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Comment by drumhead | Hacker News Reader

The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wisdom, advice, skills of their users to try and make themselves billionaires whilst delivering a hopeless piece of tech in return, thats only been made useable by others people writing software to make the site bearable, Reddit Enhancement suite, Apollo, RIF. And yet here they are ready to make it rubbish again to get their filthy lucre. The more I think about it the more infuriated I get.

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I found out yesterday that they have 2000 employees.

I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible

They raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?

Everyone wants to cash out before the ship sinks.

2000 employees at an average cost of 200k / year is a $400m a year burn rate.

If they're not breaking even with revenue then that money starts to run out quite quickly.

> why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money

Venture capital funds are for a limited time - e.g. five years. At the end of the time, the fund is liquidated - the companies are either sold, or closed down.

They can sell to another round of VC funding, sell to a competitor (who wants to "acquihire" the team), or by IPO.

Effectiveness of capitalism.

Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you know".

But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can actually provide a good experience working on the outside with a fraction of the resources?

I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful of different times now, every time I go screaming back after my eyes feel like they want to vomit. I don't generally have a huge problem with modern web design, but their particular implementation just really sucks.

I think people dramatically underestimate the importance of having a small team of passionate, highly skilled, dare I say, 10x developers, creating the actual product. When venture capitalists come in, they just hire someone somebody they know, then get lost in architectural complexity, even outsourcing some coding. The whole thing turns into a mess.

At my company, my small team ends up doing about 80% of the work, while four other teams, each with 10-plus members, seem to do absolutely nothing.

That's their main problem. No the APIs but wasting an enormous amount of resources and for what? so they can host videos and gifs themselves? Greed is a very effective way to destroy things.

Are you saying that you don't use the _groundbreaking_ one-on-one chat functionality that is a) running against the entire point of their anonymous discussion platform and b) total crap?

The only thing I've seen PMs used for is harassment. And how about the "reddit cares" suicide prevention tool? Just another tool for abuse by trolls.

I’m telling you, the avatars that are also NFTs are absolutely the bees knees.

I open that chat at least once a month.

Then I immediately close it when I realize I clicked the wrong thing. I wonder how much that inflates their stats for it and what the real compared to accidental usage rates are. It's probably very telling.

I think you are taking too pessimistic a stance. For instance the new one-on-one chat feature is great, I’ve had some OnlyFans creators send me messages out the blue to tell me about what they’re up to and I’ve received info that will get me in early on some very lucrative crypto investments.

Do you mean “Legacy chat” or “Chat”?

Apparently the chat feature released in 2020 that nobody used is now “legacy” and was replaced by a new tab which people will continue to not use. Why they didn’t migrate old chats over when deprecating is beyond me.

No wonder they’re burning through money.

So there are now three ways of contacting someone? Private messages (have been around forever), legacy chat and chat?

Yes. It’s bonkers.

New chat is only available on the new site and the latest mobile apps, so it’s also likely a way to funnel people towards those. IIRC legacy chat was also available on old reddit and the older versions of the apps, but never the 3rd party ones, which only had PMs.

The chat which doesn’t show up on old.reddit? So if someone sends you a message on it you miss it? The one you have to disable on new.reddit so people only use PMs? I missed tons of sales on BST subs before realizing people were sending me chats on that.

What makes Apollo better than the official app and why is there such a discrepancy? (I haven't used either.) I know the classic take is that the app is made for advertisers and not users, but I'm interested in what the actual difference is.

It uses the native iOS video player APIs, which (to my knowledge, it's been a while since I tried) the official app doesn't. Also overall, it follows a lot of the "recommended" iOS design guidelines and has the look and feel of an Apple-made app (fonts, long-press behaviour, slide elements to perform actions, haptic feedback, etc).

The “official app” on iOS is AlienBlue which Reddit bought. So to start with, Reddit relied on the work of a 3rd party developer to make it for them. They’ve since made it bloated and slow and full of ads.

Whatever right? Pretty typical for an official app. But it’s slower and less efficient than all of the 3rd party apps now as they’ve continued to improve.

But to me the problem is not only all of that, but they’re publicly ridiculing other apps (especially Apollo) for their “inefficient” use of the API when they’re all better than the official app.

It’s all just insulting and tone-deaf and speaks to the narrative that they no longer care about a community and see users as $$$.

Reddit app used to preload all kinds of shit that would absolutely destroy your data usage. They appear to have fixed it. I used Apollo for a little bit and didn't have any strong opinion on it.

A number of things. I'm comparing it to the website, though I think a lot of this holds true to the app as well.

1. It loads content significantly more quickly than New Reddit (Reddit has done a lot to improve on this, but for a long time, the New Reddit™ was horrifically slow after scrolling through a few posts.)

2. It doesn't support any of the social media functions that the New Reddit provides, which, for me, is perfect because that's not what I browse Reddit for. (You can turn all of that off in the New Reddit, though.)

3. Way less busy than New Reddit, even if you use "Classic" view inside of "Card" view.

4. You can disable infinite scroll in Apollo, whereas you can't in New Reddit (and it's not even supported in Old Reddit unless you use RES)

5. The Apollo developer was insanely responsive to user feedback and was really, really good about incorporating as much as he could into the app (an iPad-native experience being the biggest exception).

This sounds a lot like https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

Did you see the post where someone had reversed engineered some key encryption/obfuscation(?) function from the Android app which was just a substitution cypher and had a 66 byte memory leak on every call?

No. Do you mind linking to that?

It has been deleted! It was posted on r/programmerhumor two days ago (had "reverse engineered" in the title), there was a post about how the original post was deleted, and now everything is private.

The gist was that the function started out with a (fixed-size!) malloc, then copied the source key while applying the substitution cypher into the buffer, and then returned the result of calling a JNI function (NewStringUTF, IIRC) with the buffer, but did not actually free the buffer (which wasn't necessary in the first place). And this function apparently gets called quite often.

The Reddit iOS app and mobile redesign are improvements from past UX. In app media seems to also be better than the past link outs. And the ads have overall gotten better and less intrusive feeling.

I wouldn’t call all that “nothing”

Getting a popup, sometimes undismissable, to read the thread in the mobile app (with no option for alternatives) is the opposite of what I would call an “improvement”, even if the before is old.reddit on mobile (ignoring mobile specific sites like i.reddit et al).

There is no “past UX” for the iOS app. If anything, it’s a downgrade of Alien Blue, the 3rd party app they bought out then neutered.

Making the experience worse for mobile users for the sake of tracking engagement is certainly not “nothing”, you’re right about that. It’s worse than nothing.

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