Did Reddit just destroy mobile browser access?
reddit.com
reddit.com
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.
But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?
Nowadays Google is equally user-hostile and is happy to accommodate its peers.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
What I'm curious about is why didn't (and maybe they did as I'm not particularly well read in this situation) reddit just buy the apollo app for like $1M/$5M/etc. and then just modify it so it injects whatever tracking they want instead of creating this giant far more costly shitstorm?
Further, maybe the 50k paid users but perhaps there were many unpaid users using it less intensely?
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
If they really believe in their forced-app strategy, they should bet the farm on it, not just on mobile, but everywhere.
Rationally, your approach is of course better, but the current narcissistic execs aren't going to do anything like that, whereas I can certainly see them doing something as stupid and out-of-touch as forcing everyone to use their app on both mobile and desktop.
No. What they'll be talking about is how Reddit had too many holes in its fence, and all its cows escaped. They'll then discuss all the advancement in cattle fencing and barn construction that happened in the 30 years since.
Why do people assume Reddit C-suite and investors are being stupid or narcissistic here? That would make sense if the relationship between them and the users was a friendly one. It isn't. It's adversarial. For Reddit (as well as Meta and other social media platforms), the users are cattle. Even worse than that - they're stochastic cattle. Nobody at the top cares if you or me are having a nice experience with the site/app. They care about the value extracted from us in aggregate. To them, it's an optimization problem, and it's been apparent for a long time now that the optimum point is usually "the most shitty and abusive possible version that still clears the 'fit for purpose' bar" (the end point is more obvious when you look at goods and services that have been around for a couple decades or more, and thus subject to decades of "value engineering").
It doesn't feel as bad when they're optimizing for future value extraction, but that time is past, and Reddit is currently squeezing value out of its cattle-base.
Is it sustainable? Since when did that question mattered to the captains of the industry? "Reddit" as a brand and company matters to the users; for its leaders and investors, it's just a money making instrument that takes time to mature, but exists to be squeezed, discarded and replaced by something else.
Like seriously. What is wrong with these people that designed this shit and how do we not have an alternative.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
There were posts on reddit about the most toxic work culture there i remember with drugs and bizarre politics straight out of some san fran sitcom.
And some quite funny posts on just how grotesquely "my first react project" the whole code base was, and still is. These people are absolutely clueless. They nuked the whole "new reddit feedback" forum with posts pointing out just how bad the whole thing was, like pulling tens megabytes of starter boilerplate in production and loops with script loads inside of them that could grind a powerful computer to a halt.
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
What I like about the old UI is that I find it emphasizes the post titles instead of content. I *don't* feel inundated with images & videos, besides the little thumbnail. I usually just want to skim titles, not look at visual content, and I find that impossible in the new UI. And I find that it's easier to get at/see the comments than in the new UI.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
Only some small groups were actually driven off.
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?
The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.
It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".
I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.
I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.
There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
i installed instagram in december and it’s so much easier to make friends. I feel in touch with what’s going on in the community
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
(Although it's been a while now; the user hostility is just too much).
Considering making it back let’s see
A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Interesting point.
> A friend recently deleted all his apps and he asks me I just email him if I want to talk. I'm just not gonna do that. I barely remember to email my work people.
Oh. You have zero self-awareness. Got it.
Since you can't figure it out yourself -- you are doing that first thing in that second thing. Your poor friend.
Not wanting to jump through hoops for someone you don't necessarily care that much about ain't 'zero self awareness'
It helps me trim down 'friends' who might not be real friends.
I tend not to be the person who tends to bother other people constantly even after getting signals that they don't want to interact with you. Are you?
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
If you put them below “work people”, they’re not a friend. Or rather, you’re not a friend.
That's something this strategy helps to trim out. Who I want to talk to and jump through hoops for, and whom I don't.
---
Yea, my “true” friends will contact me anywhere, but it’s nice to have a small network of people I know that I can invite to stuff or even better yet invite me to events and activities. They may also become close friends at some point.
Internet misanthropes contributing to the trend for people to lose friends and acquaintances as they age.
i don’t in my hometown and didn’t go to school near my home state.
old friends get harder to see every passing year. it’s just incrementally harder to stay in touch given the geographical distance. i do text and visit when i can
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
gonna take your advice and cut off the people i’ve met because hospitalJail is skeptical!
