I was part of this test - I've refused to install the app for years (I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing).
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
> I prefer websites and the option to open tabs for later browsing
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
The whole auto-refresh thing is bullshit in general. You see something interesting, and then two microseconds later it is gone because the app (or even tab) decided to refresh and bring you new content.
That's the point actually. And not only in Reddit, but in all current social networks. You must lose posts, you must always look at the fresh snapshot of posts. And it works, people are conditioned to work with ephemeral internet. Apps and sites all work like this nowadays - Facebook, Instagram, Shitter, Reddit main page, Netflix main page, even HN partially. You blink and everything is gone, here is new content for you, enjoy, but not too long and don't become attached.
This drives up engagement in the population with attention disorders and promotes advertisement, since it is organically natural to see ads between ad-like endless posts.
Yelp started doing this years ago. They slowly cut access to their mobile site that used to work perfectly well. Sure I could install the app, but the obvious disrespect to the user pretending that the mobile site didn’t work perfectly well and that you have to install the app was so frustrating that I just stopped using Yelp altogether. And that’s saying something, seeing as I own a local theater venue and refusing to engage with Yelp hurts be more than it hurts them. But screw it, I hate being bullied by these platforms.
I was on reddit before they tried updating their designs, the only reason I'm still there is because they still have the old.reddit.com frontend available. I even use it on mobile where it's not exactly practical. It's not because I have some sort of aversion to change, well, I guess I'm really uninterested in downloading apps considering I didn't even bother to try things like Apolle to see what the fuzz was about, but their various attempts at redesigns have been so bad that I would rather use old.reddit.com than them on mobile, even though it's impractical.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
Could someone explain why a new web interface, albeit arguably better for mobile and actually enjoyable on desktop if the following can be forgotten, is so damn slow? When loading it appears to emerge from unknown depths and open up with a heavy sigh. Personification of a tool but this the impression it gives me every time. I thought 2020s were years when multi cores and gigabytes of memory would render everything snappy.
I signed up for Reddit last year, finally. I’m a happy user of old.reddit.com. And if it goes, I go. I survived a decade without an account, and it would be easy enough to go back that way. My opinion is not that important to share.
Old Reddit with a Stylus theme is how I've been using it for years. I'd occasionally switch to the new site just to check it's progress and while it has gotten a bit better in the last year or so, little nitpicks eventually drive me back to old.
As much as old reddit is a clear winner ok desktop it is pretty awful on mobile. Personally I actually prefer the new site on mobile (although it is awful too) but I understand why sone people still prefer the old site on mobile.
People refusing to use their app etc. are likely a minority. Most people are completely used to being bullied into submission by tech companies, and will happily follow along.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
Fortunately their app is compatible with the ReVanced project (think YouTube Vanced). It's terrible you have to recompile apk's to get a useful experience (sans ads, sharing tracking, other restrictions), but for me it's currently the only viable way to use Reddit.
Revanced is the only way to stay sane while using Youtube and Twitch on mobile. The adverts and other spam are more obnoxious than cable TV.
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
I stopped using reddit when the .compact interface was removed. No I go back once in a while but if this goes through I will probably simply never visit.
You can still use old.reddit.com, which is vastly superior and faster than the modern reddit. It also loads videos and images inline (when you click for them to load) and it de-emphasizes comments. This allows you to work like the compact feed where you scroll through posts and only go into comments sections if you _really_ want to. It is a good alternative.
There is only one appropriate, effective response to disrespect, and that is to not reward the offending party.
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hope it can be longer (a month or something) to encourage people to find alternatives.
I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.
I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
There's a second response: to not reward AND punish the offending party.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I sunk 15 years of myself into reddit. I am there in all my teenage angst, and you get to see me mature before your eyes.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
That's how Meta pulls you in, but reddit has always felt less user-focused than subreddit and comment-focused. Read a link, make some smalltalk about it asynchronously for a few hours, move on.
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
>I did this with facebook and it obliterated my social connections.
