I’m not sure what that says about the quality of the Memmy team or that of Reddit or both.
Where is the Android client???
In case Reddit is wondering, no, we don’t want to help you.
In fact, we want to destroy you now.
Memmy is not in fdroid, right?
The Reddit app has the additional development overhead of trying to cram as much spyware nonsense into the app as possible without anyone noticing. That would take a surprising amount of work tbh.
As someone who did some UX for a touchscreen product in Healthcare, it’s 100% just boring old capitalism making real work impossible.
Any time immediate profit is put above the company “Mission Statement” (which is every time) it becomes impossible for designers to do a good job.
I was working with a broken and 90’s looking UX/UI and made a modernized Material 3 style redesign that never even got full evaluation because it “wasn’t a priority”.
They’d regularly recognize UX problems and ask for the best solution. I’d research, test, and design options, explaining how I got there, and then a non-designer from an unrelated department would say some nonsense and we’d scrap the whole thing.
As a SWE perhaps they were actually prioritizing more important work.
Oh my god, I have rarely been more frustrated reading a comment. Thanks for the insight, this definitely explains a lot lol.
piggybacking off of this: please for the love of god anyone who reads this, if you intent to start a company make it a co-operative instead.
You will still make money, it just won’t go to hell when it grows large enough.
Thank you for bringing this forward. It’s simply too easy (an understatement, really) to impute malice, even incompetence, to the gritty mechanics behind complex systems.
In most cases, every single actor is willing a different outcome, but the system kinda has a life and goals of its own. And so those apparently nonsensical behaviors emerge.
We can call them stupid, but they’re stupid by their own accord…
It’s not surprising as the motivations are quite different. Reddit wants their app to be a shitty Facebook clone while Memmy/Lemmy focus on the user experience.
Let’s also acknowledge that nobody should work for free so if you truly support Memmy/Lemmy, put your money when your mouth is.
Absolutely. This is the time to put your support towards app developers, instance providers, and the Lemmy project itself.
Also memmy devs aren’t bogged down by the 10 layers of corporate bullshit your average dev has to deal with.
Source: am part of corporate bullshit.
Also, Memmy had a great template from Apollo.
The motivation is $$$. Reddit’s board and CEO want to get rich. Lemmy wants to nerd out and create a community.
I’m very much a tight wad and have only ever bought one app, Apollo. I came to iPhone because of a work phone, from RiF on Android, and became dependent on Apollo pretty quickly. Now on Memmy, and every gap or feature I’ve noticed or started to miss, the dev has implemented or addressed so quickly. Kind of insane. The app is free for now, but I went ahead and did the buy a coffee thing on his GitHub, I know he’s got to be drinking a pot a day. The kind of work he is putting in, and the community helping him along the way is special to watch. Hoping for nothing but success.
Different goals. The Reddit app is trying to be good at whatever junk the Reddit owners want to shove in your face and to harvest information from you. That goal doesn’t typically align with a good user experience in the end.
I’ve been extremely impressed with how fast the team moved on this. Not only is Memmy a great app for me, but it helps make the fediverse easy to use for newcomers. Way to go y’all!
I remember when the official Reddit app released. As an avid RIF user then, I thought it was garbage. Now we’re almost 10 years later and guest what? It got worse. It’s quite an achievement, really.
Incentives are real
Maybe it’s easier if all your resources aren’t slowed down by board meetings solely for the purpose of “how can we monetize this”
That’s what happens when you put profit ahead of function. Putting the cart before the horse something something
It’s really depressing that you can’t just build good things that people need / like because it’s not always profitable to do so. Any time money gets into the conversation it becomes a nightmare. Every bit of a project just becomes this battle for the lowest bidder and lowest quality possible to achieve a minimum viable product in a way that leads to technical debt and an unsustainable code base.
Of course you can, as an individual hobby project, or a small team project.
Founders are the most motivated, usually not by money initially. As the thing grows and needs more attention than a single founder can provide, convincing others to be just as invested is going to require some form of motivation and money being the proxy that can get us the most things we need to live our lives, usually ends up the most efficient incentive and motivator.
It’s kind of funny that people are talking about solving the alignment problem for AI when we haven’t even solved it between people and corporations.
This is exactly it.
It’s not about good or bad developers, it’s about priority.
“We want to make a good app experience to attract users”
Vs
“We want to make an app that shows as many ads and pulls as much user info as possible”
Pretty much this. It’s crazy how bloated the app is with a 1000 ways to monetize the shit out of the user (reddit premium, reddit coins, shop, NFT???)
Like holy shit it’s unreal how bad the main app is compared to a clean experience like Apollo and Memmy
AMA Request: the kind of person who would buy a reddit NFT
Question 1: what is your damage?
I bought and flipped like 20 almost. Nice tidy profit!
Damage = ~$2200
Why turn down free money?
I bought a Reddit NFT.
Damage? Just 10$ 😄 Not much.
I still have them in my Reddit vault, but not sure what to do with them now.
What the fuck is a Reddit vault
It’s reddit’s own crypto wallet for their NFT profile pictures of Snu you can buy. It sounds like a joke but sadly it’s real.
Holy shit that app is bloated
I don’t even know what a reddit NFT is, is it like some custom profile picture?
I only ever used old.reddit.com w/ RES and the Apollo app so I never saw NFTs anywhere
Good point!
Memmy > * > Reddit app
Thank you to the team and the community feedback that has really made this beautiful app.
It’s worse than that. Reddit BOUGHT Alien Blue, which was basically Apollo before Apollo, and was easily the inspiration for Apollo’s “Compact” view.
They HAD a product that was basically already almost Apollo and turned it into whatever the fuck it is now.
Which is possibly why Alien Blue’s API key still seems to work, and you can still browse Reddit with it if it’s on your phone.
It takes real talent to fuck up that badly.
