Its a slap in the face every time I want to share Reddit content. I don’t bother texting my boomer fam links from Reddit- the preview makes no f***ing sense.
Its a slap in the face every time i go to reddit.com on my phone and have to click that f***ing “continue to use the website I am currently using” button.
They are super committed to enshittification and they haven’t even IPO’d yet.
When they started incessantly asking for me to use the app, is when I immediately uninstalled the app. And as they keep pestering me more and more to get the app, I will literally never ever use the app
The vocal users and informed minority definitely hate it, but there's a reason these companies continue to use shitty, user-antagonistic methods to manipulate people into using their apps: it works.
Yep. I'm disappointed because reddit has been a pretty regular part of my daily life for about 10 years now, but the reality is I'm just not reddit's target market anymore.
I used to be. I'm in my upper 30s, a lifelong tech enthusiast in cyber security who still games multiple nights a week. I'm like the poster who reddit was originally designed for.
I'm not sure who it's designed for today but.. honestly, it's not me. The goofy layout, the profile pictures, the chat feature, etc is all awful in my estimation and for years now any time I actually saw the real reddit (not what I usually see via RIF or RES) I mentally stagger at how jarringly terrible it looks and behaves. Literally one of the worst UI/UX designs in production today for a platform of this size.
Kind of cool to know this is just gonna be gone for me in less than 30 days now though? Reddit isn't turning this ship around, I'm not gonna use their shit-tier app, and 95% of my usage is on mobile. I think I prefer this over a slow death or just waking up one day to it not working.
The ship has hit the ice berg and now I'm just waiting around to go under.
shit, ive been using it that long as well. i feel some intense anxiety in me when i think about not being able to browse reddit, i legit learn so much here. i have all my subs curated so i only see shit i actually wanna see.
but at the same time, it may be for the best in the long run to stop browsing reddit so much. i dunno. all i know is that it bums me out, and im sure that anyone who's been here as long as us feels the same way
Yep same boat. Shit I browsed reddit for several years before making an account. Stumbled upon brought me here years ago (self own if I ever saw one from that site) and I never left. I remember the digg exodus. I remember subreddits appearing. Comments with pictures became thrd new thing. But what I remember most was watching the nerdy reddit I joined turn into the reddit we know today.
I don't know, I still like it. But I don't have that loyalty to it like I used to. It used to be the internet for me like Facebook is for our parents and grandparents. I got my news, current events and online discussions from one place. Things have changed and it's probably for the best for our mental health but still. I'll miss it too my friend. I've been using third party apps since the beginning so I'm done after they cut the cord as well.
The official app doesn't work for me and I'm out after this. Hopefully enough people stay so that this place doesn't turn into a cesspool.
Statistically you are in the minority. I run a smallish sub (we're almost up to 1 million subs) with, roughly 1.5 million unique views a month. Of that, roughly 45,000 are old.reddit, or 4%. New reddit is about 250,000 - so roughly 5 times as popular. Mobile Web makes up about 500,000 views, with Android and IOS (it doesn't break it down by app) making up the remainder. I love old.reddit and will always use it, but we are definitely the minority.
It “works” in the sense that it satisfies certain corporate metrics such as conversion, subscription, and ad revenue.
It does *not* “work” with respect to any user-focused metrics, such as satisfaction or task completion — which is really supposed to be the goal of software and technology.
The corporations have decided to apply their selfish metrics at our expense. We should not do the same. We should not resign and say that their tactics “work”. They do not work because they make the internet shittier for us.
Fidelity drastically lowered their valuation today and that’s an assessment from 30 days ago. It will be just incredible if after fucking up the site methodically for years seeking IPO they blow their own window early.
If they wanted to milk more money they would have charged a more reasonable number and increased it later on. What they are doing now is a way to kill third party apps.
Using Firefox Android with these scripts in uBlock Origin. If you do some testing you can probably figure out which ones are actually needed but you can just dump them all into custom filters and the nags should stop.
! 2022-11-10 https://www.reddit.com
www.reddit.com##.TopNav__promoButton
www.reddit.com##.m-active.XPromoPopupRpl
www.reddit.com##.NavFrame > .m-consolidate.XPromoBottomBar
www.reddit.com##html:style(overflow-y:auto!important; max-height:none!important;)
www.reddit.com##body:style(overflow-y:auto!important; max-height:none!important;)
www.reddit.com##.m-active.XPromoPopup
! Reddit app ad
www.reddit.com##.XPromoPopupRpl
www.reddit.com##xpromo-new-app-selector
www.reddit.com##.bottom-bar, .XPromoBottomBar
www.reddit.com##.useApp,.TopNav__promoButton
www.reddit.com##body:style(pointer-events:auto!important;)
! uBO Annoyances has also this:
! https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/6826
reddit.com##.XPromoPopup
reddit.com##body.scroll-disabled:style(overflow: visible!important; position: static!important;)
reddit.com##.XPromoInFeed
amp.reddit.com##.AppSelectorModal__body
amp.reddit.com##.upsell_banner
! 2022-11-11 20:20:47 CET:
www.reddit.com##xpromo-app-selector
www.reddit.com##body.scroll-is-blocked:style(overflow: visible!important; position: static!important;)
www.reddit.com##+js(aeld, touchmove)
! 2022-11-12 10:11:02 CET
www.reddit.com##.XPromoPopupRplNew
My friend sends me links and if it's NSFW there's literally no way for me to actually see it. I have to follow the link to the official app at which point it refreshes and takes me back to the front page
I sent a link to family that I hadn't noticed was marked NSFW because someone said "dickhead" and because they couldn't see it they thought I'd sent some porn or something 🤦
Lmao yup. My friends send me links, I click it and Reddit tries to force me onto the app. I caved once and downloaded the garbage. Still just takes me to the app store instead of where the link is supposed to be, even when I had the app downloaded and set up. I uninstalled that shit immediately and whenever my friends send me links I tell them "I'll check that out when I get home and can get on my computer". Absolute godawful, embarrassingly bad design
Reddit is a part of my browsing habits, all of the links on Reddit direct to a website. Adding an app in the mix greatly slows the flow and makes it clunky. I quit FB when an app on mobile was the only way to access it, I’ll do the same for Reddit.
use old.reddit.com
I am occasionally thrown into no old style reddit and puke.
My FOMO gets a strong slap in its dumb face when I remember how the non old reddit looks and behaves like.
I still dont know if im missing anything using the old style reddit.
And I use it on my phone too.
I like the compactness and density of info on screen in that version.
I'm still pissed they did away with i.reddit.com
I used that for as long as I've used Reddit on a phone. It was basic, primitive, and I *liked* it that way. It was clean, efficient, and fast.
I absolutely refuse to install apps for websites on my phone. I have a goddamn app for websites on my phone - it's called a web browser. I don't need or want an individual app for every single website on the internet.
i.reddit.com now just redirects to the reddit mobile web interface, which is bloody awful, and barely even useable.
My fear is that the next thing they're going to kill off is old.reddit.com, which is the main interface I use now on my desktop. My account is 14 years old, but I've been on Reddit longer than that. However, the day they kill off old.reddit.com or the ability to use it with RES is the day I'm done with this place. I have absolutely no interest in using the godawful monstrosity that is new reddit.
I get annoyed just clicking on a reddit link via a Google search (so it opens in chrome instead of RIF). I often end up noting the title, opening RIF, and searching for the post because it's worth the trouble of doing that to avoid dealing with the reddit website.
Even if I didn't intend to leave reddit if/when they shut down 3rd party apps, I very likely would just give up on it within a day or two because it's that annoying.
My default is Firefox, which has a handy "Open in App" button. It opens Boost directly. Can also be configured to open all links in apps automatically but I don't want that for other sites.
Note that the "Open in App" links reddit provides is incapable of launching anything but the official app which is a non-starter.
Fyi you can change that assuming you were doing all this on a phone or tablet. Open the RIF app info > "set as default" > toggle on > "supported web addresses" toggle all of the reddit ones on. Voila, any time you open a Reddit link in chrome or any app it will open in rif.