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
It's not a problem with reddit. I've been there maybe 15 years and never had a single "friend". I rotate the accounts every year or so, not a big issue.
I would've agreed with you 5 years ago. However, my weak connections seem to have thinned themselves out—the people I'd only ever see on FB have gotten bored and stopped posting there. Everyone else, I have other means of contacting.
Are / were they really 'friends' though if doing so obliterated your connections? Most people tend to misclassify being friends with being open & friendly with another.
Yeah, I’ve been using BaconReader for years. It’s going to stop working soon and I’m simply going to stop using Reddit. I used to use it for more but the last few years I only use it for porn and I recently discovered that the redgifs site is great for that. Obviously not everyone uses Reddit only for this purpose but I suspect that when the third party apps go dark redgifs will get a nice bump in new users.
Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
That's assuming that everyone has a good grasp on what's going on, and considers this funny-picture-App to be their top priority.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
I can't believe they would do this AND kill off third party apps. I'm with you on not rewarding reddit, they have become very user hostile all the sudden.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
Exactly, don't take it personally just vote with your feet. Reddit doesn't owe you anything. The flip side is that you don't owe it anything either. If they do something you disagree with, that is their good right. But you are of course under no obligation to stick around.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
I find it funny people have been going on this anti Reddit turning profit crusade, but ignore the fact Reddit is pretty similar to Facebook groups, just has much better ui and indexability
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
Just because every single comment complaining (rightly) about Reddit’s current behavior does not include a comparison to Facebook does not mean it’s ignored.
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
There's something that I don't get about forcing mobile browser users into mobile apps - how does it make sense for the company? They're forcing themselves into a walled garden, where the gardener takes a hefty "app store tax" on your revenues and has countless levers to force you to style the app how it suits their interests, not yours. For some apps, this might still be the best way to gain traction. But if have already attracted users who are obviously happy with the web experience, why on earth not keep them there? I would be expecting developers, if anything, to be nudging people in the other direction. But that's not what's happening, not just with reddit, so what am I missing here?
I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?
The web puts the user in control; apps (on all significant platforms currently existing) put the company in control.
Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.
Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.
The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.
There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.
Let's not forget that the in-app browser page can be injected with whatever javascript the owner of the app wants. FB/Instagram use this for tracking. There is a more comprehensive list of what apps do this somewhere; I do not remember where it is. But for FB/Meta, you can find the info here: https://krausefx.com/blog/ios-privacy-instagram-and-facebook...
Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
Not only that, they now have a perfect way of tracking the association between multiple accounts, which is very helpful for selling a person's ahem real browsing history.
Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
You’re assuming there is some cohesive strategy here. It’s better to look at what often happens in practice at a more practical level.
Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say “why not just force existing web users to use it?”
It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.
I think your hypothesis is underrated. For sure part of the argument is to get around ad-blockers but people underestimate both the level of dysfunction and just how awful some people in powerful positions are.
This argument is at the intersection of “Wet streets cause rain” and “Depressingly likely to be accurate”.
“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”
There's also a huge disconnect between what power users want and what the ad-viewing cannon fodder will tolerate. Headlines this week say that Netflix cracking down on password sharing has been hugely successful driving new signups.
I work at a company trying to get more people into our app. The logic is completely flawed: "we want more engagement, app users show more engagement than web users, so if we get more users from web into the apps we'll get more engagement". It's obviously completely flawed but the product people and analytics department don't seem to get it.
At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.
I'm generally not cynical about human motivations, but after seeing many of these things and how thoroughly the "internal propaganda" at tech companies works, I think those are just the reasons they tell themselves. The real reason is the control and the deep analytics that you can get from mobile apps. Plus having an app icon which really does boost engagement, but nowhere enough to justify on its own.
A good compromise is to educate users on how to add a shortcut to their homescreen. I don't think people (including product people) know about this feature, and mobile browsers bury it. The pareto principle applies: 80% of stickiness is that icon, which you can get for 20% of the effort of an app.
If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture. There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position. After a few rounds of this the user will leave in frustration.
Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.
