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Comment by Loveaway | Hacker News Reader

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the Internet, to the rear end of the internet. You killed your babies, man. Antagonising your most loyal users, for what? Bit of cash? Are you guys starving or what??

Man idk. I hope San Francisco is doing good. This is supposed to be the city of hippies and love, but lately not so much good news coming out of there. It really makes me sad to see Reddit explode like this.

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Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but:

> To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this?

Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. So people dont mind it and probably never experienced the old layout. Additionally, the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2]). That also tells me that a huge amount of users are perfectly fine with the reddit app.

So, knowing those basic facts, is it at all surprising that reddit is reacting this way? They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy. The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care.

disclaimer: old.reddit user of 13 years and only recently switched to apollo from alien blue. just calling it like i see it.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828 [2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

Full disclosure, I use the main Reddit app. I don't think that I've ever installed a different app. That being said, I think it's actually pretty crazy that Apollo is #10 (in News). It's not clear that being 8 spots higher is that much of an accomplishment considering the site itself is constantly pestering you to install it, and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay (which may by itself explain the .1 difference in reviews). Actually, I just went to the AppStore to read the bad reviews, and sorted by "Most Critical", and from a very short cursory glance it seems that most of the new bad reviews are from people who are angry that they bought a lifetime subscription and the app is now shutting down. It's kind of impressive that it is still at 4.7, honestly. But more importantly, I think this also means that the 4.8 vs. 4.7 comparison isn't necessarily representative of the sentiment a month ago.

I am in basic agreement with everyone that the core app sucks. It just means that I use Reddit less in general instead of going out of my way to fix their problem for them by finding an app that works. That is another failure case that isn't really considered: there's a bunch of opportunity cost just in people who have a bad experience and then switch to YouTube or whatever.

> and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay

I've been using Apollo for free for years, you don't need to pay for it.

they seem to be cooking the books wrt the reviews. there are a ton of one word app reviews that are 5 star

But note that it’s up from #30. So this debacle is inflating the importance of Apollo way beyond what it normally would be, at least with regards to its placement in this chart.

Not that that’s a good look for Reddit, to throw Apollo under the bus, then to find the bus they threw them under was Reddit, and it threw it completely off course.

It is mind boggling that they could not anticipate this response. That memo they sent out after this and which got leaked was such an example of poor leadership, it would really be a shame if this doesn’t lead to some changes there.

Apollo does not require you to pay.

"Core" user base != tyranny of the majority. Alienating a huge amount of clearly passionate reddit users in favour of Joe schmoe browsing on the train home sounds like a dangerous decision - reddit sti needs all those people who provide the content people browse for, etc.

In any case, at this point the bigger issue for a lot of people is just the total disrespect reddit has publicly announced, repeatedly, towards its users. That some people don't care about this disrespect doesn't make it nonpresent.

I think it's also worth noting that the actual contributing members on message boards is a tiny minority[1][2][3]. Activity appears to follow a Pareto distribution. The members that not only contribute, but regularly contribute quality content is a minority within that minority.

The vast majority is scrolling and blowing air out their nose, maybe voting, maybe very occasionally leaving a comment. From a monetization sense, it may look tempting to focus on retaining that passive minority, but what risks happening is a dead sea effect where it enters a cycle of contributors leaving because contributions are deteriorating in quality. That can be nearly impossible to reverse.

[1] https://jennchen.com/blog/business/were-all-lurkers/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222436334_The_Top_F...

[3] https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000129213/10112828...

Perhaps this is also one of the reasons Reddit doesn't take action against spammers and repost bots that take popular posts and comments from <time> ago and report them verbatim later and get thousands and thousands of upvotes.

Nice way to fake content creation long enough to shove your IPO out the door and exit before the house of cards starts falling apart.

Let's hope so :) I now actively want Reddit to blow up.

Yes of course. And that tiny minority of course shares your preferences about UI design.

That minority makes the different demands on UI, since they use the site in a different way from the passive users.

Case in point, if you're rarely ever contributing it doesn't really even matter if the entire website crashes when you paste into the rich text editor so you lose everything you've written. Which I guess is why this bug is still not properly fixed on all browsers after being broken as hell for 4 years, including for long times on Chrome(?!) [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1

I think this is one of the big reasons TikTok has a completely separate app for creators (CapCut)

It allows them to continue to add creation features and a creators experience, without bogging down the main app consumers are using to mindlessly scroll while pooping.

Wait, is that why that awful editor locks up on me? Pasting? I always just give up on using it after it locks up and hadn't done it enough times to make the connection.

> reddit sti needs all those people who provide the content people browse for, etc

Seems like they are betting their future on commercial content producers. If you're on /r/all a lot of the content is already reposts, disguised corporate posts, professional reshufflers and karma hoarders, etc.

Ah yes, all redditors are equal, but some are more equal than others. Content contributors just matter more.

And if joe schmoe browsing the subreddit wants to vote in favor of the blackout, you're naturally gonna count that as a vote of support, even though they're not a content contributor, right?

Why, how would you count it? Because either they matter, in which case they support the blackout more than they do not as the votes have overwhelmingly demonstrated, or if you think they don't then who is left to pin the "most people like things the way they are" claim onto?

> They are trying to keep the main, core userbase happy.

But there's a very simple way to do that... sit down with people, figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like. There's multitudes of ways this whole thing could've been solved, they clearly don't wont to solve it.

Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.

100% agreement with you here. You have one of the first logical arguments for any push back.

> figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like

Absolutely, I was hoping that would happen when I saw the first Apollo thread(s) a few weeks ago. But Christian took this very personally, and he decided to take his toys and go home. reddit is not at all innocent here. They definitely had many missteps, but I think both sides did. And now that talks have broken down, reddit has little reason to come back to the table.

> Paid API is NOT going to make reddit profitable, especially at this price. It's funny to me that anyone actually even believes that. Hosting costs are not the problem, they have 2000 employees. For a site that can't get any feature fully functioning, has one of the worst ads in the business that noone wants to buy and is almost fully maintained by community for free, it's quite a lot of employees.

This is the heart of it for me personally. reddit has much bigger problems than just the API hosting/pricing. Drawing the line in the sand about the API and profitability doesnt make a lot of sense. Having 2000 employees (why?), hosting images and videos (value?), nfts (why?) and not following through on features is their actual downfall. They pivoted away from their core competency -- content aggregation and easy to use forums. I think they will survive though.

Why shouldn't he have taken it personally? He got 30 days notice from Reddit that they will change the pricing in a way likely to kill his business? With more advance notice he could have investigated ways to adapt his business or tried to lobby politely for a different pricing model. With this short notice he basically was forced to shut down.

I do not fault Christian at all for taking it personally, Reddit handled it very poorly.

> With more advance notice he could have investigated ways to adapt his business or tried to lobby politely for a different pricing model.

It seems insane on Reddit's part. If someone's referring that much traffic to you, choosing to cut them off entirely instead of negotiating monetization of that channel seems irrational.

Then to take an adversarial stance against public outcry as well...Reddit really "hates teh fans."

Tech leaders really are starting to out themselves as Nouveau Riche Narcissists instead of the visionaries they pretend to be.

And to add insult to the injury, u/spez was caught red handed lying about the conversation and what took place, and then when that surfaced, doubled down.

> But Christian took this very personally, and he decided to take his toys and go home.

I mean wouldn't you? He's built an app that brings him a decent income, he can work on it full time, he based his career on that application. What reaction would you expect out of f.e. youtubers when youtube made it suddenly unable for them to sustain themselves? I mean basing your life/income/business on another business is never a good idea, but this is how a big chunk of the world works. I think he has all the rights to be angry about it.

Im not sure what I would do. But I do know that if I reacted similarly, by posting all of the private meetings and communications to the public web, where I knew a hornet's nest would be stirred up (his subreddit obviously), I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

I can understand how he feels, but he had to know that this would happen.

> I think he has all the rights to be angry about it.

Yup, I totally agree, and I sympathize with him. Hes in a bad spot, but unfortunately, theres not much he can do anymore unless reddit changes their mind.

> private meetings and communications

Private meetings aren’t private after the CEO posts a completely mischaracterized version of said meeting already. Canada is also a one-party consent state, so he was fully in his right to do everything he did.

> I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

It’s funny that this is the straw that caused you to think the relationship was over, and not the obvious and easily disproven libel that the CEO kept doubling down on.

Anyone that looked at the situation objectively could see who was clearly in the wrong, and it wasn’t Christian as you keep implying. Reddit completely torpedoed their relationship at every single turn and at this point has quadrupled down on it.

> posts a completely mischaracterized version of said meeting already

Do you have a link to that? Ive been looking. I can only find Christian's account of the events [1]

> one-party consent state, so he was fully in his right to do everything he did

And I fully support his decision to do so. Ive even done the same in Japan when I was against a very hostile CEO. But posting publicly moves into very different realms (also not illegal) outside of just recording discussions.

> as you keep implying

In fact, I dont. I keep acknowledging blame on both sides of the equation. Go back and objectively read the discussion. Ive been much more critical of reddit. Emotions are pretty high. And those are much easier to use in discussions than deferring to unknown facts. So, I understand the weird flip-flopping of down and up votes.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

> But posting publicly moves into very different realms (also not illegal) outside of just recording discussions.

It really does not, even if it hurts spez's (and your) feelings.

> Ive been much more critical of reddit.

You literally pretend things they did didn't happen. You can say you've been critical, but you have pretty much shifted the blame entirely on Christian the whole time.

> It’s funny that this is the straw that caused you to think the relationship was over

Are you kidding? Christian posted in public to reddit about his failed negotiations. That was definitely a scorch the earth policy. reddit and/or spez had not posted about Apollo prior to that.

> Apollo

> Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million.

> Prices we released work out to one dollar a month per user; if Apollo doesn’t put effort forth, it hits three dollars per month.

> (As mentioned in Mod Tool section above) Pushshift will come back online for mod tools within a week or two.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

Are you kidding? It took literal seconds to find.

Thanks for the link. That definitely adds some extra context to the situation. I don’t subscribe there; so, that’s an easy one to miss. It got buried pretty good.

But I admit it’s an important one. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it pop up on popular last week.

To be fair from what I understand he only posted the private conversation because Huffman was intentionally lying about him to a large audience and he was forced to defend himself. I'm not saying he's handled this amazingly but Reddit absolutely dug their own hole in this case.

I don't think even Alastair Campbell could teach them effective crisis management.

I think this definitely could have been handled much more tactfully on both sides. Im not sure which large audience you are referring to, but Christian references a call with some moderators that seems to have sparked all of this[1]. Prior to the horrendous AMA, spez hadn't posted on reddit for 11 months. Christian was definitely the one to bring it to the public eye. Either way, both sides should share some of the blame.

I think this was definitely a case of the little guy not knowing how to navigate such a volatile situation. Some people might even find it pretty unprofessional to joke about reddit buying him out for half-priced at $10mil during an important discussion. Which, btw, would have shutdown the app also, except with a large windfall. How much of that was actually a joke vs testing the waters?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...