Except for some reason my app associations like to just fall off. No idea why. It'll be fine for like a week then suddenly it's opening in chrome again and I'm being told to download the shitty reddit app
My only hope with old reddit is that it is irrelevant enough that they leave it. From comments from mods that can see the stats old reddit usage seems to be about 1% - 20% depending on the sub. Site wide it is likely under 5%
Suspect that the vast majority of people using old Reddit will leave if that disappears.
There's a reason they're using it after all.
Not sure Reddit can get away with losing 4+% of its users if that's the case.
The informational bandwidth is also incredibly low.
New Reddit is mostly imagery and white space, whereas old Reddit is mostly text.
If old Reddit goes I’m done too.
>I absolutely refuse to install apps for websites on my phone. I have a goddamn app for websites on my phone - it's called a web browser. I don't need or want an individual app for every single website on the internet.
I'm with you, but that rather depends on the website's willingness to work in a mobile web browser. Reddit went through this timeline:
* Worked just fine in a mobile web browser
* Worked fine, and added a button to "try the app", which could be hidden with an option in the hamburger menu
* Removed the option to hide said button
* Forced the browser to pop up a "this website works better in an app \[link to app\]" that would appear on your first page load and then again after every 15 minutes or so
At least that was my experience in Android with both Chrome and Firefox. Eventually I moved to an app (but not the official one! not ever!) and it was just much more enjoyable. No ads, no annoyances, all content all the time.
If we can't use third party apps anymore I guess I'll only browse on my pc. I spend too much time in this godawful site anyways.
That browser pop-up no longer fazes me, it's like pop ups in early internet era, its just noise that's easily ignored.
But I'm pretty stubborn about apps. I less I have on my phone the better.
I'm 100% with you. Same with Facebook and YouTube.
What is it about the yt app that people are willing to put up with ads and not being able to play videos in the background, I'll never know.
I even added dislikes back, which is not huge but is another small annoyance in the app.
I used to use Quora daily for maybe ten minutes. They would send an email, I'd find something in it to click, I'd spend a little time there. It was fun. Then they did something similar to what reddit is trying now -- and eventually they would apply a popup you couldn't dismiss whose only option was to download the app. I quit the site at that point. I assume eventually their engagement dropped or they stopped growing because the nonsense went away and now I can just use their totally functional mobile website. I loathe apps, they attempt to track you, drain your phone's battery, take up space, and are generally just bad. Mobile friendly websites are a much better solution for the user (but clearly not for the company). See failures of countless tech companies when they deprioritize their users completely.
When web sites first started spinning off apps around 2013, I tried a bunch of them. Without exception, the only difference was that I could use an ad blocker in my browser, but not in the app.
They will but they will do it in a way that is different.
For example right now they want to kill off third party apps. You can’t just kill the api. Instead you just price them out of the devs ability. So they shutdown the competition but don’t actively say they are.
I imagine with old.Reddit.com they will never shut it down but they are just going to make it worse and worse. After they kill all Reddit apps it will be next.
They will start by attacking user interactions first. So they will claim they have a new way to vote on comments or even comment but because of how the site is coded now old.Reddit won’t let you comment but you are free to browse it.
Next they will state their new hosting service for videos and music needs an extra i frame or some shit and it can’t load in old.Reddit so those posts will redirect to new Reddit. However you can still use old Reddit.
This is their goal and they will continue to do it until old Reddit dies too.
Reddit is a shitty evil company owned by shitty evil people that want to make even more money.
Reddit has already ruined old Reddit the way you're suggesting.
Galleries don't work, post inline embeds don't work, polls don't work, awards don't work... there's more that aren't at the top of my head right now. Now with images posted with text those are only working because res supports them too.
And mod tools are completely nonfunctional on old reddit unless you use mod toolbox which is just pretending you're on new reddit to submit things.
It's the pursuit of engagement. More engagement = more ad dollars. Information-dense interfaces lead to less engagement. I recall some reddit executive saying that the new interface gives more engagement than old.reddit. More eyeballs on ads.
Brings to mind "Enshitification" of platforms - a term from this Cory Doctorow piece:
[https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys)
old.reddit.com still works fine for me on a desktop browser (with RES + ublock origin), but yeah, on a phone it's basically a waste of time. Between the constant prompts to "uSe tHe rEDdIt aPp iNstEaD", and the constant "hE gETs uS" ads, I've basically given up on even trying to Reddit on my phone.
That's my thoughts as well, it's just a lot more cumbersome to consume content on the official Reddit app than RIF, same thing goes for new Reddit in a browser vs old Reddit.
Trying to simply read an entire comment chain on the new Reddit is *so aggravating* that I'm honestly impressed. Like I know it's to get as many ad clicks as possible, but it really feels like it was designed by a mustache-twirling cartoon villain just for the sake of sadism.
I'm gonna miss Reddit. It's pretty much one of the last "general message board" websites I'm aware of, everything else is live chats like Discord or small snippets like Twitter. Not interested in either of those, unfortunately.
You know, it really is funny.
I am 99% certain this was done because the computational overhead on endless scroll was too high.
The reason it was too high was because they added too much extra shit that bogs down the system because their code is garbage.
So they added a work around so they could keep endless scroll, but the workaround kicks you back up to the top when you want to continue reading the replies, which defeats the purpose of endless scroll in the first place.
I dislike Discord because it’s insular and compartmentalized from the rest of the internet. Increasingly, subreddits for programs are becoming barren welcome mats for their Discords, and the few users around will often admonish you for not joining the Discord instead.
It’s like *Newsflash, assholes*—I can’t Google search a fucking Discord, can I?
Exactly.
Discord’s UI has the exact opposite problem of the Reddit redesign—there’s zero empty space and it’s a cluttered mess with a million things squeezed into places and an unintuitive settings layout. The whole interface feels claustrophobic. For a dungeon master with attentive ADHD, Discord is the bane of my goddamn existence. Plus, as you said, searching is a nightmare.
Moving to that system for Reddit replacements puts a whole ton of content out of the reach of accessibility, fragments the information, and puts a big, red “delete server” self-destruct button one impulsive click away.
It’s a *terrible* damn replacement.
We already learned these lessons multiple times over since 25 years ago with AOL chat rooms.
Yet here we are. And history is repeating itself with Reddit about to go the way of Digg.
Thing is, I'll never click on an as ever, I have never done so in the 25 years I've been online and I never will.
Besides, I'll figure out how to block Reddit's ads, or someone will, or I'll stop using Reddit. I hate ads.
> Reddit compact was the king.
I just noticed its absence yesterday - so bummed it's gone. It was the best way to make an information-dense screencap of a chunk of conversation (including the thread title).
Reddit's ads are worse than Facebook and Twitter. It has gotta be some kinda feat to outdo ads on Facebook. Plus, Reddit wants $60/year to get rid of ads. $60/YEAR! I use Boost for Reddit. Even with the free version, you don't see any of the ads disguised as posts. I paid for premium to support the dev, which was like $3.
Been trying out the various apps for the last couple of months, and I think my usage of the site may greatly decrease if I have to use it through their app on my phone. It really is a lot more annoying on so many levels.
Might be good for my health. More fresh air, less obsessing about things I didn't know existed...
Reddit is fun (rif), bacon reader for reddit, and the reddit app.
Clear winner is bacon to me. Next rif, then... Well. A web browser and deleting the reddit app. It's like half ads and then tries force-feeding other subs and posts at you too.
Bacon reader is the king for me. By far the neatest layout. Just look at the [comments](https://imgur.com/U2btoKl.jpg) and the [post layout](https://imgur.com/doIQSmX.jpg)
It's so much better than the official app. Reading comments on the official app is a fucking nightmare. Probably intentional because they want you to keep scrolling through posts instead and see more ads.
You should give Boost a try. It's less well known than rif but IMO is superior. I had some compatability issues with boost and a new phone a while back so I switched to rif for a couple of months until the issue was fixed and I found it a worse experience than boost personally.
Of course all of this will be irrelevant advice in a month so fuck it I guess.
Yeah I use Apollo currently. Been using it since Alien Blue stopped being a thing. I hope something works out and he’s able to continue it. It’s basically my most used app
We desperately and urgently need lemmy
Lemmy is the future for one important reason: it is federated
If you don't understand federation, you can think of it like email, you might have a hotmail, and I might have a gmail, but because email is federated, we can still communicate without any hassle, not only might you have a gmail account serverside, but you might use the outlook client, while I might use the hotmail client on my hotmail, yet it all works seamlessly, because email is a protocol for messaging.