Appreciate you providing insight into my life
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
The outrage from users that Reddit is trying to do what everyone in the tech industry does makes no sense
And furthermore, if they give up the IPO focus, let’s say they don’t do the obvious and sell to Meta
What do they do? Layoff 80% of employees? Cut down the servers? Obviously if they are going to screw over the investors, no one will give a penny to another funding round
If, theoretically, the investors really don’t have a majority of votes, like someone here mentioned, the 2021 funding round was the last one, Reddit just burns it’s cash until it shuts down
Okay, and? Bytedance is also profitable. Apple is also profitable. Netflix is also profitable. They all do vastly different things to achieve profitability. What works for one company won’t necessarily work for others.
Just because another company is profitable does not mean it needs to be mentioned every time Reddit is, and that was my entire point.
People don’t even necessarily have a problem with Reddit trying to become profitable, but with the extreme disregard for their users they’ve shown in the last few weeks. Is that common between all the companies above? No. And certainly not to the extent Reddit has shown. And that’s what all these topics have boiled down to.
I’m sure if an article comes up which talks about Reddit and Facebook, then Facebook will come up in conversation. Unless that happens, there should be no real expectation for it to come up organically.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
Instead a better approach is to migrate whatever you deem useful in your Reddit history to another platform. And then remove it from Reddit, either by deletion or replacing it with gibberish.
You might also be interested in this text, as food for thought:
https://karl-voit.at/2020/10/23/avoid-web-forums/
It has been shared a few times here in HN, so I believe that plenty users here know about it.
When you search about a Neovim issue for example, often the solution is in an old Reddit thread. When you delete that, it will be gone forever.
And someone might say "I won't post it there", but once the person leaves some info in that site, they're encouraging others to interact with it, and generate more info there, in that walled garden, instead of somewhere else.
Note that the potential of information loss in Reddit does not come just from users deleting their stuff. It's also mods (including automod) and Reddit Inc. itself. One day Reddit will decide "we're going to flush out old content!", and here goes your info anyway, no matter if you deleted it or not. Or Reddit itself will go off, and the info in it will be lost, just like the info from the forums that Reddit itself killed. That's the main reasoning in the link that I've provided, and you know what, I think that the author is 100% right.
Also note that there are ways to reduce the information loss. People can - and IMHO they should - migrate that info, before removing it from Reddit.
I think that you're looking at the info present there _now_ in a short-sighted way, without realising the consequences elsewhere.
EDIT: and as another commenter highlighted everything has been archived already. The info loss will be way, way lower than you think.
Agreed. In the past 2 days I've been overly annoyed as both days I've had multiple google queries dump me to seemingly useful threads that I can not see because of this foolish nonsense of shuttering communities in "protest".
I should also mention that Reddit archives exist, so those post will live on somewhere.
It's about 2TB in zstd compression, so finding the needles will be interesting - but it'll probably be much easier years from now.
Thank you for this info, it's fucking great. This means that the info loss for whatever came before March/2023 will be exactly ZERO.
This is mathematically backed.
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
Not simple at all.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?
Apart from a few geeks using firefox on android, mobile browsers generally dont hinder ads
Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.
Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say “why not just force existing web users to use it?”
It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.
How many times is improvement UX in desired there?
Even with Twitter, which has just been a cavalcade of obviously nonsense moves for months and months, there are still believers in The Plan. I'm actually a little curious why this is; despite presumably having had interactions with poorly-run companies in the course of their daily lives, some people _really_ seem to struggle with the idea that a company might be poorly-run, and seek any other explanation.
'person knows what they are doing' does not equal have a 'well-thought-out master plan'
Individuals also have their own personal goals such as high bonuses or maybe high IPO, where you will sell out and become rich.
And as CEO you have to not only have a plan, but also set up initiatives for people to follow it, which is often harder than it seems. That is why it sometimes seems a company is sabotaging itself. Sometimes there is something deeper going on but sometimes they are sabotaging themselves.
It’s easy to miss these failures internally and assume the teams/management are functional and effective when your app keeps growing… via Reddit’s content and existing market dominance.
“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”
See also Goodhart’s Law.
I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.
RIF is reddit to me, if they stick to it and block API access I'll log on one last time to delete my account.
Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.
Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.
The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.
Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.
Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.
The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.
There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.
Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
They probably did do the maths and conclude that the contributors who'll stick around are driving a significant part of the desired engagement. Dumb memes and culture war potshots and disinformation sure, but engagement.