> There's also a high chance the browser will unload the reddit page causing a flash of no content and potentially losing the user's scroll position.
The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.
>If the user follows a link to an article or video, there's a high chance it'll be the end of their reddit session, due to distraction or back button capture.
Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.
The decision maker likely wants the app installed because it increases the friction to users to “replace” the app with a competing one. Amazon used to offer $5 credits to install their app years ago, and I initially struggled to understand the reasoning; however these days its so convenient to buy via the amazon app compared to signing up for an account on different websites (i am more likely to use Amazon which is already installed than to go directly to some manufacturer and buy directly)
For Amazon, I prefer the web-app since it's able to open tabs for products I'm comparing. With the app, you're forced into a forward/back/forward navigation pattern that I think is sub-optimal when comparing products.
Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.
I too find this baffling. I have developed and maintain two platform native pairs of apps in use in the agriculture level irrigation control sphere. Our reasons for doing so are varied (historical, user experience, performance, desire to minimize cloud dependencies, need to really push Bluetooth and other OS assets (like location, storage, and photos)). But it is a butt ton of annoying work. From Java to Kotlin, Android to Compose, ObjC to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI. It seems to never end. How I would love to use the a “cross platform silver bullet”, but I spent 20 years using and pitching Smalltalk in that space and am just really distrustful that that problem is truly solvable. But I’m surrounded by what seems 10:1, if not more, of web programming hoards who all use the cloud and web apps as the hammer to every problem they see. Their enthusiasm through the industry is great. I honestly am confused why I see app after app be retooled native in parallel or in replacement to a mobile web app. The variety of contexts is great enough that I’m uncomfortable ascribing it to a machivelean subtext of control. There’s too much inconsistency and incompetence betwixt the various marketing/steering levels of all the participants to see it as some universal evil plot. I feel there has to be something more general going on.
"Install the app" walls might be super effective at destroying reengagement, though.
I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.
I asked the marketing team about it when I used to work at a restaurant reservation company 5+ years ago and the numbers were clear, marketing notifications work, way more engagement.
It’s the same reason as the third-party app API changes: prevailing forces within the company want to know that for every X API requests made, Y targeted ads were put in front of eyeballs. Most mobile browsers can block ads at this point. Plus, native apps offer more ways of gathering user data opaquely, which is worth lots of money in the eyes of finance people even if they haven’t started doing it, or if they expect it to be limited in various ways by mobile OSes and/or laws. The profits vs losses just point them this way, at least according to certain financially-minded people. This isn’t really a new phenomenon.
If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.
They could have changed their API or keys to require an adserve API included and given the app makers time to adapt to the new setup.
Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.
It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.
Slack and Discord work fine in desktop browsers and do not regularly hassle users about installing a desktop app. I think Discord users often install the app for actual user-centric features that are not possible to provide from a browser (push-to-talk voice chat while playing games for Discord, as I recall).
In addition to all of the control issues that other commenters have mentioned like blocking adblock and including tracking, an app also puts the user in the mindset of using your service by default and exclusively. If you view Reddit on the web, you might copy and link and repost it to Twitter. You're less likely to do that in an app. Additionally, it leads people to use Reddit by default, for all purposes. On the web, I might think "Oh, I should search for this on Reddit", but then if Reddit doesn't have the results that I need I'll check another website. Humans are creatures of habit. Once I get used to opening the Reddit app by default, I'll subconsciously invent ways to use the Reddit app for everything, as my one-stop-shop. Which is why I don't use any proprietary apps, ever, if I can do the same thing on the website. And also why I don't use mobile internet very much, to be honest.
Easier targeting, especially third-party means higher CPM, means more advertising driven revenue. Also, you’re worth more if you can be tracked across different devices (that became more important after the so called cookie-geddon.)
Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).
So I actually worked at Reddit a few years ago and our “cohort” got to chat with Steve as a part of onboarding. I was super nervous and I guess I wanted to appear sharper than I actually was, so I asked Steve directly “why do you push users from mobile web to the app? That’s a pretty bad experience.”
Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.
That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.
But third party app users are likely to be even more sticky. Doesn't that mean they should encourage everyone to install third party apps? No, this is just idiocy.
Its easier to collect info on users via a mobile app than via a webpage. My guess is that they're simply trying to increase what they know on their users which is the data they can monetize with their ad customers (with some small print to not get them in conflict with data protection laws).
Couple of reasons:
- Push notifications to reengage the user
- Collect more data - you can spy way more on a user using the app than on the web
- Bypass adblockers
All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.
They are desperately trying to be TikTok. It will not work and has no chance of working. Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million (they converted it to a subreddit with 1.5k subscribers when they had 200 million users at their peak and touted having 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release. Every post is people saying the Reddit app sucks and asking where Dubsmash went)
It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok.
I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
This just seems to be the strategy they teach at business school, and it never works.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
> It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok.
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
>Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
I only use Spotify for music, and recently, my homepage was all podcasts and audiobooks, with only 1 or 2 lines of recommendation for music. Spotify, please stop! You’re literally turning your homepage into something that is unusable for me!
It's roughly analogous to a tire company producing a lemon of a tire that needs constant repairs, then acquiring a chain of repair shops, Revenues are up, engagement with brand are high. The company seizes on those metrics, refusing to acknowledge the downside: the tires are bad products, which could easily tarnish the long term reputation of the company. But who cares? They have a steady trickle of income from their customers. It's a gamble, but lucrative in the short term.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
It’s how they’ve been taught to attract younger users. Cool new video app work to attract teens, we buy cool new video app.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
It's only absurd if you misunderstand the true intention. They didn't acquire Dubsmash to profit from its technology and users. They acquired Dubsmash to shut it down.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
It's hilarious to me that Reddit is only relevant at all today because Digg 2.0's redesign was so hated that everyone from it flocked to Reddit. Then they buy a moderately successful app, completely destroy it and yet their execs are sitting there rapidly killing the ways people like to use their site and trying to force them into an objectively awful app and yet are seemingly completely oblivious to their history and why they're here in the first place.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
They ended that way too early. There is so much good content to write about now. I know it’s hard to transition, but do you really need (near) the full cast still?
Because they want to force the content on you. It's not the goal that you can choose to enjoy TikTok-like short videos. You can already do that. They want to mix the videos into your feed so that you get caught in the net, like they already do on their app.
It’s likely that very few Reddit actually users want short form video. And that the acquisition was mostly for the user base which they then tried desperately to hold on to.
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
Where did you get the $50 million from? The actual amount seems to not have been disclosed and it sounds a bit low for the time and 200 million user base.
> Look at their hilariously terrible acquisition of Dubsmash for $50 million
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
Using tiktok without the app is also an interesting experience. I was perfectly happy with the mobile website, but they recently started limiting how many results you can see and putting more "install the app" banners up.
Its going to tank but for a different reason -- because like Coinbase, Robinhood, and other hyped stock listings, all the insiders are going to dump shares on the unsuspecting retail public. I imagine day 1 of trading will be the highest the stock ever gets.
For Reddit to go public they have to submit a financial disclosure known as the S-1. This will give the public an idea of Reddit's finances and business model.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
> 25% of black teens in their acquisition press release
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
No because it is a different thing. US black population has their own distinct culture (grown out of a shared struggle and history) that simply does not exist for the group that people call 'white'. In this case black teens isn't just pointing at skin color but at culture, one that is very valuable for the VC crowd because it's where cool stuff originates.
I have been in this A/B test group and I have been in the A/B test group that tries to show a TikTok style feed (one that gets new content based on the content you spent time observing) rather than a normalized upvote based one.
Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes.
I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
While I do not agree with the trend, especially how it's currently going, I think this is how Reddit leadership (and many other C-level/PM people of other brands like YouTube) view it: the site isn't a place to choose what to see, it's a consume consume consume kind of thing.