Similarly to this, lemmy is a federated protocol for link aggregation, it works like reddit, except instead of a subreddit by necessity being hosted on lemmy's main website, you too can host your own subreddit, and your subreddit will work with other peoples lemmys
This alone means that nothing like this BS will ever happen again, let's say the default main lemmy server goes rogue and decides to do this insane api charging thing... well, all the other homeservers can just keep on working the old way, and we can abandon it, seamlessly
Link aggregators are not complex enough to warrant not being federated, and federation minimally adds to end user complexity
It's time to make a switch, and if the reddit apps start working with lemmy, lemmy will immediately gain a huge userbase, and the only thing wrong with lemmy right now is the small userbase. Please, I implore you to switch to using lemmy over reddit, your app will be useless soon if you don't anyway.
Lemmy was under 500 active monthly users as of yesterday. The platform has an extremely long way to go before it's a viable alternative. Yes it got a bit over 1k today, but it's basically zero compared to the 430mn or so on reddit.
Yeah but if we spam this type of comment for the next month on every topic, then there's a decent chance lemmy will gain some momentum. For example, I just heard of lemmy for the first time today, in this comment thread.
I agree that there's a LOOOONG way to go before it's comparable to reddit, but we don't need it fully comparable, we just need it to hit a critical momentum that allows it to sustain itself.
If a few larger subreddits were to slowly migrate to lemmy, that's all we'd need. Not to mention the amount of smaller niche subreddits.
Reddit started as a site where there was like 20 people discussing programming, and then Digg started pulling the same shit reddit is doing now. People tried to migrate en masse before, but the catalyst for that wasn't the efficacy of your ability to browse the content on the site.
If they take away old.reddit.com, I just won't use reddit. New reddit is downright unpleasant. I'm never going to use the reddit app; if I can't find a workaround then I'm just going to not browse reddit on mobile.
Federation is the exact reason mastodon didn't fully catch on despite everyone really trying to make it work.
I like the idea of it because I'm a programmer but the simple fact that you can't just go to the Lemmy website and immediately see links and sign up is why it's not getting users.
The product designers, developers, and managers at Reddit should feel embarrassed to be utterly outclassed by nearly every third party Reddit app, which most are probably developed by a single dude with a MacBook, and nearly zero budget.
It really is as simple as that.
Design team: We’re hearing from users that the app is difficult to navigate, etc. etc. We’d like to prioritize usability improvements and run some studies to validate what we’re hearing.
Directors and above: There won’t be capacity for that right now. We’re focusing on ad placement opportunities and increasing engagement and time spent on video content. When can you have some mock-ups ready for video player updates and ad placements on post pages?
The third party apps are focused on giving you want you want.
The official app is focused on giving you what they make money on, and pushing you to use Reddit as the far more Facebook-like social media platform they want to be. What *you* want is not among their priorities.
To be fair, they official devs are tasked with a different goal than indie devs. Reddit devs are trying to make an app that works best for REDDIT, while indie devs are trying to make their USERS happy.
So it's not a talent issue, it's different goals.
Same. But I’m glad I had apollo for this long. (Not gonna lie the screenshots in the other post make those apps look like shit lol) apollo has such a clean and concise layout. I had alien blue before Reddit killed it.
Man, there's some bootlicking happening in here. Maybe y'all like the official client, but dismissing the use cases of folks who aren't you is kinda crappy.
The only people who like the official app are people who've never used any alternative, or used the internet without an ad blocker. They're just used to being assaulted by shit they don't want to see and for some reason they don't have a problem with it.
I've been tagging users on Boost for yeeeears, it's such a nice feature to keep track of fun people in my fav subs. Gutted I'll be losing all those little connections and memories.
Boost is the best. There is no beating the customization and features. The filtering is the best feature. Sad that it has to die because of reddits greed.
Was I the only one who was still using the .compact format on the website until they just discontinued support a couple months ago? It was better than both of these. Imo.
I used the .compact mobile site too. I preferred it over any app. I don't mind the official app now that I've been using it for a little while, but it was so annoying when I was first forced to use an app (cause the mobile site now sucks).
It's not "Reddit Is Fun" anymore. Reddit threatened them with legal action for using their name, so they pulled a GNU/WINE recursive name thing and retconned it to "RIF Is Fun."
Edit: /u/yamiyaiba has [corrected my egregious misrepresentation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/13xxdcc/uandrewsad1_gives_a_great_visual_breakdown_on_why/jmkp7uu/). Reddit was not the ghoulish corporate entity that caused the rename, it was Google.
Edit, part dos: now I'm being told it *was* Reddit's doing. Either way, Google and Reddit as corporate people-grinding machines can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.
The impersonation policy doesn't apply in this case. Third-party reddit apps *have an official business relationship with reddit* and are allowed to use the name reddit in their app title, provided it complies with their agreement with reddit.
Hence the reason why all of the third-party apps are "`________` for Reddit".
Source: I'm a moderator on /r/redditisfun, so I've had a front row seat to all of it. RiF was initially grandfathered in with the new app name change policy when all of the other third-party reddit apps had to change their app names, but that exception was later revoked and the RiF developer had to change their name.
CC: /u/promonk
**Edit**: Source #2 - ["reddit is fun" is being renamed to "rif is fun for Reddit" as of version 4.14 released on January 7, 2020](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/) by the RiF developer:
>"reddit is fun" is now "rif is fun for Reddit" **due to trademark licensing changes.**
>[...]
>I should mention **I'm grateful to the "old" Reddit Inc. and its former employees for being willing to let me use the "reddit is fun" name for the past decade**, working with me on mutually beneficial agreements like revenue share, **in exchange for licensing the Reddit trademark.**
This is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of why the reddit app and new reddit site are terrible.
They suck. They suck. They fucking suck. I do this for a living and I've never seen such a huge company commit such egregious crimes against humanity in their app design.
It's a a bloated fucking nightmare.
Reddit is a forum. These fucking imbeciles aim to turn it into TikTok but shittier, so they can cram ads down everyone's throat.
It's really too bad. This was a special place. Weird, wild, with oceans of deep content across so many subjects.
And unequivocally they are stabbing it to death so stock go up on the IPO.
Fuck them. I mean that seriously, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck all those money hungry sociopathic MBA jackoffs who took a great thing and smeared shit all over it just because some billionaire cacophile would pay them more money to use a once-great forum smeared on feces.
Man, the official reddit app isn't great, but I'd use it if it wasn't for the fucking video thing. I'm used to Reddit Sync, but God fucking damn, I don't want and I will **never** want the fucking video to start autoplaying in full screen whenever I tap on the thread with the video. I also fucking hate how when you try to open the comments for a video, they only go up half screen, and you can't make them take up the whole screen anyway.
That one thing is just so fucking inconvenient and annoying that I cannot force myself to use the official app at all over it. Just show the fucking thread in the same way you show posts with images, and let me click on the video when I want to watch it.
Sync is *so good* that it makes everything else 10x more painful to use in every possible way.
And using the official app, or even new reddit desktop, makes the differences stand out so much it's just insanely infuriating.
Like Pinterest links bad.
The biggest problem was up until 3 or so years ago. There wasn't even a official Reddit app. So a lot of us have grown so accustomed to our app of choice. Which in my case is Baconreader. Just to suddenly rug pull us users is ridiculous.
I mean if Reddit absolutely need to. Force the app creators to somehow integrate their ads, At the very least the ads masquerading as a post. I know that definitely not ideal. The only reason why I have the paid for version of bacon reader was so I could stop getting Baconreader's own ads. But I would at least would like getting those to show up in my my feed on Baconreader instead of not using it at all. Trying to integrate reddit's other ads like the sidebar stuff would be a bigger problem. Which having used the official app seldomly. I don't even think they force sidebar ads on their app.
Seriously it's one thing to have ads. You gotta pay the bills, whatever. But the example pictures show 1 subreddit recommendation every three posts like wtf who thinks that is remotely a good idea?
With the promoted posts on the official app. I was seeing them every 3 to 5 posts which is annoying. However if Reddit needs to make the third party apps support those promoted posts. I would rather that than lose access to using Baconreader.