If you have NNN million users, and you have full location tracking, purchase history, device ID, contacts, search history, list of other apps installed, usage data, Wifi SSIDs, Bluetooth beacons, etc. etc. etc. that's going to look like a huge payday compared to those same users running a mobile adblocker.
And if you're not currently collecting location tracking data, and you've got half a decade of meteoric growth, well, turn it on. Forecast that graph up and to the right, and just flip the switch to the "get money" position.
Due to the winner's curse, you only have to convince a few investors. Even if a significant fraction don't trust your prospectus and imagine that some users might be turned off by a post-IPO monetization scheme, you merely have to convince a small group that your numbers are accurate and you're TikTok 2.0.
Comments like this amaze me. People really think these giant corps are out here not doing things like this.
And yes comments like this amaze me too.
They might have chosen to ignore them. They might have fed biased assumptions into their calculations. Project management might have messed up and deprioritized the features meant to placate that section of the userbase. Institutional churn might have resulted in the corporation forgetting that they ever did run those numbers or why they are now heading down this path.
You should assume that any numbers shared publicly are just the tip of a giant-ass iceberg and that there were probably 10x more analyses going on internally that weren't shared.
The thing that ultimately gets shared publicly is whatever avoids using advanced stats or internal jargon; They want a single soundbite, not a scientific paper with a full methods section.
After a year with not much to show for it, the VP for the silo starts to put out kudos for the team for break-even revenue impact. However, behind the scenes, the insight they were taking credit for was a common sense idea that had already been in the e-commerce team’s backlog.
Nothing surprises me when a company says that they’ve run the numbers.
But... most businesses aren't that complex, and people can usually come up with really good common sense ideas for how to make improvements.
Data-science is often most effective when it serves less as a visionary idea-maker and more as translator that helps common-sense ideas become real (optimizing values, figuring out the best roll-out strategies, building forecasts).
The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.
It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.
(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)
IIRC Android has something similar that opens an isolated Chrome tab within apps but I have no idea how common usage of that is in Android apps.
Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.
Admittedly, I'd prefer not to depend on third party DNS as a solution, but it's trading one entity having access to my requests for another. I used to be able to do this with a simple hosts file/blacklist solution, but I finally succumbed to the various user-hostile policies of "ability to elevate to superuser is OK on a laptop, but not on a phone" and have not enabled su on my current device (needed to manage hosts file).
Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
With apps, you kind of by definition only have a blob of code. As an user and with a sufficiently advanced operating system, you can block some outside-world interactions like internet connections, but the app only has to give you a render target whose pixels can be drawn to arbitrarily. Some apps even use integrity verification features from the OS vendor to check if they haven't been tampered with, that is much harder to do on the web.
Which is incidentally why there is so much interest in high performance web programming and being able to draw arbitrary pixels to a render target (hello canvas/webgl/webgpu). Expect content blockers to become way less effective in the coming years (even ignoring the big obvious attacks like Chrome's Manifest v3).
That's s very sad and probably very accurate analysis!
Wonder if the arms-race will give rise to other kinds of add blockers that use image recognition to identify ads. But that still requires rendering the ads (even if only in the background), removing much of the benefit of ad-blockers.
The surefire way would be an external application that uses OS APIs to fiddle with memory directly (bye bye mobile content blockers).
But whatever form it takes, it would have to be programmed to operate on every framework available, so it's way less universal than writing a CSS selector or URL regex.
As a simple example: Dark Reader has 5 million installs on Chrome. That's 5 million people who can view a web app in dark mode even if the developers didn't think to provide a native way to do so.
I'm to the point where I boycott apps. I will only use an app if there's a real benefit to me for doing so, such as podcasts and music and offline functionality or those that use hardware features.
I have never looked into this mind
Certificate pinning means you cannot insert yourself as the backend and/or MITM the requests. The app will only communicate directly with the owner of the private key it was pinned to.
Depending on the app and OS, it may be more or less easy to change the app to remove/crack the pinning. In general, if you are not in full control of the device (root), it's not possible.
very very easy, no root required
it's even easier than that as all apps (except native ones) will be using the java TrustManager interface
> Also, it takes more than one byte if the binary is obfuscated
but they can't hide the calls into TrustManager
a small utility could automatically take in the APK, patch out the calls and return the fixed APK for you
(would probably work for 99% of apps out of the box)
Is this required? i.e. do all apps have to use the TrustManager interface to accomplish cert pinning, or is that merely the official way?
well, Java is Turing complete, so you could completely re-implement TLS yourself instead of using the API that comes with the platform
in practice no-one is going to do that
It means the payload is. HTTPS alone doesn't have any special considerations for hiding the domain, which I think is visible so the request can be routed correctly. And since a lot of ad-blocking is based on domain, that ought to work.
