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Comment by robertoandred | Hacker News Reader

Not to beat a dead horse, but the use of these patterns is one of the many reasons Apollo was so much better than Reddit's official app. Consistent navigation, consistent gestures, consistent behaviors.

And it's not like these concepts are hard, you just have to care enough to follow them. It's really disheartening to see how many apps don't.

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That’s the difference between an app that optimizes for being a good app and an app that optimizes for engagement and selling you things.

It’s similar to how supermarkets periodically shuffle around their shelving. Consistency in navigation, gestures, and behaviors allow the user to get what they want and get back out too efficiently.

Case in Point: I really like Costco, but if I ever cancel my membership then it is because of how they seem to reshuffle significant parts of the store every few weeks.

I don't know if they think I will buy more if I run around for fifteen minutes looking for something, but man it's annoying.

They probably think of it as 'increasing engagement'. To me it's just wasting my time.

That might be for other reasons, because according to a study I've seen, Costco basically runs their stores "at cost" and wants to just make money off of the memberships

(https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2018/6/18/costco, though it's from 5 years ago so things might have changed)

> They probably think of it as 'increasing engagement'. To me it's just wasting my time.

Here you've stated the fundamental truth about the so-called attention economy. The core tenet of it, is that money is made on friction. Attention is a finite resource everyone prefers to conserve for their own needs, therefore it needs to be stolen, so it can be redirected to ads, upsells, and other form of behavior manipulation.

That's why supermarkets are reshuffling stores so frequently. That's why so many websites are full of dark patterns and general annoyances. That's why ergonomics all but disappeared from software. Their inefficiency - wasting your limited lifespan in countless tiny ways - is how they make money.

> That's why supermarkets are reshuffling stores so frequently.

Normal supermarkets in the US very rarely do this.

Walmart, Safeway, Whole Foods, HEB and all others I frequently shopped beyond Costco explicitly had very stable layouts.

It was literally a topic of news in my neighborhood when one of them rearranged for a remodel.

Do you mean the app or the physical store? Maybe I'm a luddite for going to the physical store but I go to 4 different Costcos in the Bay area with some frequency and a couple others in SOCAL and I find their interstore layouts different but their intra-store layouts extremely consistent over years. One in San Diego I can confidently say is consistent over a decade.

I barely use the app except for the card and an occasional lookup for something not available in store.

I don't see that happening at all in Germany unless they completely redo the whole store layout. I always know where the stuff I want is (if I had purchased it before). The only consistent pattern we have is expensive stuff is on eye height and the cheaper option is on the bottom.

I've never seen an app as confusing as the official reddit app, and I consider myself of normal intelligence

I moderate a 30K-member subreddit so I need to be able to use reddit from my phone, but... it's impossible. Everything requires so many actions, I never know where I currently am, it's pure garbage

I’m in the same boat. The UX on Reddit is in the same ballpark as AliExpress’ app.

Since Apollo was shut down, I’ve completely stopped using any Reddit app on my phone. Sink It[1] makes the mobile site tolerable, for cases when I end up on a Reddit thread off the back of a search engine query.

1. https://apps.apple.com/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id6449873635

Yeah, AliExpress' app navigation is on an entire other level. I sometimes get so deep in screens with no way to get back to the Home Screen that either spend a minute hitting the back button like 50 times, or just kill the app and start it again.

Yeah, AliExpress is on another level of insanity. I just don't get how and why exactly. Seems like it gets people confused and spend a lot of time/money in there ? At least the website seems to be getting slightly better now. I did use the app mostly for some cart/list management things that are not working as well on the website (but why?). To be fair, the scale of what it does is crazy...

thank you for posting that link to Sink It, I never knew about it but it’s a great option to improve reddit after Apollo went away. I also like how you can just auto-redirect to old reddit if you want

I made this actually. Such a pleasant surprise to see it mentioned randomly on HN. :)

Happy to listen to any feedback or feature requests you may have.

Have you tried old.reddit.com?

Moderation via the old interface is problematic, especially if you have custom mod tools and actions set up.

...and old.reddit is not mobile responsive.

ever tried Snapchat ?

It’s an absolute shame that Steve Huffman ruined Reddit by way of the destruction of Apollo. I quit Reddit a few years earlier but this was the nail in the coffin.