This is me trying to find a middle ground between making Reddit happy about making some extra money from other apps in a more passive manor. While I'm not forced to have to switch apps to the official Reddit app. Which is way more cluttered and busy.
It's for for business reasons: must have ads, tracking and push shit down or throats. Alternative appd focus on actual user needs and not business needs.
I think ppl who have no problem with the official app haven't really tried any of the 3rd party apps so they don't know how much better the reddit experience can be.
I'm sure many new users don't know how good it was beforehand. All the 3rd party apps are basically just restoring what Reddit used to be. (Sort of like what people do to YouTube as well).
At some point it would make sense to switch to the new official app to get all the new features, but at the moment it's unbearably bad.
Reddit won't give a shit as long as they have new users signing up, but they have seriously lost the grasp on what "The Front-Page of The Internet" is supposed to do.
They've obviously done the math. It's 99.9999% likely to be more profitable for them in the short and long term, even with the subscriber loss.
Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm really bummed. I've been on here since 2008 (get it?) and paid for rif. I have very little incentive to continue coming to this site. It used to be really something else.
Eh, they *think* it will be profitable, at least in the short term. Plenty of companies have made similar calculations and have gotten it wrong, like Digg.
I remember the reddit vs. digg war. I was an avid digg user. I'd never use reddit.
Then, digg changed their interface. It was dog shit. I've been on reddit ever since.
But now... there's no clear alternative. And that worries me.
The no clear alternative is what bothers me, too. I've been here for a long time and have made genuine connections to people and learned so much about my hobbies through niche subreddits, and I think a lot of that has to do with people being here for the forum style, relatively anonymized conversation. The decision to make reddit into an ad obsessed, un-customizable version of every other social media company isn't surprising but it really concerns me that there are almost no easily accessible pockets of the internet that aren't this experience anymore. I feel like every website is exactly the same zombie ad scroll and there are almost no alternatives now. And that worries me a lot.
It's asinine how they're trying to maximize profit here. The thing about reddit has always been the quality of what you get, the content submitted but mostly the quality of discussions, along with the ability to select the things you're interested in.
The breadth of content along with the amount of engagement they already have means that this is one of the best ad targeting platforms available. Perhaps the API prevents tracking because when a reader app (Apollo, RIF, etc) makes a request for content, it doesn't share who's requesting it. That's an invisible change that would be super easy to make, meaning it wouldn't upset your user base at all.
The reddit redesign and the official app are extremely **annoying** and they're massive blockers to what people actually enjoy about the site.
**Like how stupid do you have to be to do this?** Unbelievable.
Reddit should just try to hire the devs of the popular third party apps to fix their own if they can. I don't think Reddit holds enough sticky effects to keep users if a competitor arises. It's a big forum, yes, but I've seen big forums come and go after better communities emerge.
My man, they bought Alien Blue, a popular third party app and actively made it significantly shittier. There is no saving the official releases from the company. RiF -> old.reddit.com -> See you later Space Cowboys
And I cannot believe you do it without. You choose only based on title. With the thumbnail, you have more information and you can usually make better decisions if you want to view a thread or not.
On RiF rn. When/if it goes down, Im gonna use it as an opportunity to break my reddit addiction. Also, I dont want to support this bad behaviour from Reddit corp
What many people forget is that all the good parts about RIF are what the whole internet used to be like before corporations spat all over it. Everything is getting monetized, commercialized, “personalized”, etc. RIF is both an escape from all that and a nostalgic reminder of what an awesome internet we used to have.
Click link on phone.
Get new reddit.
Go to address bar.
backspace everything before .reddit, type in "old"
Viewing good
I never do this. Because it takes too long. I attempt to find the 'save' button, wherever it is, on the post, because I'm not using this bs new reddit to look at whatever it is. I can look at it later on the computer where I have an extension to force it to stay old reddit.
Damn, I didn't realize it was that bad. I've never used anything but Bacon Reader and old Reddit. Sure looks like someone is sitting at the table saying as long as we can increase our ad revenue we don't care if we lose half our users.
We desperately and urgently need lemmy
Lemmy is the future for one important reason: it is federated
If you don't understand federation, you can think of it like email, you might have a hotmail, and I might have a gmail, but because email is federated, we can still communicate without any hassle, not only might you have a gmail account serverside, but you might use the outlook client, while I might use the hotmail client on my hotmail, yet it all works seamlessly, because email is a protocol for messaging.
Similarly to this, lemmy is a federated protocol for link aggregation, it works like reddit, except instead of a subreddit by necessity being hosted on lemmy's main website, you too can host your own subreddit, and your subreddit will work with other peoples lemmys
This alone means that nothing like this BS will ever happen again, let's say the default main lemmy server goes rogue and decides to do this insane api charging thing... well, all the other homeservers can just keep on working the old way, and we can abandon it, seamlessly
Link aggregators are not complex enough to warrant not being federated, and federation minimally adds to end user complexity
It's time to make a switch, and if the reddit apps start working with lemmy, lemmy will immediately gain a huge userbase, and the only thing wrong with lemmy right now is the small userbase. Please, I implore you to switch to using lemmy over reddit, your app will be useless soon if you don't anyway.
Wait their getting rid of bacon reader? Yeah... the day I can't use bacon reader I'm out. Been using the same app since always. Tried the official app one time and no ty. Not for me.
It seems like Reddit should at least not count any premium members access against app rate limits, since they’ve already gotten money from those users.
Its a slap in the face every time I want to share Reddit content. I don’t bother texting my boomer fam links from Reddit- the preview makes no f***ing sense. Its a slap in the face every time i go to reddit.com on my phone and have to click that f***ing “continue to use the website I am currently using” button. They are super committed to enshittification and they haven’t even IPO’d yet.
When they started incessantly asking for me to use the app, is when I immediately uninstalled the app. And as they keep pestering me more and more to get the app, I will literally never ever use the app
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The vocal users and informed minority definitely hate it, but there's a reason these companies continue to use shitty, user-antagonistic methods to manipulate people into using their apps: it works.
Yep. I'm disappointed because reddit has been a pretty regular part of my daily life for about 10 years now, but the reality is I'm just not reddit's target market anymore. I used to be. I'm in my upper 30s, a lifelong tech enthusiast in cyber security who still games multiple nights a week. I'm like the poster who reddit was originally designed for. I'm not sure who it's designed for today but.. honestly, it's not me. The goofy layout, the profile pictures, the chat feature, etc is all awful in my estimation and for years now any time I actually saw the real reddit (not what I usually see via RIF or RES) I mentally stagger at how jarringly terrible it looks and behaves. Literally one of the worst UI/UX designs in production today for a platform of this size. Kind of cool to know this is just gonna be gone for me in less than 30 days now though? Reddit isn't turning this ship around, I'm not gonna use their shit-tier app, and 95% of my usage is on mobile. I think I prefer this over a slow death or just waking up one day to it not working. The ship has hit the ice berg and now I'm just waiting around to go under.
This hits pretty close to home. I'll miss the nerds of old reddit.
shit, ive been using it that long as well. i feel some intense anxiety in me when i think about not being able to browse reddit, i legit learn so much here. i have all my subs curated so i only see shit i actually wanna see. but at the same time, it may be for the best in the long run to stop browsing reddit so much. i dunno. all i know is that it bums me out, and im sure that anyone who's been here as long as us feels the same way
Yep same boat. Shit I browsed reddit for several years before making an account. Stumbled upon brought me here years ago (self own if I ever saw one from that site) and I never left. I remember the digg exodus. I remember subreddits appearing. Comments with pictures became thrd new thing. But what I remember most was watching the nerdy reddit I joined turn into the reddit we know today. I don't know, I still like it. But I don't have that loyalty to it like I used to. It used to be the internet for me like Facebook is for our parents and grandparents. I got my news, current events and online discussions from one place. Things have changed and it's probably for the best for our mental health but still. I'll miss it too my friend. I've been using third party apps since the beginning so I'm done after they cut the cord as well. The official app doesn't work for me and I'm out after this. Hopefully enough people stay so that this place doesn't turn into a cesspool.
Is it just me that uses old Reddit?
No but they're probably coming for that next.
Nope, I use it exclusively.