Now you've blocked a large percentage of ads on android.
Phone apps delenda est
Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:
– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage
– https://revanced.app/download
Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases
No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.
The documentation[2] is very sparse right now.
[0] https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches
They offered a version of the YouTube client which they patched to remove display ads and video ads, plus add background play, SponsorBlock support, and more.
They became fairly popular before Google shut them down for distributing modified versions of their proprietary code.
ReVanced was one of the teams that popped up in the aftermath, a spiritual successor. They reasoned that they could achieve the same basic functionality legally if they only distributed patches (instructions) rather than a pre-patched binary.
So they wrote an app (ReVanced Manager) that takes a stock copy of the YouTube app, unpacks it, applies patches, then repacks & re-signs it. (They don't have Google's signing keys, so typically users need to install the new version under a new name. Users with root can choose to override the built-in version instead.)
Once ReVanced Manager could do that, they expanded into patching other apps as well.
So ReVanced is a team that maintains:
* A list of useful patches
* An engine to apply them
* A Java CLI frontend to the patcher
* An Android app frontend to the patcher
At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.
All icons on mobile look the same to me: I mean, Android's Material Design icons really look the same to me and even the icons from iOS never really stick in my head. That "settings" icon for instance with all the gears looks like a movie poster for The Golden Compass and not a settings dialog. The App store and Adobe Acrobat and many applications have meaningless logos based around a generic triangle...
Once something gets a mobile icon I will struggle to find it, but if I want to find something on the web it is a quick search, often autocompleted when I type a few letters, or easy to find in the bookmarks or maybe my history.
I find myself deleting apps aggressively because the junk apps make it hard to find the few apps I really use, most of all I use the web as much as I can because it is so easy to find anything on the web.
Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.
That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.
Well, that is why Facebook and others are pushing to "allow alternative app stores" on iphone. Getting past the app-review process means the dark patterns and data mining can get way more noxious, and at that point they just do like reddit and kill the mobile experience. No, no phones allowed on the website, we have a native app for that.
If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.
Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.
It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.
Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).
Putting on my PM hat, I bet:
- On web, the biggest top of funnel entrypoint for Reddit is Google search
- On mobile, it’s push notifications
The latter is probably the single biggest retention lever Reddit has. The former is an acquisition lever, but probably doesn’t do much for retention.
AdBlock
All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.
That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions.
I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went.
Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
That's simply -not- capitalism.
The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being.
Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do).
The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement.
I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself.
Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
1. Have an excellent business idea 2. ? 3. Profit!
Also why does reddit mobile site lag? Takes 5-10 seconds of the stupid icon before you see the text. Compare it to instant i.reddit or old.reddit.
Are they so incompetent that they cannot write a site that doesnt lag? Or they just dont care?
They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
Hacksaw Bob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 Whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGa...
Dubsmash had a sizable userbase with almost no overlap with Reddit's and their conversion rate appears to be less than 0.01%
Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
Mo 1-3 is new owners finding all the buried bodies, and restructuring leadership with people they can trust
3-6 mos is learning who is valuable and who is not (overlap with months 1-3)
6-9 mos is predicting how customers will react to X change or Y Change
9-12mos is final legal review of changes, exit packages, PR statements,etc (especially is mass layoffs are involved)
12-18mos is execution time frame for layoffs, and restructure of the organization
After the first year is when people get fired.
Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.
Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine.
Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
It is just a very tough business.
That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments.
Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
The only one that did was the short-lived Amazon original Betas, which had more irritating younger characters, yet for all of its memespeak it really did feel like it grokked the startup bubble culture well enough, especially since it was actually set in the SoMa of San Francisco, rather than Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto!
But yes it would be great to have the show nowadays with a fresh look at the current environment.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc.
An example. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creat...
Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
I think it's self-evident that hip hop is at least a trillion dollar phenomenon and that it started with black folks in the United States.
Still sounds racist, in its way. As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
Later edit: Reminds me of this Dave Chapelle skit [1], the part with the "white dude" whispering:
> Oh, my God, I think those black guys are gonna try to save us
It's just essentialist stuff.