Christian’s one dude. And he’s a dev. Most of us here are devs (or at least have technical backgrounds) yeah? Ok now imagine any of us get on a phone call to negotiate terms and defend our work on a business call with another idiot (spez). Yeah…

So you’re right neither side handled it the best. But Reddit has no excuse. They have a team of business so-called experts and have resources to handle this correctly. At this point it’s clear that they are intentionally choosing to go this route of being hostile to 3rd party apps and alienating their users.

Considering the importance of the negotiations for Apollo’s developer he could have considered hiring a middleman for the call, that would probably have prevented some misunderstandings

> Im not sure what I would do. But I do know that if I reacted similarly, by posting all of the private meetings and communications to the public web, where I knew a hornet's nest would be stirred up (his subreddit obviously), I can't expect much of a relationship with reddit to survive after the fact.

I mean, in his message he said as much. But at that point, r/spez was slandering him anyhow, so he knew he was out either way.

Might as well set the record straight first.

> Yup, I totally agree, and I sympathize with him. Hes in a bad spot, but unfortunately, theres not much he can do anymore unless reddit changes their mind.

It's a hard lesson that's been learned over and over. If you don't control your platform, ultimately you're at the mercy of the people who do.

Something iOS and Android app creators, and Windows application developers have had to learn over the years.

> It's a hard lesson that's been learned over and over. If you don't control your platform, ultimately you're at the mercy of the people who do.

The lesson hasn't been learned at all - most of us depend on systems we do not control, and show no solidarity when one of us is debased with an arbitrary and capricious decision.

Not to mention he has another business which can support him. So why would he take on a massive liability risk to try to keep it going when he can afford to just walk away?

they were going to force him to pay 2million a month starting in a month. what else could he do other than "take his toys and go home" which is a very reductive statement.

they could have served ads to the api. they could have had some profit sharing agreement. any routes it could have gone but they chose the most antagonistic one.

Stats? Come on. Reddit pesters every mobile user agent to install their shitty app every time. It's like Google pushing Chrome. How many people install their malware just to stop getting nagged about it? People even say they made reddit web bad on purpose to drive people to the app.

Show those users better third party apps with no ads and then ask them which they like more.

Why do you deserve to have no ads? Reddit isn't a community service.

I do think that for moderators, they could have some special app to help them do their jobs easier, but for regular users, meh, the ads are easy enough to scroll past, like in other social media outfits.

I also don't agree that the mobile app is shitty.

>Reddit isn't a community service.

Who do you think creates all the content? The community is all there is, and Reddit the company adds zero value other than paying for servers to host the data. They managed to create one of the worst performing and buggy websites on the internet by burning through millions of investment money. It's more pathetic than anything.

> Why do you deserve to have no ads?

Because my attention belongs to me. Exclusively. It's not yours. It's not reddit's. It's not Google's. It doesn't belong to anyone other than I, certainly not a corporation. It's not a currency that can be used to pay for services. They do not have the right to sell it off to the highest bidder.

I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped: basic human dignity. I don't consent to it. I don't consent to their forcible injection of their silly little brands and taglines into my mind. As far as I'm concerned it's mind rape and anything I do to kill ads is legitimate justified self defense. I couldn't care less how much money they lose either, find another business model or disappear.

Wow wtf. You have some serious issues. First, I agree that your attention belongs to you, and you are 100% in your right to go elsewhere. Reddit is not forcing you to view their ads.

But second, you are unhinged if you think this is a reasonable comment:

> I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped

Wow

I'm glad you agree. I don't really mind if you think I'm unhinged. I don't mind the downvotes either. The exact same moral issue of consent applies. As a human being, I deserve to be able to consent. It's part of what it means to have dignity. I don't consent to my mind being violated, it's that simple. If that makes me unhinged, so be it.

If you want to discuss the matter further and hopefully understand why I said what I said, I'm happy to do it. Provided you approach the matter seriously without name calling.

Wait.. you can downvote? Sorry, Reddit expat exploring other sites and all I see on HN is upward-pointing triangles.

Welcome, it's very nice here. You need karma > 500 to downvote, you can't downvote direct replies to your own posts and you can't see how many votes other people's posts have received. It's pretty reasonable in my opinion, downvoting is much more rare on HN in my experience. I think it's best to just ignore things instead of voting.

What's unhinged about it? It's the same principle, the only difference is severity of the violation.

Of course being raped is miles ahead of the weak form of mind control attempt that is advertising, but it's the same damn scale.

>the only difference is severity of the violation.

the difference in severity is huuuuuuge

Just FYI it's impossible for me to read this without mentally running s/huu/yuu/ first

That is an absurd and frankly insulting comparison to make.

Rape is an act of physical violence, and you're arguing about a small price to use a free service.

Oh is it? Your mind isn't part of your body? In civilized society, people can't even touch you without your consent. Why do they have complete freedom to inject disinformation and spam into your mind with complete impunity? I won't accept it.

I don't know about you but I consider my mind even more sacred than my body. It's not some advertiser's playground for them to spam their bullshit with complete impunity. I will resist that abuse. I don't need to "deserve" it. I'm not alone either. It's hard enough to cope with attention deficit without these spammers around.

I can only hope that your level of sanity is more commonly adopted because judging by the replies to you it appears many have just given into the machine. Unwitting servants of Moloch.

So don't use reddit.

I don't have to abstain from using reddit. They're the ones who need to stop sending me free web pages. If they care so much about getting paid, all they need to do is have their web servers return 402 Payment Required and only resume service after payment is confirmed.