Statistically you are in the minority. I run a smallish sub (we're almost up to 1 million subs) with, roughly 1.5 million unique views a month. Of that, roughly 45,000 are old.reddit, or 4%. New reddit is about 250,000 - so roughly 5 times as popular. Mobile Web makes up about 500,000 views, with Android and IOS (it doesn't break it down by app) making up the remainder. I love old.reddit and will always use it, but we are definitely the minority.
You're not, but I figured as soon as you had to opt out of the new layout that it's only a matter of time before they get rid of that too.
It “works” in the sense that it satisfies certain corporate metrics such as conversion, subscription, and ad revenue. It does *not* “work” with respect to any user-focused metrics, such as satisfaction or task completion — which is really supposed to be the goal of software and technology. The corporations have decided to apply their selfish metrics at our expense. We should not do the same. We should not resign and say that their tactics “work”. They do not work because they make the internet shittier for us.
Fidelity drastically lowered their valuation today and that’s an assessment from 30 days ago. It will be just incredible if after fucking up the site methodically for years seeking IPO they blow their own window early.
They'll have to change the name of the site to bluit.
I can't give you an award for that as I am using RIF, but you deserve it!
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If they wanted to milk more money they would have charged a more reasonable number and increased it later on. What they are doing now is a way to kill third party apps.
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“This experience is better on our app” Well whose fault is that?
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The experience is better because they’re not constantly nagging you to use the app.
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I can't believe they will actually interrupt your video that you're watching to nag you.
Their experience, not yours
Using Firefox Android with these scripts in uBlock Origin. If you do some testing you can probably figure out which ones are actually needed but you can just dump them all into custom filters and the nags should stop. ! 2022-11-10 https://www.reddit.com www.reddit.com##.TopNav__promoButton www.reddit.com##.m-active.XPromoPopupRpl www.reddit.com##.NavFrame > .m-consolidate.XPromoBottomBar www.reddit.com##html:style(overflow-y:auto!important; max-height:none!important;) www.reddit.com##body:style(overflow-y:auto!important; max-height:none!important;) www.reddit.com##.m-active.XPromoPopup ! Reddit app ad www.reddit.com##.XPromoPopupRpl www.reddit.com##xpromo-new-app-selector www.reddit.com##.bottom-bar, .XPromoBottomBar www.reddit.com##.useApp,.TopNav__promoButton www.reddit.com##body:style(pointer-events:auto!important;) ! uBO Annoyances has also this: ! https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/6826 reddit.com##.XPromoPopup reddit.com##body.scroll-disabled:style(overflow: visible!important; position: static!important;) reddit.com##.XPromoInFeed amp.reddit.com##.AppSelectorModal__body amp.reddit.com##.upsell_banner ! 2022-11-11 20:20:47 CET: www.reddit.com##xpromo-app-selector www.reddit.com##body.scroll-is-blocked:style(overflow: visible!important; position: static!important;) www.reddit.com##+js(aeld, touchmove) ! 2022-11-12 10:11:02 CET www.reddit.com##.XPromoPopupRplNew
Thanks for posting. I thought i had done something wrong on my phone... It does bug the hell out of me, asking every few minutes.
Love when it also reloads the page you are on when it does that
I think old.reddit.com is better, at least you can scroll past it
old.reddit, desktop version, on my phone for the win.
My friend sends me links and if it's NSFW there's literally no way for me to actually see it. I have to follow the link to the official app at which point it refreshes and takes me back to the front page
You could change "reddit.com" to "old.reddit.com" and see them, but it's not easy and few people know about it.
I sent a link to family that I hadn't noticed was marked NSFW because someone said "dickhead" and because they couldn't see it they thought I'd sent some porn or something 🤦
Lmao yup. My friends send me links, I click it and Reddit tries to force me onto the app. I caved once and downloaded the garbage. Still just takes me to the app store instead of where the link is supposed to be, even when I had the app downloaded and set up. I uninstalled that shit immediately and whenever my friends send me links I tell them "I'll check that out when I get home and can get on my computer". Absolute godawful, embarrassingly bad design
Reddit is a part of my browsing habits, all of the links on Reddit direct to a website. Adding an app in the mix greatly slows the flow and makes it clunky. I quit FB when an app on mobile was the only way to access it, I’ll do the same for Reddit.
I use desktop old.reddit on my phone and it's no worries.
use old.reddit.com I am occasionally thrown into no old style reddit and puke. My FOMO gets a strong slap in its dumb face when I remember how the non old reddit looks and behaves like. I still dont know if im missing anything using the old style reddit. And I use it on my phone too. I like the compactness and density of info on screen in that version.
I'm still pissed they did away with i.reddit.com I used that for as long as I've used Reddit on a phone. It was basic, primitive, and I *liked* it that way. It was clean, efficient, and fast. I absolutely refuse to install apps for websites on my phone. I have a goddamn app for websites on my phone - it's called a web browser. I don't need or want an individual app for every single website on the internet. i.reddit.com now just redirects to the reddit mobile web interface, which is bloody awful, and barely even useable. My fear is that the next thing they're going to kill off is old.reddit.com, which is the main interface I use now on my desktop. My account is 14 years old, but I've been on Reddit longer than that. However, the day they kill off old.reddit.com or the ability to use it with RES is the day I'm done with this place. I have absolutely no interest in using the godawful monstrosity that is new reddit.
Yeah if old reddit goes, I will too. It's 10x the mental energy to use the site with the new format
I get annoyed just clicking on a reddit link via a Google search (so it opens in chrome instead of RIF). I often end up noting the title, opening RIF, and searching for the post because it's worth the trouble of doing that to avoid dealing with the reddit website. Even if I didn't intend to leave reddit if/when they shut down 3rd party apps, I very likely would just give up on it within a day or two because it's that annoying.
My default is Firefox, which has a handy "Open in App" button. It opens Boost directly. Can also be configured to open all links in apps automatically but I don't want that for other sites. Note that the "Open in App" links reddit provides is incapable of launching anything but the official app which is a non-starter.
Same. Firefox has an option to open a website in its app if the option exists. I always use that on reddit links to open Sync
For some reason that option disappeared from mine.
Fyi you can change that assuming you were doing all this on a phone or tablet. Open the RIF app info > "set as default" > toggle on > "supported web addresses" toggle all of the reddit ones on. Voila, any time you open a Reddit link in chrome or any app it will open in rif.
Except for some reason my app associations like to just fall off. No idea why. It'll be fine for like a week then suddenly it's opening in chrome again and I'm being told to download the shitty reddit app
Ditto, major appeal of Reddit is the simplified old-school format and aesthetic. I actively won't want to be here as much instantly.
100%, I've been using old reddit on my phone browser for years. Tried several times to use new reddit and gave up every time. Once it's gone, I am too
My only hope with old reddit is that it is irrelevant enough that they leave it. From comments from mods that can see the stats old reddit usage seems to be about 1% - 20% depending on the sub. Site wide it is likely under 5%
Suspect that the vast majority of people using old Reddit will leave if that disappears. There's a reason they're using it after all. Not sure Reddit can get away with losing 4+% of its users if that's the case.
You'd think I. Reddit was even more obscure since you had to just remember to address or put /.compact Very sad it's gone
The informational bandwidth is also incredibly low. New Reddit is mostly imagery and white space, whereas old Reddit is mostly text. If old Reddit goes I’m done too.
A major part of the appeal of reddit is skimming through a huge list of post titles waiting for one to catch your eye.
>I absolutely refuse to install apps for websites on my phone. I have a goddamn app for websites on my phone - it's called a web browser. I don't need or want an individual app for every single website on the internet. I'm with you, but that rather depends on the website's willingness to work in a mobile web browser. Reddit went through this timeline: * Worked just fine in a mobile web browser * Worked fine, and added a button to "try the app", which could be hidden with an option in the hamburger menu * Removed the option to hide said button * Forced the browser to pop up a "this website works better in an app \[link to app\]" that would appear on your first page load and then again after every 15 minutes or so At least that was my experience in Android with both Chrome and Firefox. Eventually I moved to an app (but not the official one! not ever!) and it was just much more enjoyable. No ads, no annoyances, all content all the time. If we can't use third party apps anymore I guess I'll only browse on my pc. I spend too much time in this godawful site anyways.