Apollo is one of the few reasons I shell out the $100/year for an Apple Developer Account.

If someone is even mildly technical I'd recommend going the Sideloadly route for getting Apollo, ad-free/background-play YouTube, ad-free/backgroun-play Twitch, and ad-free Spotify.

You can use altstore to sideload those for free, or at least i know you can for uyou+.

I believe there are two large caveats with Altstore. 1) It requires the use of a local "server" to phone home on a weekly basis. That means setting up and running another computer in the home, then configuring a regular check-in. Remote check-in (such as while traveling) sounds even more complicated. 2) There is a limit of three apps.

There is (was?) a sideloadable app called "reprovision" that did the re-signing on your device without needing to do a reinstall every time. Was useful for keeping a jailbreak app on an ipad 6. Worked great as long as I didn't turn the device off for over a week.

Looking forward to the EU's sideloading rules coming in though, so I never have to deal with this.

That’s good to know. spez really dropped a bollock on this.

The recent overhaul of Narwhal for version 2 reworked the entire app to operate pretty close to what Apollo was at its core. It's extremely customizable as well. Their new subscription plan for covering the API costs is pretty fair and would be cheaper than what you are doing here.

I'm glad there's a spiritual successor to Apollo, but it's not entirely about comparing one cost to one cost.

Spotify: $10.99/mo ($132/yr)

YouTube: $13.99/mo ($168/yr)

Twitch: $11.99/mo ($144/yr)

Narwhal: $6/mo ($72/yr)

You'd be right, the $72/yr for Narwhal is less than the $100/yr developer certificate, but with all of the other sideloading opportunities it's no contest w.r.t cost.

Why not pay for Spotify and YouTube Premium?

I can't speak for them but my YouTube experience is in the toilet as of late. I've been a Premium subscriber for years now and they just keep making the apps worse. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. Despite paying for an "ad free experience," they serve me this shit:

* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.

* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.

* Ads for merchandise under the content.

* Ads for paid subscription to channels.

* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.

At this point my experience is infinitely better with another front end which bundles SponsorBlock. Why am I paying for a FAR worse experience on their app? Their family subscription is not cheap where I live.

Why would I?

Because it’s a pretty good deal and part of your fees go to the creators whose content you’re consuming.

I've noticed no change to the subreddits I'm active in. Obviously there was change when everyone was making a fuss, but now that that's died down, it seems like it never happened.

Interesting that you say that, in my subjective experience the overall quality of submissions and discussions has dropped significantly. I don't have any data about this of course, but the site just doesn't really capture my attention anymore the way it once did, and it's mostly down to the comments just not being an interesting read anymore (for me).

It really all depends on the subreddits and what each individual got from it to begin with.

Some folks use a phone for everything. I just can't stand it and have never touched reddit on a phone. But I hate everything web and phone related. It's just too small for me.

I've noticed some very big changes on my side, especially in terms of quality.

That's actually the reason I'm about to delete my account, the good contributors somehow left.

The official Reddit app is one of the few where I regularly "get lost" and it takes too much mental energy to go back to the main view...and I just force quit and reopen it.

Even on Apollo you can get confused because you can open an infinite amount of layers (subreddits, user profiles, posts) on top of each other. After a few of them it gets very cumbersome to get back to the front page because you have to swipe / press back until you get there.

There probably is a magic gesture which I don't know about.

Apollo was the best iOS app ever made. RIP.

For the nostalgic folks amongst us with a bit of a hacker spirit, you can apparently side-load Apollo and patch it to use your own reddit api key.

This will hopefully become easier with EU-imposed official side-loading.

For mobile browsing of Reddit, I found Sink It, iOS Safari extension, to help clean up the current mobile web version so I’m not struggling with old.reddit which isn’t mobile responsive.

https://gosinkit.com

I mean, if I would have to write curl scrips to access reddit, it would still be a better experience than the official reddit app, it’s not a high bar.

Honestly, I don’t think I could deliberately come up with a worse design.

OpenRed is basically this. It is a reddit app that parses the html instead of using the api so the dev can keep it free. It is a bit buggy but I use this over the official app because you don't get ads or random posts from subs you don't subscribe to.

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