The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho
But potentially consider this comment from the linked reddit post. It is heartbreaking.
> I'm just so tired! That is all! I'm so tired of feeling left behind by people who aren't aware, and who don't care. The choices we have for social media really aren't much, and if they don't care about third party apps, what else are they going to throw away? Will we lose this place too?
The decision has many side effects that Reddit is not acknowledging and it is important to recognize the importance that an API can have, particuarly on accessibility.
Will reddit survive. Oh yeah, they will be absolutely fine. But their decision does negatively impact the world and that is the important story here.
I do feel for the poster, though.
But hey its fine because the cycle is starting again and there's a shiny new thing focused on its users we can all move to.
> The energy is better spent getting Reddit to improve their official app imho
The market forces of a site like Reddit (or most web sites, frankly) are fundamentally against accessibility. The mobile web site nags me constantly with a banner popup to install their native app. How does one even talk about accessibility in the presence of dark patterns that make a site inaccessible to even those without the need for a11y?
If I'm being blunt, a11y is nothing more than a sledge hammer that devs use to bash other devs over the head with. A lot of "thou shall nots" with not a whole lot of actual user testing. Sprinkling aria attributes and "semantic" tags all over your DOM doesn't make your site accessible. Not when you're also putting in ads, carousels, and various other things that go completely against it.
Reddit is currently deeply integrated into the cultural zeitgeist. Much in the way that Digg used to be the discovery mechanism for the forefront of internet culture. Then v4 hit and everyone fled to reddit. Yes, Digg is still there but it's not the Digg of pre-2010.
Twitter is still around post-Elon, but with a lot less relevance and lot fewer legitimate users.
Reddit will still be here in a year, no matter what. But it may look very different than how it looks today.
But hey, youtube comments never improved much and that site is still highly relevant today, so hard to make a prediction based off my observed anecdote. And I've never used twitter much at all, so maybe I just hadn't noticed before.
So there is almost certainly a correlation to the boost that is given to comments. But even if it is a causative correlation, the ultimate cause is not the bluecheck boost, but the desire of the decisionmaker.
Very much NOT pop culture/politics/etc.
I don’t know what circles you are in but neither digg nor Reddit are particularly relevant nor ever were at their peak. They’ve always been pretty niche. Reddit hasn’t been relevant since at least 2017 in my circles at least - all communities moved to discord and public discourse has always been on twitter and still is.
100k people leaving reddit won't kill reddit, but 100k people can definitely form it's own active community. That many more people than most reddit alternatives as of now.
Official apps always struggle to balance shoving ads in your face and being an actually nice to use app.
On a second thought, maybe that's Reddit's idea, just turn it into a GPT generated and Astroturfing maelstrom and see what happens
You could argue Digg is still alive right now, I won't call it that though.
I wonder how will they kill themselves eventually. As surely that is coming too.
The ONLY real reason people are complaining is because using the official app means seing ads.
All the arguments thrown around there are whataboutisms to try to justify the fact that they want to keep profiteering off of Reddit, that's it.
I've asked multiple times already people to point out specific issues with the app and nobody did beside "iT's AwFuL".
- On my screen size, it was incredibly hard to navigate the profile. The profile header covered over half the screen - Notifications were often bugged - You can only have one thing open at once - no way to quickly toggle between two pages. Apollo at least has four buttons in the bottom you can use to go to seperate pages - It was extremely laggy - It sends notifications by default for random junk ("your post got one upvote!!!" "check out this trending subreddit;!!!") and at least once there was a server bug where it ignored me having turned those off and sent marketing notifications anyway
The real issue for me is it just feels bad to use. Everything lags, it constantly loses my place, ...
new.reddit was nice, I was using it back in the beta period. But it's so slow. It's barely usable. Opening a reddit thread from google if I'm not signed in shows like three comments and a bunch of random unrelated junk. Opening new reddit when I am signed in just feels slow. Every action pauses for a moment to do a bunch of react rerenders.
I don't know if they've fixed it by now but back two years ago it was doing react rerenders of practically the whole page while moving the mouse.
Using the mobile app feels similarly bad to using new.reddit
An app like Apollo - which is so important Apple is featuring front and center at their biggest announcement of the decade, won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications, and/or charge $5/month, before shutting things down for good?
All of these app developers are fear mongering, and hiding their true plans, im 100% sure of this
At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described
Being featured by Apple doesn't pay the bills and Reddit obviously doesn't listen.
> won't attempt to add some caching, poll less for push notifications
The Apollo developer has repeatedly asked Reddit to offer a more efficient method of getting notifications that doesn't require polling. The app backend already uses caching and only a small fraction of the allowed request budget. Reddit doesn't care.
> and/or charge $5/month
$5/month are not enough, in case you didn't notice Reddit's new pricing is insane. Also according to the developer about 10% of users pay the monthly premium subscription. Make it mandatory and most users will be gone.
> At the minimum they could sell to someone else for many millions of dollars, and they'll do the things I described
Even if the things you described weren't already long implemented, they don't change the prices which are simply too high for third-party apps to survive.