>[Reddit says] that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. [Reddit] raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else.
I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it.
Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".
This is the status quo at the moment. The days of strong, robust third-party clients for a service that don't get squashed by said service are on the long tail at the moment. They figured out that they can monetize users, and thus third-party clients eat into that revenue. Thus the idea of "approving" third-party clients exists.
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority
Wow, an amazing example of "missing the point." If the use of 3rd party apps is increasing over time versus the official app, there is something wrong with the official app and the proper thing to do is fix that.
Restricting 3rd party access is just delaying the inevitable.
The problem is that Reddit's incentives are directly opposed to their users.
Advertisers demand a lot of ads, a continuous drive for "engagement", and bland cookie-cutter content. Users want to hang around in their own weird little subreddits - without being bothered with ads or "useful" recommendations.
It is impossible to combine the two, so the official Reddit app can never satisfy the user base.
Companies often advertise open API access to increase usage and growth, and then cut it off once the growth from those open API access is less than the potential monetary gain from closing the ecosystem down (ads from their mobile clients, charging 3rd party clients for API access, etc). It's suck, but I'm actually surprised it took this long for Reddit to finally do it.
Its ads, I use a third party client because it has no ads and no trackers.
They won't do that, they want to collect souch data so they can sell it or use it for ad targeting.
> During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else.
Can you imagine the horror if users were allowed to control what and how a website displays on their own device?!
I’m curious the ratio of ad-block users. It’s got to be higher than the average internet user. Probably even more so for the ones that are logged in.
> Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage.
The word is “user agent”. A web browser is just one such program. You can even name it whatever you want because like all web standards from that era, it’s just a line of text with implicit trust of the sender.
I don't understand why they don't just serve up ads that are indistinguishable from the normal content? I get a lot of ads it seems in facebook even with an adblocker. not that i use facebook much anymore but still... there are ways around it
In a way I’m thankful that Reddit has made using their site so inhospitable to mobile browsers. I’ve simply stopped using it. Though it seems they’ve at least brought back old.reddit.com but i.reddit.com still seems to redirect to the incredibly unusable www.reddit.com on mobile.
Now, in its place, I load up a .epub book in the iOS Books app and set it to continuous scroll mode. This way I’m getting the dopamine hit from the continuous scrolling AND I’m actually reading something worth my time, energy, and effort rather than outrage bait, astroturfing posts, or karma farm threads.
I've been using the space bar more and more in the browser (and less (and c-f/c-v in vi/emacs)), and am beginning to find it annoying when I have to scroll any other way.
I wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit.
It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
> For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer (later clarifying that with NSFW content they're talking about sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons), but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit.
I wonder if this is the real impetus to do this now. It feels like there's increasing pressure coming from somewhere (payment processors? advertisers? politicians?) to push NSFW content to the margins.
Edit: Another commenter mentioned them going public soon. That seems more likely.
>To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
> To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
Can’t, or more likely in my opinion don’t want to.
What users want is pretty simple: a feed of posts from subscribed subreddits that’s sorted by post score and recency. The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer much room to twiddle with UI, algorithms, etc to drive ad impressions, feature adoption, etc.
Apollo basically did that a while back by shoving adds to paid lifetime users about subscriptions. I abandoned use of that app at the time while christian started only allowing "one thread a day" related to his change there and claiming he needs the subcription money to live (while having in the past begged for donations to buy ridiculous things like the apple apple and mount).
I am not a fan of subscription culture in general and I had paid a lifetime fee he agreed upon to avoid such ads but he simply changed the definition of an ad to be a "reddit ad". I also used to toss him tip jar donations occaisonally because the app was good. But he seemed to get greedy after his virtual tamogachi.
RedPlanet does well but honestly I use reddit for less and less every day, despite my account being 16y 11m old.
> While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free.
This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money?
There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
I don't think Reddit is profitable? I can't find any sources indicating it is and several indicating it is not. That isn't to say they can't squeeze a profit out once they IPO, but it's been fairly altruistic up to this point.
