Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Niche subreddits can be good. But man the site overall has fallen so far. I also left with tons of others when they pulled the API, so maybe it all sucks now?

View on HN

There are still some good communities on Reddit but the user experience of the web app on mobile and the iOS app are abysmal to say the least. I found myself using Reddit less and less when I couldn't access Reddit via my client of choice (Apollo) earlier this year and these days I hardly ever use Reddit anymore. If I ever need to revisit an old thread I do so on desktop via old.reddit.com.

A few communities migrated to lemmy, you can check there

apollo was the only way to possibly consume reddit without losing your mind: i had a filter list with words like 'dead, death, kill, killed, shot, murdered...'

this actually turned Reddit into a wonderful place where I learned a lot about my favorite tech and microcontroller platforms and still got a good dose of cool memes

i genuinely feel like i haven't been able to participate in a lot of things anymore because the generated noise from their current metric, 'if it bleeds, it leads', is too high

I watched a YT video about the apollo endgame last year and wondered "why didn't he steal that inertia and just launch his own social network?" It would have been so appropriate given reddit was started with a massive outflux from a previous link aggregator.

Yeah man, I know this is another HackerNews "Why not simply.." but it feels like he really did have a golden opportunity to hijack Reddit

I'd much rather post on an open version of Reddit with my clients of choice than the mainline TikTok-ified trash version

I wondered the same thing - I presume there’s just no money it a Reddit replacement unless there’s a subscription fee, but I think his users would’ve happily paid it. Plus it’d act as a cover charge to keep out bots and trolls.

yup, one of my favorite forums had a system that was open to view but had a five dollar invite fee to upgrade your account to post things, plus any penalties for infractions made by an invited member beyond a certain 'egregiousness' traversed up the invite tree

I have a 15 year old reddit account, and when reddit was good, it was so good. Now, it's a rotting carcass. They blocked it at my work and I am sad to say I don't even really miss it.

What's the problem with the iOS app? I use it all the time, don't have any issues.

The upvoting system there seems to tune everything to become an "average redditor", who I find I don't really have a lot in common with. Even niche subs seem to suffer from it.

Hey there, I also jumped ship after they pulled the API.

I found an alternative in the Fediverse, for programming subs, at least: https://programming.dev/

> Niche subreddits can be good. But man the site overall has fallen so far. I also left with tons of others when they pulled the API, so maybe it all sucks now?

Content quality in niche subreddits is falling as well. Most technical or semi technical small subs I follow are flooded with single picture posts asking "what's this?" or "how to fix?" "pls help" and so on. The overall level of discussion has dropped to almost zero.

> I also left with tons of others when they pulled the API

Where did you go?

I'm not the person you're asking, but at least for me: I went nowhere. I don't have something that is as good as Reddit at keeping me informed now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com