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
That's not the attractive part of TikTok-style feeds for business leadership: it requires you to engage with exactly one thing at a time. And you don't decide what that one thing is, and they can make it an ad.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
I mean... It's not ethical. What discussion needs to be had? If "we" don't like doing those things, why don't "we" find a job doing something we believe in?
Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
I've been wondering if I'm in some experiment sometime as well. Sometimes my r/popular will be filled with content from niche subreddits I don't follow with barely any upvotes. The content is generally bad. Seems like a failed attempt at a "for you" page (and then I would just have browsed my own frontpage with subs I follow..)
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
I want both. I want the old.reddit.com UI, but I would like to have algorithm curated feed. I am sick and tired of all the USA politics on there. I've added a lot of the political subreddits to my filters, but that just means sometimes when I browse r/all I just get a blank page since every single post on that page was from political subreddit.
> It looks like you’re part of one of our experiments. The logged-in mobile web experience is currently unavailable for a portion of users. To access the site you can log on via desktop, the mobile apps, or wait for the experiment to conclude.
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
They do – there is a beta option in preferences that is unticked by default that lets you opt into experiments. However it seems to me they just kinda forgot about it?
I've subscribed to the beta experiments years ago, before the dark patterns started emerging and I was actually looking forward to any changes, and you're absolutely right, it is totally abandoned. The subreddit has just become a place for people to vent their frustrations and to be completely ignored by the admins.
Doesn't make it appropriate at all but since they're testing "will the average user put up with this crap" restricting to just people who went out of their way to go into settings and enable labs would yield really biased results.
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
I mean the other way around. Sure, bully your users by default but let them opt out via a somewhat hidden setting. If they use the setting instead of installing the app you have your result.
I get wanting to test the hypothesis that disabling logged-in mobile web will drive app downloads, but the user experience a critical flow you used to use went a way for no apparent reason, and workarounds also went away. It would feel like you're going crazy or your device/IP got banned, somehow.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private and shocked at some napkin math of how many total subscribers are affected.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
The Reddit API changes are hyper-focused on killing 3rd party mobile apps.
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
I'm mostly worried about how long this can last and whether it will have the intended effect. It's a huge community rallying point but Reddit has clearly shown it does not care about the community's opinion.
> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
Counting subreddits is meaningless as a stock percentage. For example, there are millions of subreddits, but only 150k or so even have any activity at all. A small percentage of those are responsible for most activity.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
It may only be <1%, but many, many subreddits are barren, unmoderated, entirely inactive wastelands. I would assume that if you only consider subreddits with actual content being regularly posted, the percentage is significantly higher.
I assume this comes in addition to "reminding" me multiple times a day, sometimes when I click a link, sometimes seemingly on a timer loop while I am just reading, that they have an app?
Yes. I tried the app. The app is better not because it is good but because they deliberately break the web.
Also the app seems to eat battery and I am planning on charging my new iPhone 14 twice a day to use it or jump through hoops to figure out if it is anything I do wrong.
Between this and the community blackouts I am leaving for now.
I left Twitter a few months ago (including Nitter) and my stress levels have been lower since that. I guess the same will happen after I leave reddit.
Edit: It also seems to me the fediverse is picking up steam quickly now. The number of lemmy instances and lemmy users seems to have exploded recently: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Readit News
It was extremely annoying for a site I've used for 12+ years to treat me like that. It did massively cut my usage of Reddit (which I would consider to be quite high), I primarily access it from my phone and I all but stopped using it for the week or so I was in the "experiment".
The number of times I lost a post because when I switched app or didn’t use my phone for a while reddit would just reset to the home page… I think they really didn’t realize how much the shitty UX would enrage people against them.
On a computer I see no benefits from any of the redesigns compared to old.reddit.com. I work a lot with Typescript and also React myself, and I love the language, so it's not because I dislike that sort of thing, but I think a list of links with comments just works better without being put into a virtual DOM or even just JS. HN is the perfect example of that, there has been a lot of hobby JS frontends from people, but they all work worse than the real deal and somewhat hilariously they work better than reddit's professional attempts. Now I get why reddit wants to move away from the page-reload. They want a lot of the SoMe interactivity, like their silly chat and so on, but I'm not sure who would ever want a Facebook with total strangers instead of people you actually talk with. I sure don't.