Reddit is fairly unique among large internet properties in that even as their "default" design has gotten shittier and shittier (in my opinion), it was possible to go back to older iterations via old.reddit.com or i.reddit.com. I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork.
Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.
When old.reddit.com goes away, so will I. The new UI is such trash that I can't stand looking at it for any extended period of time. That and the RedditIsFun app are the only things keeping me on reddit, UI-wise.
> I wonder how much of a release valve for dissatisfaction these alternate UIs and third party apps represent. With 3rd party apps possibly going away now and i.reddit.com apparently dead (is old.reddit.com next?), I wonder how many angry redditors will come out of the woodwork.
I've seen a couple of subreddits publish their stats on user agents (moderators get access to this), and even on highly technical ones IIRC the old design and third-party apps are miniscule compared to the vast majority being the official app and current website. I'm fairly sure r/homelab was one of them, but Google seems to indicate that isn't the case.
The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years.
Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?
I realise nothing has changed yet but with the news of this a couple weeks ago I deleted the Apollo app. Nothing against it, great app, I just wanted to wean myself off Reddit ahead of the big switch off.
I've actually found my mood to be much happier in general. I'm not saying Reddit is entirely a horrible place full of grouchy people but there is a lot of it. Maybe it's that, maybe it's getting rid of the doomscroll dopamine overload. Whatever it is, it's good times.
I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. Continuing to use "site:reddit.com" in some searches but I reckon I'm done with general use forums for the foreseeable.
Thank you for doing a digg, Reddit! I might not have realised I don't need you without this :D
> I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life.
My belief/hope about Twitter is that it won't be replaced by any single competitor, it will be replaced by a combination of people being a bit less online and spreading out their traffic and attention to multiple sites rather than making any one their home.
If Reddit spends the next 5 years slowly dying because it's too big to die quickly, that's the best we can realistically hope for.
> Reddit will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. (Note: This change should not impact any current moderator bots or extensions.)
This seems to be a common theme. Tumblr, Imgur, Onlyfans (tried and walked it back). I am betting this has to do with their credit card processors. They tend to enforce their values/morals on others. It is unfortunate sites just immediately obey and do not fight it.
I doubt the reason is morality, it's to hamstring 3rd party apps so they are baseline inferior to the official client. It's sabotaging the competition so anyone seeking a 'full' reddit experience is forced to use the official client, regardless of whether it is the best app or not.
It is an interesting time in internet history that we'll be looking back on. Twitter is eroding itself. Reddit closes itself off. Fb lost focus.
It's a ripe time for something new, or somethings new, to emerge, where people can go to discuss 'things'. But I'm not sure if it's going to take the forum like form we're expecting.
Why doesn’t Reddit allow users of the API to log in via OAuth and then pay for Reddit gold to get access? Then the apps can keep letting users call the API directly without a proxy server, and they still get paid.
(Yes, I’d like the API to remain free. But if it doesn’t that seems like the next best option rather than losing any and all open source clients.)
The alternative is for every single user to register as a developer to get their own OAuth2 client-id, or if Reddit switches to some kind of API token (thus collapsing the distinction between an _application_ and the _user authed through it_)
> ...it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser.
I find this to be a particularly cogent point. What is stopping someone from making an app that just displaying the normal site, ad free with extensions such as RES?
Without RedReader I would not use Reddit. It's understandable that they would want to capitalize off third-party app users -- this approach is pretty disappointing though. Been on the site over 15 years but looks like things are coming to an end.
Given how simple Reddit's API is to replicate, I'd love to see somebody build their own federated version of Reddit that the reader apps could consume alongside or in lieu of the main API.
Reddits value isnt in their code or API. Its in their userbase.
Reddit used to be completely opensource. As in you could clone reddit and deploy it for your own use back in the day. But it made no sense to do so other than research since the content, which is all user generated, is whats in the value.
Reddit is a cesspool I find hard to avoid due to its position, but that was my same take on Twitter and losing my client was the thing that got me to break that habit. I'd welcome it for Reddit to do the same and then I'd be free of both.