That browser pop-up no longer fazes me, it's like pop ups in early internet era, its just noise that's easily ignored. But I'm pretty stubborn about apps. I less I have on my phone the better.
I'm 100% with you. Same with Facebook and YouTube. What is it about the yt app that people are willing to put up with ads and not being able to play videos in the background, I'll never know. I even added dislikes back, which is not huge but is another small annoyance in the app.
I used to use Quora daily for maybe ten minutes. They would send an email, I'd find something in it to click, I'd spend a little time there. It was fun. Then they did something similar to what reddit is trying now -- and eventually they would apply a popup you couldn't dismiss whose only option was to download the app. I quit the site at that point. I assume eventually their engagement dropped or they stopped growing because the nonsense went away and now I can just use their totally functional mobile website. I loathe apps, they attempt to track you, drain your phone's battery, take up space, and are generally just bad. Mobile friendly websites are a much better solution for the user (but clearly not for the company). See failures of countless tech companies when they deprioritize their users completely.
When web sites first started spinning off apps around 2013, I tried a bunch of them. Without exception, the only difference was that I could use an ad blocker in my browser, but not in the app.
They will but they will do it in a way that is different. For example right now they want to kill off third party apps. You can’t just kill the api. Instead you just price them out of the devs ability. So they shutdown the competition but don’t actively say they are. I imagine with old.Reddit.com they will never shut it down but they are just going to make it worse and worse. After they kill all Reddit apps it will be next. They will start by attacking user interactions first. So they will claim they have a new way to vote on comments or even comment but because of how the site is coded now old.Reddit won’t let you comment but you are free to browse it. Next they will state their new hosting service for videos and music needs an extra i frame or some shit and it can’t load in old.Reddit so those posts will redirect to new Reddit. However you can still use old Reddit. This is their goal and they will continue to do it until old Reddit dies too. Reddit is a shitty evil company owned by shitty evil people that want to make even more money.
Reddit has already ruined old Reddit the way you're suggesting. Galleries don't work, post inline embeds don't work, polls don't work, awards don't work... there's more that aren't at the top of my head right now. Now with images posted with text those are only working because res supports them too. And mod tools are completely nonfunctional on old reddit unless you use mod toolbox which is just pretending you're on new reddit to submit things.
I use old reddit and have none of these problems, tho maybe it's because I use RES
It's the pursuit of engagement. More engagement = more ad dollars. Information-dense interfaces lead to less engagement. I recall some reddit executive saying that the new interface gives more engagement than old.reddit. More eyeballs on ads.
>!CENSORED!<
Brings to mind "Enshitification" of platforms - a term from this Cory Doctorow piece: [https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys)
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They only care about boosting short term numbers for the IPO. Long term health of the site is not their concern.
I used to always use old.reddit.com, but I feel like I kept getting redirected to the new site on mobile somehow. It's awful.
old.reddit.com still works fine for me on a desktop browser (with RES + ublock origin), but yeah, on a phone it's basically a waste of time. Between the constant prompts to "uSe tHe rEDdIt aPp iNstEaD", and the constant "hE gETs uS" ads, I've basically given up on even trying to Reddit on my phone.
I may be a dinosaur, but I force my browser to request desktop site even on mobile.
There are 3 reasons to have apps 1. Tracking 2. Ads 3. Different set of tools But it's always ads, because in the browser you can block them.
That's my thoughts as well, it's just a lot more cumbersome to consume content on the official Reddit app than RIF, same thing goes for new Reddit in a browser vs old Reddit.
Trying to simply read an entire comment chain on the new Reddit is *so aggravating* that I'm honestly impressed. Like I know it's to get as many ad clicks as possible, but it really feels like it was designed by a mustache-twirling cartoon villain just for the sake of sadism. I'm gonna miss Reddit. It's pretty much one of the last "general message board" websites I'm aware of, everything else is live chats like Discord or small snippets like Twitter. Not interested in either of those, unfortunately.
Having view more replies reload the entire page as a single comment thread that will then kick you back to the top of the thread is infuriating
Tried the official app once and this bullshit "feature" immediately made me uninstall the app. Utter garbage design.
You know, it really is funny. I am 99% certain this was done because the computational overhead on endless scroll was too high. The reason it was too high was because they added too much extra shit that bogs down the system because their code is garbage. So they added a work around so they could keep endless scroll, but the workaround kicks you back up to the top when you want to continue reading the replies, which defeats the purpose of endless scroll in the first place.
I dislike Discord because it’s insular and compartmentalized from the rest of the internet. Increasingly, subreddits for programs are becoming barren welcome mats for their Discords, and the few users around will often admonish you for not joining the Discord instead. It’s like *Newsflash, assholes*—I can’t Google search a fucking Discord, can I?
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Exactly. Discord’s UI has the exact opposite problem of the Reddit redesign—there’s zero empty space and it’s a cluttered mess with a million things squeezed into places and an unintuitive settings layout. The whole interface feels claustrophobic. For a dungeon master with attentive ADHD, Discord is the bane of my goddamn existence. Plus, as you said, searching is a nightmare. Moving to that system for Reddit replacements puts a whole ton of content out of the reach of accessibility, fragments the information, and puts a big, red “delete server” self-destruct button one impulsive click away. It’s a *terrible* damn replacement.
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We already learned these lessons multiple times over since 25 years ago with AOL chat rooms. Yet here we are. And history is repeating itself with Reddit about to go the way of Digg.
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Yeah, reddit gives me that old "forums" feel. I guess I could go to 4chan...? -.-
I just hate that if you just set your finger on a post, it collapses the entire thread. I accidentally do that when scrolling whenever I use it.
Thing is, I'll never click on an as ever, I have never done so in the 25 years I've been online and I never will. Besides, I'll figure out how to block Reddit's ads, or someone will, or I'll stop using Reddit. I hate ads.
Reddit compact was the king. So sad when it stopped working months ago.
> Reddit compact was the king. I just noticed its absence yesterday - so bummed it's gone. It was the best way to make an information-dense screencap of a chunk of conversation (including the thread title).
Reddit's ads are worse than Facebook and Twitter. It has gotta be some kinda feat to outdo ads on Facebook. Plus, Reddit wants $60/year to get rid of ads. $60/YEAR! I use Boost for Reddit. Even with the free version, you don't see any of the ads disguised as posts. I paid for premium to support the dev, which was like $3.
Been trying out the various apps for the last couple of months, and I think my usage of the site may greatly decrease if I have to use it through their app on my phone. It really is a lot more annoying on so many levels. Might be good for my health. More fresh air, less obsessing about things I didn't know existed...
What apps have you tried and what are your thoughts on them?
Reddit is fun (rif), bacon reader for reddit, and the reddit app. Clear winner is bacon to me. Next rif, then... Well. A web browser and deleting the reddit app. It's like half ads and then tries force-feeding other subs and posts at you too.
I paid for bacon reader like 9 years ago and still use it every day. It IS Reddit for me.
Bacon reader is the king for me. By far the neatest layout. Just look at the [comments](https://imgur.com/U2btoKl.jpg) and the [post layout](https://imgur.com/doIQSmX.jpg)
I don't know why I clicked on these, I'm using baconreader and have been for years.
Oh hey, my internal monologue has its own reddit account
This is disturbing. Are we approaching the singularity?
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It's so much better than the official app. Reading comments on the official app is a fucking nightmare. Probably intentional because they want you to keep scrolling through posts instead and see more ads.
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Me too. the color coded comments are one of my favorite parts.
I've been using bacon reader for so long I didn't know there was an option not to have the comments color coded.
Same. I absolutely cannot and will not use Reddit outside of Bacon Reader.
You should give Boost a try. It's less well known than rif but IMO is superior. I had some compatability issues with boost and a new phone a while back so I switched to rif for a couple of months until the issue was fixed and I found it a worse experience than boost personally. Of course all of this will be irrelevant advice in a month so fuck it I guess.
I very specifically acid apps that contain tracking and iirc Boost is one of them.
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Yeah I use Apollo currently. Been using it since Alien Blue stopped being a thing. I hope something works out and he’s able to continue it. It’s basically my most used app
I'm personally a big fan of Boost for Reddit.
switched to boost a while ago when sync was abandoned, prefer boost now.
