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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

It always seems like the current owners and top managers of Reddit don't use it. If they were, things could be much better for the community and probably the business. Again, the official Reddit app seems done by your high school cousin in a mobile development course.

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Dogfooding is so important.

It reminds me of a recent twist to the EV space in North America where Ford, and then all other players, decided to switch their EVs to Tesla's NACS connector.

This interview recently is really grounding. Basically Ford's CEO went on a road trip and actually tried the EV road tripping experience with a non-Tesla (non-Tesla charging stations that is) and saw how dogshit it was. That started conversations to actually try and improve the situation for customers (thus the change to NACS).

Timestamp link to the interview: https://youtu.be/7vE0KXHZXCY?t=244

Despite the jargon use of the term, I don't think dog food CEOs actually eat their dog food, because it is for dogs. Similarly Reddit is for Redditors.

All the kids in my neighborhood growing up tried a Milk Bone at one point. Close enough right?

Somebody already posted that the (it was only one) CEO actually did.

I'll just point out that dog food is food. It may not be healthy for a human in large amounts, but it can't be worse than eating fast food for a week or so.

I know an unreasonably large amount of people that claimed to try it. Most when they were children. I doubt that my bubble is unusual on this.

au contraire:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/09/texas-busin...

I'd except them to at least feed their own dogs the dog food they make though.

Nah, this isn’t a matter of people wanting the site to be good but not knowing what to do. They know that they’re making the experience worse, and they don’t care because it makes them slightly more money. We’re well past the point where people are doing “build the thing you’d want to use”.

Sorry, don't agree. In business, like in sports, there are forced and unforced errors [1]. Reddit commited many unforced errors. Have you used their ads system? I tried and did since it was created. It seems done by my other cousin younger than the one developing the Reddit app in the garage.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/29k5i7/can_someone_...

I always hear these complaints about the Reddit app and I honestly don’t know what people are talking about. Sure, there’s a few UX things that could be improved, like almost every app. But I’m a heavy user with multiple accounts and I rarely have issues. My main issue is some stuff around the video player UX but it’s pretty minor. What are people so worked up about?

FWIW, I’ve been a heavy Reddit user for over a decade, across web and various mobile clients. I’ve also been a full time iOS engineer since 2010, and their app would be a huge effort to recreate. It’s amateurish to suggest that any single dev could build it in a year, let alone a weekend. I’m NOT defending their business practices either. But their mobile app is fine.

Did you try any other apps? The official Reddit app didn't even come close to their usability. As far as saying that no single dev could build it in a year - well I don't know how long it would've taken for the latest codebases, but to my knowledge RIF and Apollo (perhaps the most popular unofficial apps for Android and Apple, respectively) were developed by single people, and they were widely praised for being far more usable than the official app.

Yes, I used a bunch of them over the years. And yeah, they were fine, but that doesn’t answer my question about what exactly is wrong with the official Reddit client to garner so much hate.

They were widely considered to be significantly better. The official app had less features, was often annoying to use, and just didn't even work all the time. At least for RIF, I liked: better performance, more reliable (official app would just decide not to load ANY media sometimes), no notification spam, higher density information, more customizable, better separation between ads and posts (and a small purchase to get rid of them entirely), the list goes on. It was pretty obvious once you used them for a day or two.

They were “widely considered” to be better, but again, almost never with any specifics. Just knee jerk hate.

And I don’t have any of those issues with the official client, other than the ad one. The performance is great, it’s very reliable, I have most notifications disabled except for a couple things I care about (and the notification settings are pretty fine-grained).

Maybe the customization stuff could be more extensive? But I don’t want 1000 settings for every tiny little thing. Regardless, it hardly seems like a complaint that people would get so worked up over.

Maybe the official client used to be much worse and I don’t remember, but increasingly I think people are just pissed about Reddit cutting off the alternative clients and hate being forced to change, so they moan and groan as if the official client is the worst app they’ve ever used. When really, it’s fine.

It sounds like you don't have a problem with it. Maybe you never encountered the issues, or maybe you just have a higher tolerance for them. I did give specifics, and if you cared to look they're well documented - it's hardly knee jerk hate. Over 1.5 million people were annoyed enough by them to buy Apollo alone. And for the record, these complaints were present from far before Reddit decided to get so stingy with their API.

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