That's a good question and if you're sincerely interested in understanding the answer, there's a long history of thought on the topic of black excellence in the context of racial oppression. You could start with W.E.B. Du Bois and the "Talented Tenth"
For the record, I'm assuming your questions are disingenuous, but answering in good faith for other readers who might interested.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
Thank you for the your recommendation.
Found it funny that one of the establishment's darling magazines, I'm talking about Foreign Affairs, has started doing the token racial thing when it comes to Du Bois by finding out that he had, indeed, written for them 70 to 80 years ago [1], and in the May/June issue they even re-published a July 1943 piece of his. No mention of his communism, of course, that would defeat the purpose of talking about race without really looking at what stands behind race.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/web-du-bois-doc...
I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
What happens usually is some middle tier exec (or big name customer if B2B) will say, “hey did you see Snapchat new stories feature? We should do something like that” and then without careful customer research, or a product leader connecting it to an overarching vision, the devs just start work on it and it rolls out because it’s just there.
Everyone needs something to do and everyone loves new features right?
Blindly copying some other company’s new features or UI patterns, and pigeonholing it into an app without cohesive product-wide strategy (aka connecting it to what customers already like about your service but even better) is always the sign the company has entered mediocrity. Largely a talent issue and execs who don’t really care about long term product dev. People just looking at generic growth charts and hoping they go up and then buying other companies when their own teams can’t hack it, hoping they can seed some life, without fixing the root causes.
Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
OP said:
>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"
Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.
Edit: Rift is probably another good example, though less high-profile than SWTOR.
What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.
The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How someone spends their leisure time is a limited, valuable resource.
This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
Say you have a shop and brand that sells chocolate cake; but a competitor appears that sells ice cream, and their market turns out to be 10 times bigger than yours. You could try to make a new shop, selling ice cream, but the lack of brand awareness might make it never take off. So instead you turn your chocolate cake shop into an ice cream shop, and use your existing customer awareness to catapult you into taking half that market. Good for you, since you now have half of a 10 times bigger market. Bad for the customers, since they now lose the choice between cake and ice cream.
Ok, maybe the part about "using your existing brand" is where social networks are a bit different from other industries. There are hundreds of companies that could create a good social network, but the hard part is getting a big enough user base going. Probably this is less of an issue in the cake industry.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
It's so frustrating. The Web, of course, has a similar but much worse problem with that, in no small part because there aren't—for no good reason—excellent built-in UI elements. They could be good, and there could be a lot more very helpful more-complex and smarter elements (think: mobile listviews, native hands-off payment prompts, that kind of thing), but they're not and there aren't :-/
Damn near every app on my phone would be better if the designers and brand-obsessed product managers hadn't gotten their way.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
And to nobody's surprise US tech will be primed to offer their TikTok clone.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base.
More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.
How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes.
I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
Modern ads are not the obvious type that are marked as such. It's more like product placement and a bunch of other less obvious methods.
I’m almost positive that Instagram also has those sort of embedded promotions/ads, which are generally done outside of the official platform. But they also have a metric shitton of actual ads, within their own platform, that they queued up.
Most of the things I get on TikTok are, I would argue, genuine content that someone made because they wanted to or is following along a trend that is ongoing. I don't get a lot of people showing off a product, and often when they do it's for stuff I'm interested in and I'm already following them for.
Perhaps its a matter of diversity. Instagram feels very monotone in its ads: bottom barrel mobile games or brands trying to sell me their garbage I don't need nor would be interested in. TikTok on the other hand feels less monotonous in what I get shown.
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
"Vote with your feet" is probably a more realistic strategy for enacting this kind of change, so to deny that there are software jobs that are not part of the problem is a bit defeatist. I'd be all in favour of a general strike on building adtech, though I personally couldn't participate.
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
It was used during the redesign where they added thumbnails like 14 years ago, to allow people to see the new design before it got launched.
This was the birth of /r/beta
The subdomain is basically the same as old.reddit now, but I continued using the domain all this time for no reason.
The /r/beta subreddit was repurposed for beta testing, but has been abandoned for at least 8 years. I don’t know why they leave the subreddit active.
The subdomain I can only imagine was totally forgotten.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
Today is an okay day after all.
My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-michael-seibe...
Did you report that to 911?
Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.
No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.