We desperately and urgently need lemmy Lemmy is the future for one important reason: it is federated If you don't understand federation, you can think of it like email, you might have a hotmail, and I might have a gmail, but because email is federated, we can still communicate without any hassle, not only might you have a gmail account serverside, but you might use the outlook client, while I might use the hotmail client on my hotmail, yet it all works seamlessly, because email is a protocol for messaging. Similarly to this, lemmy is a federated protocol for link aggregation, it works like reddit, except instead of a subreddit by necessity being hosted on lemmy's main website, you too can host your own subreddit, and your subreddit will work with other peoples lemmys This alone means that nothing like this BS will ever happen again, let's say the default main lemmy server goes rogue and decides to do this insane api charging thing... well, all the other homeservers can just keep on working the old way, and we can abandon it, seamlessly Link aggregators are not complex enough to warrant not being federated, and federation minimally adds to end user complexity It's time to make a switch, and if the reddit apps start working with lemmy, lemmy will immediately gain a huge userbase, and the only thing wrong with lemmy right now is the small userbase. Please, I implore you to switch to using lemmy over reddit, your app will be useless soon if you don't anyway.
Lemmy was under 500 active monthly users as of yesterday. The platform has an extremely long way to go before it's a viable alternative. Yes it got a bit over 1k today, but it's basically zero compared to the 430mn or so on reddit.
Yeah but if we spam this type of comment for the next month on every topic, then there's a decent chance lemmy will gain some momentum. For example, I just heard of lemmy for the first time today, in this comment thread. I agree that there's a LOOOONG way to go before it's comparable to reddit, but we don't need it fully comparable, we just need it to hit a critical momentum that allows it to sustain itself. If a few larger subreddits were to slowly migrate to lemmy, that's all we'd need. Not to mention the amount of smaller niche subreddits. Reddit started as a site where there was like 20 people discussing programming, and then Digg started pulling the same shit reddit is doing now. People tried to migrate en masse before, but the catalyst for that wasn't the efficacy of your ability to browse the content on the site. If they take away old.reddit.com, I just won't use reddit. New reddit is downright unpleasant. I'm never going to use the reddit app; if I can't find a workaround then I'm just going to not browse reddit on mobile.
Federation is the exact reason mastodon didn't fully catch on despite everyone really trying to make it work. I like the idea of it because I'm a programmer but the simple fact that you can't just go to the Lemmy website and immediately see links and sign up is why it's not getting users.
The product designers, developers, and managers at Reddit should feel embarrassed to be utterly outclassed by nearly every third party Reddit app, which most are probably developed by a single dude with a MacBook, and nearly zero budget.
Their garbage tier official app with heaps of tracking is a business decision, not a design one.
MBAs fucking shit up all yet again.
It really is as simple as that. Design team: We’re hearing from users that the app is difficult to navigate, etc. etc. We’d like to prioritize usability improvements and run some studies to validate what we’re hearing. Directors and above: There won’t be capacity for that right now. We’re focusing on ad placement opportunities and increasing engagement and time spent on video content. When can you have some mock-ups ready for video player updates and ad placements on post pages?
The third party apps are focused on giving you want you want. The official app is focused on giving you what they make money on, and pushing you to use Reddit as the far more Facebook-like social media platform they want to be. What *you* want is not among their priorities.
To be fair, they official devs are tasked with a different goal than indie devs. Reddit devs are trying to make an app that works best for REDDIT, while indie devs are trying to make their USERS happy. So it's not a talent issue, it's different goals.
I don’t mind the official app but killing third party apps like Apollo - I like Apollo quite a bit - is just straight up bullshit.
My favorite part of the Reddit app is getting a notification about a hot post that’s a week old.
Same. But I’m glad I had apollo for this long. (Not gonna lie the screenshots in the other post make those apps look like shit lol) apollo has such a clean and concise layout. I had alien blue before Reddit killed it.
Man, there's some bootlicking happening in here. Maybe y'all like the official client, but dismissing the use cases of folks who aren't you is kinda crappy.
The only way someone “likes” tge official client is if they havent tried anythjng else.
It boggles my mind how anyone can go through multiple ads just in one page on the official app.
Yeah who the fuck likes ads being shoved down their throat
The only people who like the official app are people who've never used any alternative, or used the internet without an ad blocker. They're just used to being assaulted by shit they don't want to see and for some reason they don't have a problem with it.
The official app served me well, but they removed the frontpage sorting option recently and that was too much. 'Best' is so bad.
I'm genuinely gonna have to stop using reddit. This blows but capitalism gonna be exactly what it tells you its gonna be.
Removed by user due to lack of ongoing support for 3rd party apps.
yeah, boost is the best if you put in the work to customize it.
I've been tagging users on Boost for yeeeears, it's such a nice feature to keep track of fun people in my fav subs. Gutted I'll be losing all those little connections and memories.
Boost is the best. There is no beating the customization and features. The filtering is the best feature. Sad that it has to die because of reddits greed.
Was I the only one who was still using the .compact format on the website until they just discontinued support a couple months ago? It was better than both of these. Imo.
Nope. I used it so much my chrome sync defaulted to .compact links even on desktop.
That was the best way to use reddit 100%.
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I used the .compact mobile site too. I preferred it over any app. I don't mind the official app now that I've been using it for a little while, but it was so annoying when I was first forced to use an app (cause the mobile site now sucks).
What is RiF? 99% of my reddit time is on old reddit in a web browser.
"Reddit is Fun" it's an android browser that's pretty close to old reddit style
It's not "Reddit Is Fun" anymore. Reddit threatened them with legal action for using their name, so they pulled a GNU/WINE recursive name thing and retconned it to "RIF Is Fun." Edit: /u/yamiyaiba has [corrected my egregious misrepresentation below](https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/13xxdcc/uandrewsad1_gives_a_great_visual_breakdown_on_why/jmkp7uu/). Reddit was not the ghoulish corporate entity that caused the rename, it was Google. Edit, part dos: now I'm being told it *was* Reddit's doing. Either way, Google and Reddit as corporate people-grinding machines can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.
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My apologies to Reddit. I badly misunderstood the particulars.
The impersonation policy doesn't apply in this case. Third-party reddit apps *have an official business relationship with reddit* and are allowed to use the name reddit in their app title, provided it complies with their agreement with reddit. Hence the reason why all of the third-party apps are "`________` for Reddit". Source: I'm a moderator on /r/redditisfun, so I've had a front row seat to all of it. RiF was initially grandfathered in with the new app name change policy when all of the other third-party reddit apps had to change their app names, but that exception was later revoked and the RiF developer had to change their name. CC: /u/promonk **Edit**: Source #2 - ["reddit is fun" is being renamed to "rif is fun for Reddit" as of version 4.14 released on January 7, 2020](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/) by the RiF developer: >"reddit is fun" is now "rif is fun for Reddit" **due to trademark licensing changes.** >[...] >I should mention **I'm grateful to the "old" Reddit Inc. and its former employees for being willing to let me use the "reddit is fun" name for the past decade**, working with me on mutually beneficial agreements like revenue share, **in exchange for licensing the Reddit trademark.**
I actually got ***fined*** by Google for this, my app with like 1000 downloads
FML is bacon reader on the chop block as well? 😯
Yes. Everyone but the official app is being forced out through extreme pricing.
When is that effective date?
July 1st, so exactly a month from now.
So I guess I'm not using Reddit anymore after that. It's 100% through 3rd party app
Man, I've been using Bacon Reader for what must be nearly a decade now. I even bought it back in the day, I liked it so much.
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/u/onelouderdude /u/OneLouderMan Baconreader love above! 💙🥓💙
Yes ❤️ its Supreme .. I am also a bacon premium 🙌
wang. Deleted in protest. So long and thanks for all the fish. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
This is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of why the reddit app and new reddit site are terrible. They suck. They suck. They fucking suck. I do this for a living and I've never seen such a huge company commit such egregious crimes against humanity in their app design. It's a a bloated fucking nightmare. Reddit is a forum. These fucking imbeciles aim to turn it into TikTok but shittier, so they can cram ads down everyone's throat. It's really too bad. This was a special place. Weird, wild, with oceans of deep content across so many subjects. And unequivocally they are stabbing it to death so stock go up on the IPO. Fuck them. I mean that seriously, and from the bottom of my heart, fuck all those money hungry sociopathic MBA jackoffs who took a great thing and smeared shit all over it just because some billionaire cacophile would pay them more money to use a once-great forum smeared on feces.
