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Comment by elmepo | Hacker News Reader

Same, albeit with Reddit is Fun. Personally I used to visit Reddit multiple times per day but now I typically visit it once or twice per week, if at all. I'm sure the official app is fine, but the approach they took to third party developers soured it for me.

Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders should take is to kill off third party apps sooner rather than later if you ever want to do so, before user growth on those platforms becomes an issue.

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Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like.

By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.

It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.

Reddit devs are probably the least competent of any modern social media platform. Any talent goes to an actual site, leaving the typical "redditors" () to work for reddit.

Naturally, this leads pretty much any technical project to be doomed from inception.

Biggest mistake by far was letting adtech completely TANK the performance of sites just so they can satisfy paranoid adverts. It's an absolute travesty that a top 3 reason to install adblock comes from a performance POV, because these simple static webpages* are forced to inject MB's of ads into your feed first.

Reddit as a site was never optimal to begin with and it only became worse when they decided to homeroll their own image/video hosting. But the biggest consequence of surrendering to ads turns base Reddit into feel like its 20 years older than it is.

>It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.

money and control, the root of most evils in the world.

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