Their advertising bullshit though? They're knowingly sending me stuff for free. They chose to do it. I won't be guilted into accepting abuse based on that. They did so hoping I was gonna look at the ads but the truth is I'm under exactly zero obligation to actually do that. So I won't.

You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want. You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads. Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”. If you don’t like penises, but consent to have sex with a cis man, it isn’t rape because he has a penis that you don’t like but knew he had. It isn’t rape because you want to have sex with anyone and everyone and want none of them to have a penis. The answer is not that no one is allowed to have a penis, the answer is for you to stop having sex with people with penises. It isn’t the world’s responsibility to only be populated with people you want to have sex with, it is your responsibility to only consent to have sex with people you actually want to have sex with.

> You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want.

True.

> You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads.

It's not really an all or nothing, take it or leave it proposition. Just because they sent me ads, doesn't obligate me to view them. I get to view just the parts that I want to view.

We're not some captive passive consumer audience that reddit can jerk around at will. We are in control. We own the machine and we decide what it's going to display. If we decide we don't want to see ads, we're not gonna see ads and that's pretty much the end of it. What reddit wants or needs has pretty much zero bearing on the matter.

If you send me a page with some annoying element and I decide I want to get rid of it, it's within my power. All I have to do is inspect the element and delete it. Alternatively, I can download an annoyance filter extension with a huge database of those annoying elements to do it for me. It's called uBlock Origin.

This is called adversarial interoperability and it's an essential freedom.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

If I'm handed a magazine and it has annoying ads on it, I can rip out the pages and throw them in the trash. Same thing.

> Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”.

I think it does. I don't consent to having information I didn't ask for forcibly inserted into my mind for someone else's profit. When I opened this post, I wanted to see the comments, not irrelevant brands of products I don't care about. If I wanted to see products I'd have visited Amazon or gone to the market.

It's really simple. If you add noise to your signal, I'll filter it. I don't care if you make money by adding that noise. Find some other way to make money or go bankrupt.

> It isn’t the world’s responsibility

I'm having difficulty understanding what you're saying. I think you mean "it's not reddit's responsibility to cater to your needs". Well it doesn't have to. I'll look after my own needs -- by blocking its ads unconditionally and with no exceptions.

The moment you log into someone else website, your attention no longer belongs to you, FYI. Not sure who told you it should work differently.

> The moment you log into someone else website, your attention no longer belongs to you

It absolutely does. What nonsense. My cognitive functions don't belong to some corporation just because I visited their website. They are inalienable.

i wish more people would stick up for themselves like this, and i hope you inspire others to do so. i think this spamming into the mind actually contributes to this mindset where the person sticks up for that abuse itself rather than their mind and self. like a stockholm syndrome. thanks mate. keep on truckin'!

Thank you. The reason I go out of my way to post my opinions on this matter is I discovered I wasn't alone over my years here on HN. I've interacted with like-minded people many times here, discussed these matters plenty of times and refined my thoughts. Plenty of what I said in this thread, I learned from talking to others here.

It's really difficult to say these things because people come at you to call you entitled, unhinged, a freeloader, downvote you. I always say it anyway. I hope it inspires others too. We're not alone.

Because ads are worse than cancer. The fact companies are allowed to jam them into your eyeballs without consent is absolutely ludicrous.

Bro, you're walking into their property and getting pissed at their decorations. They need to make money, and Americans at least have shown that they vastly prefer to pay for things and services by looking at ads, rather than by paying with money.

If you don't want ads, pay for the privilege and get reddit premium. If you don't want to pay and you can't handle ads and you refuse to use an adblocker but MUST keep visiting for some reason, then stop whining - you've directly refused every solution.

We're walking into nothing. Our user agents are making a request to their HTTP server. It's not our faults if it replies with a free web page. All they have to do is return 402 Payment Required.

But they want that mass media appeal that comes with giving things out for free, don't they? Guess they'll have to deal with it. If they send ads along with their free pages, we'll delete them. I used to rip out the ads from the magazines too. Same thing.

> If they send ads along with their free pages, we'll delete them.

IDK who "we" is in this sentence, but if you mean "the average internet user" then you're wrong. There are ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, PornHub... No significant percentage of the population has "deleted" these apps or websites because of ads.

It means people like me, like the users of this site. It also means people who know me personally because I make sure to tell them about uBlock Origin and install it on every browser I use. You bet they like the ad-free web.

I can't help everyone but I try.

I don't know who "we" is either. Which means I'm just extra confused by the large number of ad-blocker-blockers that exist on the internet. I mean, what disobedience surface are they even targeting? Literally nobody blocks ads, it's an urban legend! xD

how so? I just slide by them and move on with my life.

It's absolutely mind-blowing to me the entitlement people have thinking they should get things for free.

Oh please. They're the ones who are entitled. They literally think they can sell our attention to advertisers. It's not theirs to sell.

They chose to have a free site. Don't want to give things away for free? Charge for access then.

This is must be a parody, right?

No, they chose to have a site funded by ads. If you don't want to be advertised to, get off Reddit.

The shareholder need their profits!! won't someone think of their needs?

No.

the site isn't free, the cost of using it is the ads.

We're under no obligation to look at ads.

Correct.

Your quip about deserving no ads has precisely 0 to do with the comment you are replying to. Nothing does but the last tiny sentence where you voice your own unpopular opinion with no substance to back it. Really strange post.

I dont know. All I know is that at least 2.6mil[1] people were pestered into installing the app. And all of them decided to leave a positive review of it. Past that, I wont make any assumptions.