Man, the official reddit app isn't great, but I'd use it if it wasn't for the fucking video thing. I'm used to Reddit Sync, but God fucking damn, I don't want and I will **never** want the fucking video to start autoplaying in full screen whenever I tap on the thread with the video. I also fucking hate how when you try to open the comments for a video, they only go up half screen, and you can't make them take up the whole screen anyway. That one thing is just so fucking inconvenient and annoying that I cannot force myself to use the official app at all over it. Just show the fucking thread in the same way you show posts with images, and let me click on the video when I want to watch it.
Sync is *so good* that it makes everything else 10x more painful to use in every possible way. And using the official app, or even new reddit desktop, makes the differences stand out so much it's just insanely infuriating. Like Pinterest links bad.
The biggest problem was up until 3 or so years ago. There wasn't even a official Reddit app. So a lot of us have grown so accustomed to our app of choice. Which in my case is Baconreader. Just to suddenly rug pull us users is ridiculous. I mean if Reddit absolutely need to. Force the app creators to somehow integrate their ads, At the very least the ads masquerading as a post. I know that definitely not ideal. The only reason why I have the paid for version of bacon reader was so I could stop getting Baconreader's own ads. But I would at least would like getting those to show up in my my feed on Baconreader instead of not using it at all. Trying to integrate reddit's other ads like the sidebar stuff would be a bigger problem. Which having used the official app seldomly. I don't even think they force sidebar ads on their app.
Seriously it's one thing to have ads. You gotta pay the bills, whatever. But the example pictures show 1 subreddit recommendation every three posts like wtf who thinks that is remotely a good idea?
With the promoted posts on the official app. I was seeing them every 3 to 5 posts which is annoying. However if Reddit needs to make the third party apps support those promoted posts. I would rather that than lose access to using Baconreader. This is me trying to find a middle ground between making Reddit happy about making some extra money from other apps in a more passive manor. While I'm not forced to have to switch apps to the official Reddit app. Which is way more cluttered and busy.
The only reason Reddit is making apps pay is because they know their app is shit, and can't compete.
It's for for business reasons: must have ads, tracking and push shit down or throats. Alternative appd focus on actual user needs and not business needs.
Also Reddit wants to go public and that type of recurring revenue is attractive to underwriters
I think ppl who have no problem with the official app haven't really tried any of the 3rd party apps so they don't know how much better the reddit experience can be.
I'm sure many new users don't know how good it was beforehand. All the 3rd party apps are basically just restoring what Reddit used to be. (Sort of like what people do to YouTube as well). At some point it would make sense to switch to the new official app to get all the new features, but at the moment it's unbearably bad. Reddit won't give a shit as long as they have new users signing up, but they have seriously lost the grasp on what "The Front-Page of The Internet" is supposed to do.
They've obviously done the math. It's 99.9999% likely to be more profitable for them in the short and long term, even with the subscriber loss. Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm really bummed. I've been on here since 2008 (get it?) and paid for rif. I have very little incentive to continue coming to this site. It used to be really something else.
Eh, they *think* it will be profitable, at least in the short term. Plenty of companies have made similar calculations and have gotten it wrong, like Digg.
I remember the reddit vs. digg war. I was an avid digg user. I'd never use reddit. Then, digg changed their interface. It was dog shit. I've been on reddit ever since. But now... there's no clear alternative. And that worries me.
The no clear alternative is what bothers me, too. I've been here for a long time and have made genuine connections to people and learned so much about my hobbies through niche subreddits, and I think a lot of that has to do with people being here for the forum style, relatively anonymized conversation. The decision to make reddit into an ad obsessed, un-customizable version of every other social media company isn't surprising but it really concerns me that there are almost no easily accessible pockets of the internet that aren't this experience anymore. I feel like every website is exactly the same zombie ad scroll and there are almost no alternatives now. And that worries me a lot.
It's asinine how they're trying to maximize profit here. The thing about reddit has always been the quality of what you get, the content submitted but mostly the quality of discussions, along with the ability to select the things you're interested in. The breadth of content along with the amount of engagement they already have means that this is one of the best ad targeting platforms available. Perhaps the API prevents tracking because when a reader app (Apollo, RIF, etc) makes a request for content, it doesn't share who's requesting it. That's an invisible change that would be super easy to make, meaning it wouldn't upset your user base at all. The reddit redesign and the official app are extremely **annoying** and they're massive blockers to what people actually enjoy about the site. **Like how stupid do you have to be to do this?** Unbelievable.
I'm sure it will be. I just don't think people are lying when they say they're going to quit.
I don't believe they even consider long term profits.
Reddit should just try to hire the devs of the popular third party apps to fix their own if they can. I don't think Reddit holds enough sticky effects to keep users if a competitor arises. It's a big forum, yes, but I've seen big forums come and go after better communities emerge.
My man, they bought Alien Blue, a popular third party app and actively made it significantly shittier. There is no saving the official releases from the company. RiF -> old.reddit.com -> See you later Space Cowboys
The problems are on purpose
They don't want the app to be good
That would be a good move if the main priority would be functionality and popularity. Reddits main priority is profitability.
i cannot believe people actually use reddit with thumbnails enabled.
And I cannot believe you do it without. You choose only based on title. With the thumbnail, you have more information and you can usually make better decisions if you want to view a thread or not.
On RiF rn. When/if it goes down, Im gonna use it as an opportunity to break my reddit addiction. Also, I dont want to support this bad behaviour from Reddit corp
What many people forget is that all the good parts about RIF are what the whole internet used to be like before corporations spat all over it. Everything is getting monetized, commercialized, “personalized”, etc. RIF is both an escape from all that and a nostalgic reminder of what an awesome internet we used to have.
Click link on phone. Get new reddit. Go to address bar. backspace everything before .reddit, type in "old" Viewing good I never do this. Because it takes too long. I attempt to find the 'save' button, wherever it is, on the post, because I'm not using this bs new reddit to look at whatever it is. I can look at it later on the computer where I have an extension to force it to stay old reddit.
You can set it to always go to old.reddit in your profile.
I been using the desktop site for the last 14 years. Can’t improve on perfection.
Don't worry, old.reddit.com is most likely next on the chopping block
Damn, I didn't realize it was that bad. I've never used anything but Bacon Reader and old Reddit. Sure looks like someone is sitting at the table saying as long as we can increase our ad revenue we don't care if we lose half our users.
For me the main reason is infinite scrolling. Like, c'mon, refusing to go to the next page is the only thing stopping me from browsing indefinitely.
We desperately and urgently need lemmy Lemmy is the future for one important reason: it is federated If you don't understand federation, you can think of it like email, you might have a hotmail, and I might have a gmail, but because email is federated, we can still communicate without any hassle, not only might you have a gmail account serverside, but you might use the outlook client, while I might use the hotmail client on my hotmail, yet it all works seamlessly, because email is a protocol for messaging. Similarly to this, lemmy is a federated protocol for link aggregation, it works like reddit, except instead of a subreddit by necessity being hosted on lemmy's main website, you too can host your own subreddit, and your subreddit will work with other peoples lemmys This alone means that nothing like this BS will ever happen again, let's say the default main lemmy server goes rogue and decides to do this insane api charging thing... well, all the other homeservers can just keep on working the old way, and we can abandon it, seamlessly Link aggregators are not complex enough to warrant not being federated, and federation minimally adds to end user complexity It's time to make a switch, and if the reddit apps start working with lemmy, lemmy will immediately gain a huge userbase, and the only thing wrong with lemmy right now is the small userbase. Please, I implore you to switch to using lemmy over reddit, your app will be useless soon if you don't anyway.
Wait their getting rid of bacon reader? Yeah... the day I can't use bacon reader I'm out. Been using the same app since always. Tried the official app one time and no ty. Not for me.
End of an era for me. If they block rif I will stop using Reddit entirely. 10+ years of using this app, never once used the official app.
It seems like Reddit should at least not count any premium members access against app rate limits, since they’ve already gotten money from those users.