I use third party apps exclusively, and will not be participating in Reddit after Apollo shuts down.
It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.
“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.
Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
Yes. I tried the app. The app is better not because it is good but because they deliberately break the web.
Also the app seems to eat battery and I am planning on charging my new iPhone 14 twice a day to use it or jump through hoops to figure out if it is anything I do wrong.
Between this and the community blackouts I am leaving for now.
I left Twitter a few months ago (including Nitter) and my stress levels have been lower since that. I guess the same will happen after I leave reddit.
Edit: It also seems to me the fediverse is picking up steam quickly now. The number of lemmy instances and lemmy users seems to have exploded recently: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
I’ll probably come back at some point, because I do like being in touch with some of the subreddits.
But I’ll see how Reddit-free life feels for a bit. I find it really offensive that they can have such a trash UX in their app and then shut down the other apps.
The Reddit UI has always felt really hostile, which is fine… I just chalk it up to incompetence. But shutting out people who are more competent just feels way off.
If you're anything like me, then it feels more productive and less addicting. Turns out the longer I do without it, the less connected to it I feel, the less compelled to go back and participate some more. And I feel better using the wasted time to do something more useful with my life.
I turn off HN periodically for the same reason, when I feel like it's becoming too much.
I unsubscribed from the 3D printing sub a while ago, because the good stuff didn't get upvotes, because they were not images, so nothing good would make into my home page.
The latest cool thing I discovered was on youtube of all places on the topic of conical slicing.
pcmasterrace is basically just "check out this pile of boxes of expensive stuff."
The home server / selfhosted subreddits are endless pictures of a wifi router, 2-bay NAS, and a small form factor PC sitting on a shelf (and in the case of the selfhosted subreddit, also screenshots of people's web dashboards for their home server which is almost entirely torrenting / media related.)
My local area subreddit is almost entirely photos of scenery, with little in the way of anything of substance like news or politics.
I remember when they started using those annoying pop ups to ask people if they want to rather use the official app or continue. Then suddenly for some links only the Reddit app would work. Nowadays I try to avoid clicking on Reddit links when I am on mobile.
Also, the answer theoretically should be right below the question 'cause it's most relevant but I can see how no one could bring themselves to upvote this.
They seem to have broken the back button now on iOS/safari. I’m sure it wasn’t like that a few weeks ago.
But then one day I checked out of habit and I was back in.
But if they want to “ban” me from the site because I visit with my phone’s browser, so be it. Honestly they’d probably be doing me a favor. But I’m not downloading the stupid app.
For the time being I'm just going to reallocate my Reddit time to reading about my hobbies.
I just flat block it, but use workarounds when I rarely need to view Google results, may follow this same approach going forward.
Screen Time on iOS/macOS lets you override the clock but in a “snooze” style. It blocks me from habitually browsing the front page but lets me land there from search.
Right, which is why they should shut down the web site and instead force users to install an app (including on PCs). If they believe that strongly in users being required to use an official app, they should force this everywhere.
[1] r/Redactle - https://redactle.net puzzle game | [2] https://discord.gg/VKnrnXev
Try Discourse, or Zulip (disclaimer: I used to work there), or Mastodon, or spin up your own forum using any number of self-hostable solutions. Try anything but Discord. Future you will thank you when Discord is the one in the news some future day.
Discord just doesn't work for me. I'm not going to scroll through hours of chat, and I'm not going to sit there and watch the chat rehash the same discussion people had hours ago.
I have things to do... kids to take care of, a house to clean, groceries, dinner, places to go, etc.
At least for me, personally, that would supply the only thing I still use Reddit for, some of my hobbies have communities on Reddit + Discord and I participate in both, if Discord provided a discussion board to allow a more asynchronous communication I would ditch Reddit completely.
Its not like the stock market is littered with social media website corpses or anything...
And that includes retirement funds and such, especially the general ones that follow indexes of various types.
Unlike the API change though, I think they do risk losing users with this who still see ads and provide some return.
I know what they are thinking, but (setting aside the whole enshittification thing) it makes me sad to see yet another long term sacrifice for some quick profit. It makes me not want to invest in them.
Recently, they decided to move you to an absolute blank screen after login. Nothing is happening. You have to activate "desktop mode" before the page loads. Or you have to open a subreddit directly and click on the "Home" button afterwards. It's a joke.