Ive never used it. I rather be using Alien Blue, but the auth stopped working earlier this year. So, I had to start using Apollo.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828

This isn't a good take because the evidence is contextual. Joe Average users typically download the reddit app because they are forced to or face the dysfunctional mobile site. I watched my own partner do it. She doesnt like the app or care for reddit at all, its simply next generation facebook style walled garden garbage, including reddits fucking terrible video hosting format.

The business has abandoned its once core userbase in favour of cheap eyeballs. It's sheer modern tech laziness and an embarassment to the "innovation" culture that it lazily still staples itself to.

> including reddits fucking terrible video hosting format

Yeah, include "why did Reddit insists on the cost of self-hosting videos if they didn't have the competence or the money to do it correctly?" on my list of reasons the CEO is an idiot.

> I watched my own partner do it. She doesnt like the app or care for reddit at al

But did she leave a review? I dont mean to diminish your anecdote; I was strictly referring to public stats. Millions of people download and eventually ignore the app, but clearly enough are downloading it and having positive feelings about it. Thats how we got to this situation.

> has abandoned its once core userbase in favour of cheap eyeballs

I agree. It really sucks, but it is happening.

Who knows how many of those reviews are fake or low effort attempts to make the "leave a review" prompt stop appearing

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-019-09706-9...

There was the old adage for Excel that:

- 100% of people view spreadsheets

- 10% of people use something like SUM() or similar

- 1% of people write VB macros

You can create a product which works well for the _average_ viewer, but if it sucks for the 1% of 10% (maybe mods or contributors in this analogy), you're going to create a bad user experience for everyone.

Loads of Excel users aren't really doing "spreadsheets" except in the sense that it's Excel and that's a spreadsheet software, so arguably this is a spreadsheet. The same way arguably if I type this novel into Visio now that's a diagram. Like, is "An Oak Tree" a sculpture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree

For many Excel users it's like computerised graph paper, they can write stuff in boxes, maybe use it to make a calendar, they can colour the boxes in - yes, they can do arithmetic on the boxes, but many of them are surprised to find out that's what it is actually for.

Just as a side note: > It was once barred by Australian officials from entering the country as "vegetation".[13][14] Craig-Martin was forced to inform them that it was really a glass of water. He said, "It was of course a wonderfully funny incident, particularly because it extended into 'real life' the discussion about belief and doubt, and fact and fiction I was addressing in the work."

I'm somehow really let down by the guy's failure to commit to the bit. It's not an artwork unless he commits to the bit… far as I can tell, he should have gone along with it as the customs officials were doing. What a killjoy :)

The "bit" is Transubstantiation, a key Miracle of the Catholic faith. Catholics believe that the Eucharist blessing, a ritual often performed in Churches on a Sunday, literally transforms the bread and wine - they aren't just symbols, they literally are now Christ's Flesh and Christ's Blood. Now, you may observe that, just as "An Oak Tree" looks, and in every way seems exactly like a glass of water, the bread and wine still looks and in every way seems exactly like bread and wine, but Catholicism teaches that nevertheless they are the Body and Blood of Jesus.

(Roman) Catholics who care will be told this is because all observable properties are just incidental whereas the substantial nature changed, just imperceptibly.

Now, the exact details will vary outside Roman Catholicism, but you should generally expect that either they're deliberately vague (Eastern Orthodox and Anglican traditions) or they have the same sort of dubious philosophical out, and that's what this artwork is about.

So, it's not really necessary to the "bit" that you insist it's actually An Oak Tree at customs. Catholicism works around this question (obviously it's not OK to import thousand year old flesh or blood without a very difference license from bread and wine) because the bread and wine are just bread and wine up until the ritual is performed, you could do the same by just deciding a different glass of water on a shelf is "An Oak Tree" to skip the customs check.

The point is that those people wouldn't be using Excel if it didn't support the advanced usage. They would be using some other tool, that supported it.

And yes, even if all they want is to paint some squares by hand.

"the 1st party mobile app sits at #2 (2.6M reviews -- 4.8[1]) vs #10 (up from ~30 in May) for apollo (170.5k reviews -- 4.7[2])."

Lots of people probably install the official app, just to try it out, but that doesn't mean they actually use it.

I installed it myself a long time ago, but I never use it because it's garbage compared to Boost (my preferred 3rd party app).

Youre absolutely correct. Thats why I didnt mention install counts. Apple doesnt publish those numbers, and I didnt want to make any assumptions about them.

But I am comfortable assuming that those reviews come from users that did install and use both apps. The opinions seems to be very positive for both.

I do find it interesting that Apollo had such a steep popularity increase in the last couple of weeks[1].

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/979274575/statistic...

Many people reviewing the Reddit app will be reviewing Reddit the platform, not the app as a means of accessing the platform.

Im curious about your source on that one, but let's suppose that that statement is true. Couldn't you say the same for Apollo?

So, the large amount of positive reviews for the mobile clients also speak positively for the platform. Is that what you are theorizing?

Just anecdotally from my experience glancing at reviews occasionally on apps like that, that have a physical presence or a website. In the latter case I think it's inevitable and completely fair, the app can be the primary way you interact with it, how you discovered it, how someone else may discover it, and a review of the thing itself might be perfectly useful.

I think it's less likely to happen with Apollo if at all, because those users are clearly aware of, and even have front of mind in the moment, the distinction between Reddit the platform and Apollo the client. The number of people who discovered Reddit via Apollo must surely be extremely small?