[+] [-] jjulius|2 years ago|reply
I mean, let's not look internally and figure out what we (read: Reddit) could do to improve our app. Let's just continue to ignore the negative feedback we've been getting regarding the changes we've made for the last few years, and the fact that people use third-party apps because what we provide is garbage. There's nothing we need to fix, it's the users who need to get used to it.
Reddit's attitude towards users can essentially be summed up as, "The beatings will continue until morale improves".
[+] [-] fphhotchips|2 years ago|reply
I don't think they quite understand the ground they're losing to Discord.
[+] [-] LocalH|2 years ago|reply
I miss the heyday of programs like Trillian.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djbusby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icehawk|2 years ago|reply
Wow, an amazing example of "missing the point." If the use of 3rd party apps is increasing over time versus the official app, there is something wrong with the official app and the proper thing to do is fix that.
Restricting 3rd party access is just delaying the inevitable.
[+] [-] crote|2 years ago|reply
Advertisers demand a lot of ads, a continuous drive for "engagement", and bland cookie-cutter content. Users want to hang around in their own weird little subreddits - without being bothered with ads or "useful" recommendations.
It is impossible to combine the two, so the official Reddit app can never satisfy the user base.
[+] [-] neurostimulant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacooper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|2 years ago|reply
Can you imagine the horror if users were allowed to control what and how a website displays on their own device?!
I’m curious the ratio of ad-block users. It’s got to be higher than the average internet user. Probably even more so for the ones that are logged in.
> Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage.
The word is “user agent”. A web browser is just one such program. You can even name it whatever you want because like all web standards from that era, it’s just a line of text with implicit trust of the sender.
[+] [-] weaksauce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lethologica|2 years ago|reply
Now, in its place, I load up a .epub book in the iOS Books app and set it to continuous scroll mode. This way I’m getting the dopamine hit from the continuous scrolling AND I’m actually reading something worth my time, energy, and effort rather than outrage bait, astroturfing posts, or karma farm threads.
[+] [-] local_crmdgeon|2 years ago|reply
I guarantee you Reddit makes most of it's money from astroturfing. It's why they'll never go public, they don't want to open their books.
You can't look at r/Politics, WPT, etc and tell me those posters are human.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|2 years ago|reply
Longer bit in a recent response to a thread about Reddit's increasing enshittification:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35753967>
[+] [-] dbtc|2 years ago|reply
I wish mobile safari's reader mode had a paged option like the books app.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CatWChainsaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrymyers|2 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_fe...
I think the post about RedReader brings up the critical point: Reddit is dependent on its users to create and moderate content for every subreddit.
It would not surprise me moving to only paid access to the API starts a real declining spiral for Reddit. To me this is an implicit admission from the Reddit team that they are incapable of providing a better first party experience than third party clients.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
> For NSFW content, they were not 100% sure of the answer (later clarifying that with NSFW content they're talking about sexually explicit content only, not normal posts marked NSFW for non-sexual reasons), but thought that it would no longer be possible to access via the API, I asked how they balance this with plans for the API to be more equitable with the official app, and there was not really an answer but they did say they would look into it more and follow back up. I would like to follow up more about this, especially around content hosting on other websites that is posted to Reddit.
I wonder if this is the real impetus to do this now. It feels like there's increasing pressure coming from somewhere (payment processors? advertisers? politicians?) to push NSFW content to the margins.
Edit: Another commenter mentioned them going public soon. That seems more likely.
[+] [-] jjulius|2 years ago|reply
They essentially admitted as much in their discussion with RedReader.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|2 years ago|reply
Can’t, or more likely in my opinion don’t want to.
What users want is pretty simple: a feed of posts from subscribed subreddits that’s sorted by post score and recency. The problem with this is that it doesn’t offer much room to twiddle with UI, algorithms, etc to drive ad impressions, feature adoption, etc.
[+] [-] croutonwagon|2 years ago|reply
I am not a fan of subscription culture in general and I had paid a lifetime fee he agreed upon to avoid such ads but he simply changed the definition of an ad to be a "reddit ad". I also used to toss him tip jar donations occaisonally because the app was good. But he seemed to get greedy after his virtual tamogachi.