I’m not downloading the app. I am just not doing it. Period.
I'd assume their goal with this isn't to convert the stragglers, it's to just close the gates to them so that they disappear from ad-view related statistics.
Edit: Further to this point, the Apollo app which everyone was talking about the other day has 50000 (fifty thousand!) paid users. Reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users. They don't care about this minority of users, they just want the shitstorm to pass so they can move on. They also don't care that there's likely a small minority of users creating most actual good content, but it doesn't matter because the site can be floated entirely by meme spam bots and porn posts and still be massively profitable.
But surely Reddit has already calculated that “[search query] + Reddit” is traffic they don’t care about?
I just hope it flies under the radar enough that Google don't start banning accounts for using it. I don't log in to the Youtube app for this reason, but I'm sure there is a line in a EULA somewhere that means they could if they wanted to.
Which reminds me, i need to backup all my email...
I made it a matter of principle to not use the Reddit app. Even if they removed all ads and made it an acceptable user experience, I'll never use the app as long as they are harassing me about it.
It's simple. Don't reward bad behavior.
Sometimes, denying obnoxious people something they want means denying yourself something you want.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.
This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).
Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.
* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.
* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.
* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.
Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.
I've been recommending people to replace their content in Reddit with literal gibberish (from random generators), and then delete their accounts. Each person doing this makes Reddit data less valuable for LLMs, and eventually it means that not even Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. would ever bother paying for API access.
I can't just delete. I've helped people there, and been helped. If my data is part of a corpus that betters humanity, than so be it. Hopefully one day that corpus will be released under a FOSS license.
i installed instagram in december and it’s so much easier to make friends. I feel in touch with what’s going on in the community
Reddit is probably among the least sticky social media sites because of it.
Huh... I did this with Facebook and it basically changed nothing. I was forced to text my friends life updates, that was it.
Out of every social media site I've quit, Facebook seemed to have the lowest impact on my life(as long as I or my wife checked it every 1-3 weeks for Events).
It seems Facebook has an ability to make you feel popular without actually making you friends. I'd be skeptical of the 'friends' you make on Instagram. I've made a few over the last 6 years, but since quitting, I really only talk to 1-2 of them rarely.
Considering making it back let’s see
Dead Comment
This is mathematically backed.
In the game of prisoners dilemma if someone chooses to defect (bad behavior) rather than cooperate, and you choose to cooperate (reward bad behavior), bad behavior becomes a winning strategy, so you can expect even more bad behavior in the future.
That's the issue with operating on principle:
We HN users might be aware of this particular issue, but there's thousands of products that we use, because we're unaware or don't have the energy to fight.
So with all the exploitation, abuse and pollution that you indirectly support, why do you expect most users to draw the line at a weird website?
Not simple at all.
I was going to ban personal reddit use this week but I already broke that to read this topic and respond to the one dev that replied to it.
In any case, it looks like Reddit is going to join the ranks of long forgotten startups on a slide towards basically being empty shells of their former selves. More interesting to ask is where the users, content, and attention will go.
I never really cared for Reddit. The signal to noise ratio just feels wrong to me. Lots of people yapping about whatever and just not a lot of stuff that interests me. I lurk in a few sub-reddits but as communities they are pretty weak.
Might be a nice one for Elon Musk to buy. But I'd recommend he does that at a big discount. This company needs the same kind of shock therapy that Twitter received to have a realistic shot at surviving. Including a big layoff round probably. I get that people are still upset about what happened at Twitter, but they too were on a long slide towards irrelevance. It's debatable whether Musk's intervention is going to be good enough of course.
And everyone I know in real life who uses Reddit on a daily basis is also in at least 2-3 FB groups. Be it a local mom/dad group, Costco group, the car they own, or something more niche
They’re not big Zuckerberg fans but they’re much more accepting of him making billions than the Reddit shareholders
FB groups also utilize mods who work lots of hours for free. So those who say Reddit cannot IPO because of the free labor are wrong
People can dislike two things at once, and it doesn’t need to necessarily be said. Three, even, if they’re feeling frisky.