[I don't have stats, but one anecdote:]

I was originally a desktop user of Reddit, before the redesign. At some point I also installed Sync Pro to read occasionally on mobile, but it wasn't my primary interface to Reddit.

I'm generally pretty open to redesigns. I don't have the dislike of change, and am ok with taking a little while to adapt to something new. Its usually an investmet in a better approach (e.g. MS Office introducing the Ribbon). So when the Reddit update happened I wasn't one of those people who rigorously stuck to Old Reddit - I just waited until I got used to it.

What actually happened is that I stopped using Reddit online at all. Everything was so slow. It just became a chore to read threads. I didn't make this decision consciously, it's just what happened over time.

I don't disagree with your line of thinking here.

But the big difference you're missing is that the kind of users that use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users.

Sure the Reddit app sits in its position in the app stores, but you ask most frequent users on reddit, and they all say they transitioned to a third party app.

So my point is i see things like the app as entry points for new users, and then those users either churn or end up transitioning to third party apps to make their experience better.

> use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users

Are they?

> they all say they transitioned to a third party app

Have they? Who asked?

Im inclined to believe a lot of these things. I used to work for a large network of forums in the late 00s. We had a lot of traffic but didnt require 2000 employees (literally only 5 dev to manage 250mil monthly pageviews). In all reality we might been reddit if we got lucky, but we didnt. Oh well. So, I tend to side with the users, but I do understand the behaviors in play. Im not trying to be argumentative just to blindly support reddit, but so many people are just throwing out stats as if they are correct with zero proof. Its almost impossible to have an honest conversation when the facts are being made up on the spot. This whole situation has become so emotional.

It would be pretty hard to do a fair comparison between the users of the Reddit app and Apollo.

Accessing reddit.com on a mobile will bombard you with pop ups to get you to access through the official app, while Apollo would only be found via word of mouth or actively seeking an alternative.

Review score average might be a better, where they're pretty on par in that regard, but again hard to tell if that's an indication of each app or a review of the content served by reddit itself.

You may be right, but keep in mind that the comparison with Apollo isn't a fair one. There are many third party Reddit clients. Red Reader (which I use), Reddit Is Fun, Stealth, Infinity, Dawn, and many more. You'd have to combine all of those. You may still not reach Reddit's official app's numbers, but it is probably not a negligible percentage of Reddit's userbase.

> keep the main, core userbase happy

I think you're mistaking the apathetic hordes who don't contribute much with the power users, power posters, and moderators. I consider the latter to be the "core userbase". Not the big numbers that look good to an mba. If a team built a reddit replacement, they would want that 0.1%, not the rest.

> I consider the latter to be the "core userbase"

How do you measure this? I see this a lot, but no one can ever quantify it. Is it just a feeling that people that make most of the content use old.reddit and 3rd party apps? Are we just hoping thats the case?

Or maybe the "power users" are constantly changing or are actually corporate accounts? On a massive site where moderators get to decide what content makes it to the masses, it might make sense that the corporate/commercial users are the "power users." But Id have to put on my tinfoil hat to believe that.

>The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care.

What kind of nonsense is this? How is the blackout messaging received so well with large amounts of upvotes? It's not censorship either--any opposition message that occasionally appears is often voted down into oblivion.

It's crazy the amount of people that seemed to be straining to support Reddit, it's almost, suspicious.

I used to exclusively use old.reddit but switched to modern as my eyes got worse. I use the official reddit app on my Android phone and modern reddit in Firefox on my desktop and laptop as well as in Firefox for Android in desktop mode.

I get what you're saying, and somewhat agree, but Reddit has shown they're willing to fill their own communities with bot posts to pad their numbers. What makes you think they're not buying reviews?

Minority by quantity or quality?

How many people visit reddit because they searcher something on google, how many do more than just read?

Mods are part of the power users, alienating them can have a large effect on the community landscape

I use the reddit app very occasionally. Mostly when I'm away from my laptop and someone DMs or replies to me. For actually USING reddit, browsing threads etc it is woefully shitty experience.

Apollo is also ios-only

They don’t care about the old guard of mostly geeks and techies. With Covid and moments of Twitter/tumblr exodus, Reddit has picked up a ton of users that just want generic social media.

It’s basically just a global slightly more news text-centric TikTok feed. Serving up slop that’s just tasty enough to keep you hooked.

My home page turned into this at some point in the past, after which I unsubscribed from a bunch of dopamine based subs and subscribed to more substantial subs of my interest. That really helped, but over time the rot set in again as a few subs grew in size and turned into a meaningless dopamine fest (probably fuelled by karma hungry bots / farms).

Based on this experience I won't be surprised at all if your prediction became true. It is as if that's the natural end state and it requires constant effort (org, mods, community) to steer away from it.

This was exactly my experience too. Their app is also optimized toward that end, ad-riddled, laggy, and privacy-invasive (the green online dot, bombarded my pi-hole with requests). Their web is the same, just pushing for the app and slow. I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.

> I have not been on reddit on the past few days, and perhaps this is my chance to put my time into better use, including more HN again.

This is the way.

The constant of reddit is that user protests come in waves again and again. If this wave will be over soon, the "geeks and techies" will be focused on polishing the alternatives. Even if this wave doesn't break reddits back, the next wave of user protests will have polished alternatives (due to the current influx of users and their demands) with way less friction ready.

Yep, Reddit an alternative to "every other shitty forum on the web" but now they're the big poop.

Maybe I'm imagining things but i feel like the content on reddit is very regular, average and safe lately. Like you can't be werid in the comments.

It's going to be even more regular, average, and safe when they block NSFW subreddits in the API.

