zlacker

Someone in the thread where the OP linked directly to the Reddit post[0] suggested that perhaps Apollo would just create its own Reddit-like website under the name Apollo, republish it on the app store and then all the users would flock to the new social-media app instead of Reddit. The whole thing is really Reddit's fault: instead of offering to buy-out Apollo and make it official, they are relying on their ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use and hoping they can make an extra buck on the few third-party apps that will remain.

I'm not sure what they expect...we've all seen it happen with social-media, it starts out all open and free, and then investors get involved and soon enough people have already moved on to the next open and free alternative. 4chan is the only exception to this rule. But if 4chan somehow got transformed into a for-profit service, then things have already gotten very bad.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36141083#36144800

>>Discou+(OP)
The interface is "shitty" for users, not for Reddit. Reddit just wants ads and the inability for users to filter out stuff they don't want to see, such as ads or moderation, in order to market themselves to the highest bidder that needs to spread propaganda. Having any user control of the content distribution is harmful to this goal, and must be destroyed.

In general, all for-profit social media or similar operations will have the same fate. The term for this is "enshittification". While HN is owned by a company, it isn't being used as a profit generating service, even though it technically has some job ads, so it is (so far) immune from this.

We must find a solution to sustain non-profit user-generated content operations to continue enjoying the benefits of an open online community. Forums went of fashion as they required too much technical expertise to operate and to a lesser extent to use, so they got displaced by reddits and discords, both of these are distinctly worse from a data sovereignty and user freedom perspective. In the age of smartphones, density of information (esp. text) seems to be frowned upon.

I'm not sure what's the solution is. "Making your own platform" doesn't work because people's time is limited, and they inevitably gravitate toward the biggest platforms, taking all the attention and mindshare with them. Is federation the answer? Perhaps, as it seems to bring down the operation costs to a reasonable level, but it seems to pose other problems with content curation, which is a hard problem.

>>Discou+(OP)
I have to think a fairly small slice of users are using 3rd party clients. I know almost nobody uses old.reddit.com anymore.

I don't see any of the moves Reddit is making as unsustainable, they just have a lock on their niche. Sure Apollo could clone Reddit, but why continue to use their app that that point when it would be better to switch to the official app which will see maybe 100x+ more usage?

>>always+d1
i would suggest the solution is git, although maybe something like jujitsu would be an even better base than git

if you need relational modeling have people run it themselves on something like supabase

>>faerie+uh
I still use old.reddit. For my reddit usage it's perfectly fine and if anything finding things in the new UI results in a terrible experience for me.

>>faerie+uh
Reddit power users are overrepresented as users of third party clients and old.

They have an outsized influence as content sharers/creators rather than consumer, so annoying them is worse for reddit than it might appear.

>>LikesP+7j
Source? It’s plausible that most third party client users are power users, but certainly not the other way around.

>>Discou+(OP)
> ultra-shitty interface that nobody wants to use

I don’t want to sound dramatic, but the official Reddit app works just fine and is much more popular than any third party client in terms of usage.

>>Discou+(OP)
Or scrape the HTML directly instead of using an API. I'm pretty sure the clients I mentioned in the post scraped the old forum. APIs and SaaS wasnt a big thing a decade ago.

And I recall in my case there is not a big exodus but people slowly moved over with die-hard fans on both sides.

As a comparison, with 20MM the devs can probably build the new thing, serve media over CDNs and out-SEO reddit with some to spare.

I think moot and hiroyuki did try to monetize 4chan but with mixed success. See the 4chan pass and splitting of the SFW boards into a separate domain.

>>anonre+lr
Different strokes for different folks for sure, but I personally cannot stand the "official" app. It's popular for sure, but mainly because reddit is popular and most people simply opt for the "official" client by default. The one time I tried it I hated all the ads, the inability to follow comment chains properly, the sluggishness -- really, everything. Apollo was a GODSENT back when it was announced. And I'm not even talking about tasks you would do as a moderator. I do hope that they reverse their decision.

>>faerie+uh
I still use old.reddit.com. Anytime I can opt out of "next gen" React interfaces I'm going to do it, so my M1 Pro processor doesn't melt.

>>anonre+lr
It is more popular because it's extremely heavy pushed.

>>KptMar+WE
It's more popular because the amount of absolute horseshit people are willing to wade through to get their fix of social media stuff is insane.

Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling. Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.

>>Discou+(OP)
Why would they buy them out? The main value prop for the client is no ads, reddit wants to serve ads or provide a subscription. So while it was great, reddit provided free infra, that Apollo resold to their users, it's fair to expect it to end. 20M is something like 15-20 dollars per year per user for them, seems fair.

>>gaudat+4s
You can't really just scrap the html of a a single-page app, or with a reasonable delay to make your app usable

>>mrguyo+521
>Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling

That would absolutely increase engagement.

>Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.

That's actually way higher than I thought...

>>KptMar+WE
To the extent that whole subreddits are deliberately broken (no comments load, or the "open in app" bar covers the "next page" button) in the mobile web version, and that's when they're not labelling everything that's not Teletubbies as NSFW and denying mobile access except via the app.