Unless there’s a post specifically about Reddit and Facebook, then you shouldn’t expect people to even bring up Facebook. It’s at best barely relevant.
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I get that there are some marketing benefits from having your logo on of the user's home screens (likely not the main one), and that very few users even know you can do the same thing with websites, and that in the early days there was a big feature gap between native and mobile apps. But for apps like Reddit, it seems to me like you should be able to achieve everything you could want with modern web standards, and users who use their browser a lot will probably see your logo on the "New Tabs" page anyway. So what am I missing?
Yes, Google and (especially) Apple may force Reddit to comply with this or that, but Google and (especially) Apple also prevent the user from doing all sorts of things they can do with an open platform like the web.
Users can't block ads in an app. Users can't block telemetry. Users can't prevent tracking, at least without help from the platform vendor. Users can't easily save their favorite content from your app if the company doesn't want them to. Etc.
The web is fundamentally user-centric, and apps are roughly the opposite of that.
There are also legitimate user-benefiting advantages of apps, such as ability to use the accelerometer or other non-web features, but I can't really think of any that convincingly apply to Reddit's app. Maybe somewhat better push notifications, and "sign in with Apple" but... still seems like another own-goal from team Reddit if they are, in fact, doing this.
Their finance team probably made a projection that if they can get X% of current mobile web users onto the app, they’ll be able to extract Y% more total revenue. They have no idea that they should split users into contributors and lurkers and even if they had, they have absolutely no idea how to model their value, so they don’t, the board sees the numbers and tells them ‘ASAP’ and that’s how you kill social networks, because the financial model is based on false assumptions.
Yeah, they can. By which I mean, they can do it right away, for the official Reddit app:
– https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.reddit.frontpage
– https://revanced.app/download
Or, for even less work, you can just use a pre-patched APK with the ads removed: https://github.com/revanced-apks/build-apps/releases
No need for root access nor flimsy DNS solutions.
Although I broadly agree with this assessment, I'd just like to add a slight nuance that, at least in my view, it's specifically _app store apps_ that are roughly the opposite. You can still, for example, install random APKs (on Android, I doubt Apple has anything similar) if you're so inclined, so they can be as user-centric as you want. It's just that the major manufacturers optimize for the roughly-anti-user-centric flow.
Adguard does a pretty good job of blocking these things inside of apps.
I have never looked into this mind
Phone apps delenda est
Some exec will be constantly getting pressure to make his mobile app growth chart keeping going up. So instead of doing customer research finding out what people want, having a product vision, market research (“why do people like Apollo?”), making the app so good that Redditors tell other Redditors how much better it is, etc they just say “why not just force existing web users to use it?”
It’s just lazy belligerent tactics so [x] chart goes up. The mobile app team probably has a ton of political pull so they get to stomp on others to get their metrics.
“All these other companies are successful and had experienced large mobile growth along that success. Maybe we can force that same success by boosting our own mobile numbers.”
See also Goodhart’s Law.
Deleted Comment
At least we aren't doing hostile stuff to get people into the apps, yet.
Now they could use the tabs feature, but this is again a lost opportunity to have them browse some comments etc. Plus, if they need to browse for another purpose, you'll just be one or ten of a hundred open tabs instead of one of the couple of recent apps.
The funny thing about this is that this misbehavior is mostly exclusive to badly written SPAs and other heavily-JS’d sites. Plain old rendered HTML sites like old Reddit don’t flash blank and restore scroll position fine.
Ironically this is made worse by apps teaching users not to multitask. You can't open a tab to read later.
Apart from a few geeks using firefox on android, mobile browsers generally dont hinder ads
Is there something I'm missing here? It seems that the app is the less usable experience to me.
I gave in and installed the Reddit app, but it simply doesn't work well enough or transition well enough from a Google search into the app. Would definitely engage a lot more with Reddit if only the app pushing nonsense were gone, and that's as a user who does have the app installed.