Will it? Who will be using the API at all going forward?

It's not even about not just "liking" them, like if it's only about resistance to changes.

My way of browsing reddit on desktop is to scroll and open lots of stuff I find interesting in tabs. With new reddit this is "holding it wrong" I guess, because that amount of tabs absolutely destroy the performance of my browser. Scroll is janky etc. And multiple subreddits have features and stuff that never got ported to new reddit, making new reddit a subpar experience as well.

As for the app, I just can't figure out what to press. I want a list of posts, and pressing them to take me to the comments. It keeps injecting other stuff everywhere, though. Avatars, coins, huge ads, lots of posts from other communities I don't want to see in my list, defeats the purpose of following a subreddit. I have to use the app once in a while to post content as other apps aren't allowed to upload videoes etc, and it's a confusing experience every time.

All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.

    All they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS 
    for developing third party apps,

Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully?

It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned.

One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads.

That's just a wild guess on my part, though.

Can you really make that much money with behavior data? If that was the case, wouldn't we see more sites with few ads?

I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.

    Can you really make that much money with behavior data?

Good question. I don't know if companies sell behavior data directly or if it just helps them to target ads better and therefore theoretically improve conversion rates.

> So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads.

Yeah, and this is them being unreasonable. The insistence on all the large platforms on doing that even when all of their users revolt is childish and killed a lot of platforms already.

> Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully?

Telegram does this, and I think they're successful with it.

Telegram? But there's no ads in the official app - are you saying they require them in third-party apps in order to make them a worse experience and push people back to the official one/make money from them if they don't? That'd be.. interesting, but I think I assume you meant something else, not Telegram?

There are ads in the official apps - they appear similar to regular messages in large channels (telegram's few-to-many/broadcasting offering)

Fully agree:

First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers.

In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.

Or just require a Reddit Gold sub to any user who wants to use another app.

Indeed. The fact that they didn't do this and the extremely high cost of API access is good evidence that they wanted to kill 3rd part apps outright.

This wouldn't solve the problem of their API being used to scrape Reddit to train LLMs.

Then have different terms for different purposes. Charge LLM trainers and request that 3rd party apps show ads.

How would Reddit be able to tell the difference?

Users don't browse all of Reddit, and they don't browse from wildly varying IP addresses, from multiple ips simultaneously, or from datacenters.

Why not instead charge 3rd party apps for the API and let the 3rd party apps show their own adds to help pay for the cost of the API?

So easy to fake those conditions, though, and then you’re right back where you started only with a fun new game of whackamole to play.

All this suffering so some jackass can get his third comma.

Reddit would be better for everyone as an open source nonprofit.

Reminds me of Russ Hanneman's obsession with the three commas and the 'Tres Comas' tequila from HBO'S Silicon Valley.

I'm hindsight, it's crazy how accurate that show was in portraying a lot of the VC and Silicon Valley folks in general.

Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it.

What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against.

And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.

I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that?

Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.

True, but old data is not what companies want since it is readily available and probably already in models. Reddit produces more data than any other social media website in the text and picture format. I think Tiktok is relatively close but with videos.

Reddit is still also open to indexing, so the data is still currently available with no authentication required to anyone interested in crawling it. The training data for AI theory doesn't hold water.

The other thing to also consider is that Reddit funding is partially attached to investments. Investments for Reddit and many other investment based companies dried up over the government pulling back interest rates to deal with inflation.

reddit has been around for nearly 20 years, the AI thing just seems like a hype train they're trying to jump on to.

Hypetrain like crypto. But AI has potential unlike crypto. Not part of the hypetrain as you really need to get it behave properly. The biggest loss in AI right now is the data needed to for an AI model to work. Not only does it need source data but it needs to store its model, those models can be MASSIVE. Which means expensive, to make it accessible you need to store it in memory... to make it better it needs to be faster... faster larger memory is $$$.

its the death of reddit, just like digg before it. And google circles or whatever it was called its been so long. and myspace and friendster and orkut and aol and msn and Usenet and Dubsmash and vine and literally more sites than Wikipedia fits on one page

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_netw...

I was thinking about the connection between the death of digg and now the death of reddit. It's similar that they destroyed engagement by not responding to feedback. Social communities can be forgiving for missteps with acknowledgement and accountability, but Reddit seems to have just shifted its focus from being a community space into a data product.

Had an account for 14 years that I plan on 'deleting', whatever that means with the fast and loose intentions around customer data that reddit seems to have now.

This is more like the death of Twitter - highly exaggerated and no alternatives. Nothing changes.

Lemmy is relatively thriving. I doubt this will be the "Great migration", but if Lemmy was able to hold enough users, the next time Reddit makes a big mistake, Lemmy will be a viable alternative by then.

Just tried Lemmy.. are you serious?

Funny i was part of not one of these. B/c every one of these were full of social media zombie sheeple along with gamers, dorks, geeks and techies. Decent, fun people you find IRL. Not arguing / chatting online.

For me it's been a blessing in disguise. Reddit was a time suck for me, and spending a week without it has broken the habit. I don't need it, and a lot of it is honestly pretty toxic.

Killing geese that lay Golden Eggs is old and enduring Silicon valley tradition.

Maybe, but in this case there was no golden eggs, Reddit had users but no way of making any money out of it other than by selling the data (which is exactly what they seem to be doing now).

Reddit is a forum. It should not be hard to make money selling ads on the most popular forum on the internet.

Hosting costs should be jack shit, developing costs should be pretty low, etc. Reddit must be funking up in a pretty fundamental way to not be making money.

Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...

It's easy to correctly say that they're not using 2000 employees to keep the site running.

I'm sure they've thought of keeping costs low, and I'm sure they could lower costs by a lot and know it. They choose not to.

They're not forced into their current path.

But it makes sense when you look at that VC money. Just being profitable would be a failure. Chase billions of revenue or die trying.

Or to put it a different way, if reddit spent $100M a year on employees and offices and $100M a year on servers, they would have amazing profit margins already.

I don't think you work in large enough company. Everyone always does this type of napkin math, and then hand waves away a lot of the details. I mean, why does Meta need 70K employees to run three apps?

I'm sure the VCs first playbook was to start cracking down on expenses, since it's typically easier to get results from than improving revenue....

Meta is very different than Reddit on complexity, scale and also that it is profitable

Meta is one of the clearest examples of a company that is spending most of their budget outside their main product, so I'm not sure what you're trying to show.

You saw their VR division, right?

They aren't spending most their budget on VR. What do you think the budget is for the rest of the company? Far as I can tell with a 10 second glance at their financials: 60B year operating expense vs 10B year in their VR spending?

Good thing I didn't say that.

VR is just one of the places the money is going.

It is easy to say from the outside.. but everyone else seems to make it work.

What makes reddit so special it shouldn't be able to afford to pay for itself? It doesn't make sense. Every social media company with this kind of massive userbase appears to be able to make good money, why not reddit?

Sure, maybe they cant make Facebook levels of cash - but 10th most visited website, with what should be low hosting costs (mostly text), should be more than sufficient. If they can't make it work, they'd need good reason to explain what makes them different, IMO.

They didn’t, in case you aren’t in the industry of VC, they all want to go big or to go bust. There’s no culture of reasonably sustainable business model

I would have happily paid a few bucks a month for Reddit premium if they had decided to tie api access to that.

I've seen a lot of companies go far by "selling the dream" instead of actually booking rev. If this continues to go badly reddit won't have rev or a dream. At least with users making content other users want there is always a chance.

> Are you guys starving or what??

The CEO himself have said a few times that they are are not and were never profitable. They can't keep raising money, so yeah, from their POV, it's do something now and bad consequences don't really matter.

The thing where he disagree with any thinking human is on what that "something" may be (and about not acting earlier). But the desperation is reasonable.

There's something else odd going on. I think the easiest answer is the company is just poorly run but considering everything we've seen from both sides of the issue:

- Reddit believes costs to maintain their API are on the level of charging 3rd party apps upwards of $20MM each. A small handful of 3rd party apps between iOS/Android would be netting them $100MM annually? Does it really cost them that much to run the API? There's a lot of questions regarding those figures by themselves

- Reluctance to come up with alternative offerings. If this is about 3rd party apps not serving ads, why is the most obvious solution not just "3rd party app usage must be through premium accounts"?

- An absolute refusal to recognize how their site operates and the value of the free labour given to them through moderation and content generation. This one is where I'm most in the dark. They must've run the metrics to see that even if losing a sizable portion of the 3rd party users they won't be in a bad place. I'm assuming they're prepared to rework their moderation structure in its entirety? But at the same time, they seem unable to devlop/publish meaningful features that have been requested by those who know the site best

My gut reaction is the IPO is coming. They want short term numbers bump to justify these actions and damn the long term. A mindset of solve the immediate problem, ignore the rest and figure it out later. Most people see this as a bad strategy, they seem to believe in it...but have they had a good track record to date showing they're capable of making these measured decisions? I think not.

It's interesting to watch & experience at least.

Some of that disagreement is that Reddit should get paid.

The current blackout fiasco seems to be centered around avoiding all forms of payment to Reddit -- both api charges and ads.

What are the reasons these so-called "tech" companies do what they do. For example, why does Reddit choose to ban free API access and encourage the use of a closed source app. Is it for the benefit of users. Really. Improved "user experience" or whatever. Maybe there other reasons that the companies are reluctant to share..

For instance, I asked someone I trust this question of why. His answer: "It's greed."

If someone asked me the question, I might answer, "Because they can."

Interesting to see Reddit moderators defend the company when faced with issue of Section 230 libility^1 now opposing the company when faced with issue of increasing company profits.

1. See Gonzalez v Google amicus brief.

It was the same with Digg and Slashdot.

Unless there's an realistic alternative to Reddit that users are actually moving to - then no it's not.

Given the number of blacked out subs that link to a Discord, it seems like an alternative is already there. For sure it's not exactly the same, but it seems to serve a similar purpose for a lot of users.

Yea Discord is not an alterative.

In practice it's serving as one though. For sure it's not a 1-1 replacement, but alternatives often aren't. Reddit doesn't work exacctly the same as Digg, and neither work like a PHPBB forum.

There are loads of reddit alternatives. The only thing reddit has going for it is network effect.

Post a few, maybe I'll switch.

What's a social media zombie sherson (is that the singular of sheeple?) and how are they worse than a hardcore redditor?

I like the new Reddit UI for mobile web compared to old.reddit.

Both are inferior to reddit.com/r/.../.compact, which they nixed a few months ago, on mobile.

what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.

Same, would love to know what is 'bad' about the official app.

- Pressing notifications brings up the wrong pages.

- Back navigation is very messed up and unreliable.

- Images, videos and posts often take a long time to load, and often just don't.

- No ability to copy/paste text from posts.

- Collapsing threads is unreliable.

- Barrages of spam notifications that are difficult to turn off.

just offhand.

Man I've been using the app daily for over a year and have never experienced any of these issues..

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