RedPlanet does well but honestly I use reddit for less and less every day, despite my account being 16y 11m old.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sorenjan|2 years ago|reply
This is an important point. Reddit gets its content and moderation for free by their users (who often steals that content from elsewhere...), yet they consider them to cost them money?
There's another thing I haven't seen many people bring up. Like a lot of Reddit users with an older account, I use old.reddit.com together with RES. RES uses the .json endpoints for a lot of functionality, and those are considered part of Reddit's API according to them. So this is not just about third party mobile apps, the desktop experience might get seriously degraded as well. I hope it does, because the worse it gets the easier it is to quit.
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
The people make content.
The people post content to groups they're on.
The people are the moderators of those groups.
But reddit profits.
Seems like the old federated solution is better. Capitalizing on people socializing and doing stuff just seems wrong, and I'd say IS wrong.
I wonder what it'd take to rebuild Usenet and get easy access for the masses, like Mastodon has done?
[+] [-] SeanAnderson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
Then again, I'm sure reddit has analytics on this and has decided it's worth the backlash.
[+] [-] x3n0ph3n3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sofixa|2 years ago|reply
I've seen a couple of subreddits publish their stats on user agents (moderators get access to this), and even on highly technical ones IIRC the old design and third-party apps are miniscule compared to the vast majority being the official app and current website. I'm fairly sure r/homelab was one of them, but Google seems to indicate that isn't the case.
[+] [-] deminature|2 years ago|reply
Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?
[+] [-] corobo|2 years ago|reply
I've actually found my mood to be much happier in general. I'm not saying Reddit is entirely a horrible place full of grouchy people but there is a lot of it. Maybe it's that, maybe it's getting rid of the doomscroll dopamine overload. Whatever it is, it's good times.
I have no intention of replacing the Reddit in my life. Continuing to use "site:reddit.com" in some searches but I reckon I'm done with general use forums for the foreseeable.
Thank you for doing a digg, Reddit! I might not have realised I don't need you without this :D
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply
My belief/hope about Twitter is that it won't be replaced by any single competitor, it will be replaced by a combination of people being a bit less online and spreading out their traffic and attention to multiple sites rather than making any one their home.
If Reddit spends the next 5 years slowly dying because it's too big to die quickly, that's the best we can realistically hope for.
[+] [-] Reptur|2 years ago|reply
This seems to be a common theme. Tumblr, Imgur, Onlyfans (tried and walked it back). I am betting this has to do with their credit card processors. They tend to enforce their values/morals on others. It is unfortunate sites just immediately obey and do not fight it.
[+] [-] deminature|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politelemon|2 years ago|reply
It's a ripe time for something new, or somethings new, to emerge, where people can go to discuss 'things'. But I'm not sure if it's going to take the forum like form we're expecting.
[+] [-] easton|2 years ago|reply
(Yes, I’d like the API to remain free. But if it doesn’t that seems like the next best option rather than losing any and all open source clients.)
[+] [-] mdaniel|2 years ago|reply
It does: https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader/blob/v1.20/src/ma... but the OAuth client-id is issued to RedReader, meaning that when QuantumBadger's api access gets nuked, there goes RedReader
The alternative is for every single user to register as a developer to get their own OAuth2 client-id, or if Reddit switches to some kind of API token (thus collapsing the distinction between an _application_ and the _user authed through it_)
[+] [-] BeefySwain|2 years ago|reply
I find this to be a particularly cogent point. What is stopping someone from making an app that just displaying the normal site, ad free with extensions such as RES?
[+] [-] skeoh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zb1plus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croutonwagon|2 years ago|reply
Reddit used to be completely opensource. As in you could clone reddit and deploy it for your own use back in the day. But it made no sense to do so other than research since the content, which is all user generated, is whats in the value.
[+] [-] brokenmachine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monksy|2 years ago|reply
It looks like this is going to kill RedditSync.
[+] [-] brokenmachine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehPReth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|2 years ago|reply