing this on mobile, they want users to install the app.

I refuse to, and I will abandon reddit when 3rd party apps stop working.

Facebook moweb works really well, in my experience

Interestingly, Instagram web has been going in the opposite direction - it is getting more features previously only available in the apps.

Still buggy as hell, but they are improving it.

And full of unwanted 'reels'

Only when that crap can be turned off it will be as good or better than a year ago.

Facebook is doing this. Their website is not only lacking features but it's also glitchy to the point of being dysfunctional. The scrolling jumps multiple posts at a time with no user input, posts missing like/comment buttons, CSS messed up where some posts are cut in half. I'll delete my account before installing their Spyware app though.

Firefox on Android with no extensions.

It is. I've worked at a huge website that relies on ads. Ads trump any good UX.

Reddit has had a mobile website that worked very well for years (Since the beginning?) They disabled it about a month ago to funnel everybody to the "new" mobile site, which barely works and serves only to funnel users into the app.

It's not sloppy or poor craftsmanship, it's intentional.

I have noticed no change for years and for years now it’s been broken for me. Different devices, all standard configuration, all up to date OSes. Once you log in and interact with it, it goes wonky.

I’m effect, I guess what you and others are saying is that it doesn’t matter if Reddit has good devs or bad, they are going to put out a terrible product.

Were you using i.reddit / compact mode, or the default mobile layout?

Default. This is what it looks like for me when I load the page: https://i.imgur.com/ed1ETWK.jpg

This is what it looks like when I click on a post: https://i.imgur.com/wqNAofO.png

This is on an iPhone 14, iOS 16.

It's my understanding that the website that worked fairly well was i.reddit.com (which was disabled recently)

Side-by-side comparison (i.reddit.com on the right): https://old.reddit.com/r/redditmobile/comments/7kaqgb/could_...

Exactly so. I mean look at it this way: You and I both know that the frontend of Reddit isn't exactly a complex machine. Even poor developers could make it work. Everything that happens is a choice made at a project management level or higher.

iirc there was a post from a former reddit developer over a year ago who said this was intentional. The changes made to the site increased certain metrics, and that's all that mattered despite being slower.

> Reddit has fantastic devs, I can be 100% sure of that

Did you miss the part where it took them years to get a functional video player and it's still the worst one you'll likely ever use?

Again, I am pretty sure that is an issue of priorities.

If reddit puts two juniors working on the video player and then has half the team working on making the stupid profile pictures for users that is not an issue of developer talent.

I have 0 doubt that there are really good devs at reddit, and I am also sure they are being made to work on monetisation shit and not on fixing mod tools, video player, bot detection and power user options which would make the app 1000% times better

So it doesn’t matter if they have any good developers or not. By your logic they will never put out a good product. I guess you just found a way for Reddit to save a ton off payroll: let go of all senior developers and hire a bunch of cheap code monkeys as the result will be exactly the same.

> By your logic they will never put out a good product.

For their Customers they will. Their customers are ad agencies.

What they will never make a good product is for its users because the goals of reddit the company and the userbase are opposed.

Or the horrid mobile client? Or the horrid web redesign?

Maybe they do have fantastic devs, but it sure don't show in what users interact with.

It's not functional most of the time, still

Also not to mention the site regularly fails to even serve a page! Like it's a bunch of text guys, this isn't that hard in 2023. No reason reddit should be going down as often as it does.

I find this fascinating (in part because I see that tension -- features that, at least initially, help the company but make the product less usable to the actual users -- in other products). The long-term fate of apps filled with features that users dislike is surely not a good one...

Users are not the customers. They are the product.

The customers, ad agencies, are being listened to and their feature requests are implemented.

Imagine a user like a cow, the person deciding is the human who eats the burger, the cow does not decide how big its house is. Similarly users on reddit do not choose the app layout for their convenience, ad suppliers do.

Yeah, that narrative works for lots of products. But humans aren't cows and can walk away, and it has happened before. Arguably, it's happening now on Facebook and Twitter. Reddit will just be another dying product idea.

Most redditors use the official app and don't care about the ads and bad experience. Most PEOPLE don't care enough about ads to install free ad blocking software, even when they know about it.

The problem here is that most Reddit moderators care very much about the bad experience, because it makes their unpaid jobs more onerous. And Reddit can't function with moderators.

The Apollo guy should create a reddit alternative, for realz.

This doesn't sound crazy to me.

It's absolutely crazy and akin to asking a bootcamp dev to make Twitter after they created a "twitter-clone" client.

Just on the tech side, the mobile client is not Reddit's bread-and-butter, it's their servers handling traffic, resiliency, recommendation algorithm, spam filtering among many others.

It's a CRUD app, best, top, hot and controversial are your recommendation options.

Not that it's simple to run a site this popular, but it's a lot less complicated than many other social media sites.

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