The chat is a nightmare as well. Now you have the legacy and the new chat tabs. As a user, there is no notable difference between those two. I was able to pop out the chat in previous versions into an own window. They removed the button to do that, but it still appears sometimes.
Forcing you into the app is next level.
I'm surprised some have put them in the same boat as Tiktok. Compare the logged out mobile Web experience of clicking on a Tiktok link to, say, Instagram and then get back to me. Tiktok just works and plays the video. IG nags you to login. And the page is slow to load. Like how IG Reels expects to be aserious Tiktok competitor is completely beyond me.
But we're doomed to repeat this pattern with Reddit and whatever eventually succeeds it:
1. Company creates app/website for users to create content;
2. Users create content. The company does everything it can to create hypergrowth;
3. At some point the owners decide to extract value from the user-generated content through ads, selling information, etc. It's easier to monetize an app than a website so you'll get nagged (and eventually forced) into installing the app;
4. There will be cries of protest. Comapny will mollify its users by partially backpedalling;
5. It'll quietly just roll forward with the changes months later after users have accepted the partial changes from (4);
6. Go to (3).
At some point the site turns into Myspace, Geocities, Experts Exchange, etc and users eventually leave and the cycle repeats itself.
This model is broken.
- It's true that some hobby specific subreddits have wealth of information. But it's just occasional view of such subreddit and "sort by top". New posts are 99% attention seeking posts without value, even on good subreddits
- Besides the above, 99% of reddit is political virtue signalling, memes, karma farming
Indeed, time is little and precious and should be spent wisely. Very virtuous of you.
> hobby specific subreddits have wealth of information
Ah the virtue of doing hobbies
> New posts are 99% attention seeking posts without value
Only the most virtuous of us completely avoid the trap of attention seeking, well done.
> political virtue signalling
Ah the biggest virtue of all, avoiding virtue-signalling. You've really tapped into the big one here, well done and thank you for letting us know that you're not some filthy virtue-signaller.
EDIT: Forgive me, I’m cranky. Of course the communities resting on Reddit’s beach are themselves the castles. I’m so tunnel-visioned on the API aspect that only used that lens.
It's surprisingly easy to kill a product through a series small isolated 'improvements'.
For instance, FB a/b a lot but I can't remember the last time it broke the ability to go to someone's profile entirely.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-tw...
Reddit needs decoupling, not disrupting.
Wondering what will happen when Google comes to that point. Or Microsoft.
What is worse about MS is that some of their designers and project managers admit they dont even use their own products - so they dont see how bad they become.
If you want to read without feeding the beast more than necessary ^
When you keep selecting people for an specific behavior, you get a population biased towards that behavior. If you suddenly decide you want something else, then you have a problem.
about Apple. About everyone else though, there are no limits. Observational anecdata from rApple and HN.
Reddit is trying to monetize the platform and it is very healthy thing for them and for the users. Pushing users to the mobile app is very reasonable if not a must.
Apps have better engagement. Push notifications, quick access to the platform, having a foot in the door on the user apps home screen are very clear pros.
Also, pushing people towards being always logged in is a hugh step towards more customized ads which in turn will increase monetization.
Yes thier app maybe lacking but I think they will try to make it best the viewing experience for Reddit. Deprecating the mobile web client gradually only makes sense.
I am not hinting that they are angles but no amount of complaining will ever change the situation without finding a better model that addresses these points.
Twitter, Facebook, and every other social media have gone through this journey. Why do you expect anything else?
If companies break your trust make them suffer. Leave. Find alternative or build them.
Any user who continues to use a platform and keep getting treated like a ahole deserves it. Look at recent netflix flip on password sharing, users rewarded them by giving them more subscriptions instead of leaving and finding alternatives.
Sidenote: could the 3rd reddit party clients embrace such an alternative and give it a meaningful boost in usage?
I don't use imgur on my phone anymore... mission accomplished?
Instead they force suggestions. I don't want Reddit politics ever ever ever. I subscribed to sdnsfw, I don't want other nsfw boards, I wanted stable diffusion only. They have a juicy controversial topic that drives me crazy, show me so I can waste hours commenting, no please don't.
You literally can't get rid of these. Or at least it was not clear.
I don't use reddit because I like being addicted. I used reddit because they had niche info.
Last year, when I tried the app, it asked if I was happy about it very often. It becomes annoying to skip this question. I tried to answer "No": I felt my answer got lost in a confusing procedure. I never tried to choose "Yes", but I guess it would have led me to the notation on Google Play?