Dead Comment
If Reddit execs thought they could take the same approach on desktop (forcing us all into desktop apps with unblockable ads and more system access), they absolutely would. They see that Slack and Discord did accomplish this effectively, and probably want to catch up.
Premium users would only see the ads from Reddit, where non-premium would also have seen ads from the app maker.
It would have increased the ads shown to users, added more money into reddit's pocket, and increased the liklihood of users paying cash for the platform while pissing off fewer people.
Putting on my PM hat, I bet:
- On web, the biggest top of funnel entrypoint for Reddit is Google search
- On mobile, it’s push notifications
The latter is probably the single biggest retention lever Reddit has. The former is an acquisition lever, but probably doesn’t do much for retention.
Speaking as someone who worked in publishing, ad tech and built primarily for mobile (PWA or native).
Apparently there are metrics showing that mobile app users are “stickier” than web users, meaning they come back to the app more.
That was a long time ago though and my perspective on this probably isn’t relevant anymore.
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All this makes losing customers who are not willing to make the transition to the app worth it.
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I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
And to nobody's surprise US tech will be primed to offer their TikTok clone.
That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions.
I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubsmash
https://old.reddit.com/r/dubsmash/
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base.
More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.
How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
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Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
Without old.reddit.com, I would have not used reddit. I think it is important to never comply with these forced changes.
I think there is a larger discussion on professional ethics to be had. Is it ethical to implement dark patterns and "force" users into behavior or to degrade experience, not as a cost saving measure, but as an effort to force compliance?
We implement these things we would probably not tolerate ourselves. We implement ads but use ad blockers. We try to force app usage but allow old.reddit.com for ourselves. How is that ethical?
Similar to YouTube removing granularity levels for filtering videos on channels, it's not a content library. It's not even a video rental store. It's a movie theater. Sit down, watch what's on today, move on.
It's not a movie theater, it's a TV station. As long as the thing you're looking at is compelling enough to stay after they slap you in the face with an advertisement every few seconds (every 8-30 seconds, on my Instagram reels feed right now), you'll just keep doing it. As long as the commercials aren't too long or obnoxious, you won't change the station.
Sorry to sound hostile- I think your implicit inclusion of me in your "we" got my back up. Do you personally work on building ad tech or implementing dark patterns? Do you feel you have no alternatives that are accessible to you?
"When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor." -- Timothy Snyder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F75dhfkXjw8)
As engineers we are building these systems, such as ad tech and personal data markets, that we do not wish to participate in. We (and if you're back is up, then in all likelihood you) are responsible for the world we are creating.
As engineers we have an ethical responsibility to build a world we wish to live in.
As a class of people exercising power together, we can use that power to make a world we want to live in. When we implement systems that sell personal data we disempower ourselves and empower those who benefit from making the world a worse place.
But if I refresh, it's back to "expected" content. So weird.
Wow. Most companies at least have the grace to allow users to opt out of these kind of experiments via a "labs" kind of configuration.
https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/wiki/index
https://www.reddit.com/live/x3ckzbsj6myw/
No self-awareness that running such a test ya know might make you the bad guys though.
They accidentally tipped their hand with this. Everyone suspected, but it's basically confirmed that they're pushing to get mobile users onto the first-party app.
Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.
Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.
Today is an okay day after all.
My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-michael-seibe...
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.
Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.
The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.
What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.
Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.
Yes. I tried the app. The app is better not because it is good but because they deliberately break the web.
Also the app seems to eat battery and I am planning on charging my new iPhone 14 twice a day to use it or jump through hoops to figure out if it is anything I do wrong.
Between this and the community blackouts I am leaving for now.
I left Twitter a few months ago (including Nitter) and my stress levels have been lower since that. I guess the same will happen after I leave reddit.
Edit: It also seems to me the fediverse is picking up steam quickly now. The number of lemmy instances and lemmy users seems to have exploded recently: https://the-federation.info/platform/73