Reddits mobile site became unusable for me a few years ago.
I have bad news for you, Narwhal and other apps will all stop working after this month. That’s the reason for the current protest. Here are recent articles:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
I’m well aware of the protests.
Open the `/etc/hosts` in your favorite editor (vim).
Enter this line: 127.0.0.1 reddit.com
(google of course is taking great pains to prevent that, cheerled by the DoH hans on HN)
They don’t have users they have victims.
I’m sure they lose more users by throwing up the banner to people who can’t be bothered or don’t want to download the app.
With firefox on Android i have ublock origin, on the reddit app i don't - I'm forced to watch their ads however they feed them.
Plus, push notifications like "have you seen this post?" and "your comment got 10 upvotes!"
Nobody other site is so belligerent in getting you onto the app so I can’t see how it’s a net positive for them.
That's all I need, and now I don't need to worry about hivemind downvotes when I dare go against the grain.
Seems like a win/win.
I'm not sure if Reddit is still A/B testing this strategy of alienating everyone on mobile that does not use their "one and only" app.
It'll randomly pretend I'm not logged in.
Refreshing works sometimes, sometimes it doesn't.
(old.reddit is noticeably less buggy and MASSIVELY faster...)
Facebook, Twitter, .... now reddit? Might be.
And it's never advertisement. Advertise away. It's usually one of two things: encroaching on privacy or pushing "engagement." I'd have left reddit years ago except that I could opt out of the re-design.
IMO, we need some well funded and user focused non-profits to provide social media. Capitalism and the drive for growth is destroying these platforms from within.
However there is likely certainly more to it, as forcing users into applications provide much more control & analytics which can be profitable for companies.
On my iPad, this post appears as neatly formatted text in a nice font, centered on a white background with absolutely nothing else on the page. Not so much as a username or date (though it does say "by" on the line above).
There's also a little hamburger icon in the top left corner that does nothing if clicked. and a search icon that behaves the same.
It's... uncluttered and free of distraction, I guess.
On the pros the moderation tools are amazing and bots are first class citizens. Events are really nice for organizing stuff, A+ code formatting.
Search is kinda bad but not worse than Reddit. They do have a posts thing now but it seems seldom used and not as nice as arbitrarily nested threads.
- shorter domain name
- allow users make and moderate "subreddits"
- add picture support
All my slavic friends working internationally are now trying to hide accents because people might think they were Russian and have them lose their contracts or mistreating them.
I have since broken off friendships with people proudly proclaiming they were redditors. In history "books" 200 years from now, such websites will be treated as the 21st centuries version of the hitler youth. If you're tolerating such behaviour or denying it's existence, you're supporting racism.
I'm wondering what I'll get here. Censorship or debate?
For a less popular opinion, I don't sympathize at all with the reddit moderators who are up in arms about the API problem. They have had full, unfettered control of their subreddits where their power is near absolute and they enjoy pushing their own views and punishments on anyone they don't like. But now that a higher power is enforcing their rules on them, they cry oppression (see u/awkwardtheturtle and the moderators of r/art). It is pure hypocrisy and almost hilarious to me.
I know not all moderators are the same, but with the way reddit is designed, power is only exercised in one direction and power abuse is unavoidable. The very culture of reddit at its core is flawed now and I think it is funny that only now, when the higher caste of redditors, who are in the minority, started to get affected that we see some calls for action.
You know, the best choice is not to do general socializing via web. Specialized discussions okay. Spend your leisure time at a pub or similar places with the regulars. And bring a book in case you don't anyone meet up that day. So much more fun and relaxing than trying to argue with strangers or wrestling with mods.
To be fair Reddit has an additional issue:
Whoever is the top mod is based on seniority. This sort of system tends to attract basement dwellers with no social skills (even if those are essential for a good mod), who are there just for the power.
If you save the world and then fart once in public, nobody will remember you as "the hero that saved the world". You'll be forever remembered as Mr. Fartman. And the same applies to any group of people.
Being a mod doesn't make you a good mod, not even a good person; you're bound to have a few piece of shit moderators, like awkwardtheturtle, godofatheism, millionsofcats, bardfinn and the likes. And when you remember "the mods" you'll remember those farts, and end blaming the rather decent big majority, who silently does their mod duties for the best of their communities. I sympathise with _those_ moderators.