I just don’t understand the thought process. They could’ve just shelled out $10M for Apollo and made that the official Reddit app. Then give users the choice of ads or pay for ad free experience.
so basically they’re making a massive gamble that most people will just switch over to their garbage app. Maybe they will, but for sure the power users, big sub moderators & regular posters are all coming to Lemmy. You know, all the people that made Reddit worth visiting.
Personally I think this will be the end of Reddit.
Well, Reddit did shell out money for a third party client. They bought the iOS app Alien Blue in 2014 and turned that into an official app before quickly abandoning it for their client in 2016.
Yeah I used that before Apollo :)
They bought the app , and then destroyed it.
They should have learned for their second try, and just bought the app, then not destroyed it.
If your core offering can be recreated by a bunch of hobbyists in the their spare time, and your value is 100% the content your users create and moderate then perhaps you’re not the great product company you thought you were and you should leave product creation to others.
But hey, perhaps it’s a good idea to take the reasons for using your site away and see what happens.
After all, your friends take their private planes everywhere while you’re forced to fly first class occasionally - and you want that money.
That would never happen though. The icentives of Christian Selig and the incentives of Reddit are very different. People like it because it’s not made by Reddit
That is the crux of the issue, yeah. Reddit needs to make money, which requires enshittifying their app to serve more ads…which drives people away from using their app.
Lemmy’s lack of profit motive is probably the best thing going for it. The decentralization is good too, but I still think it’s secondary to the fact that it doesn’t need to try to make a profit
Some of the communities I was in on Reddit don’t seem to want to move. They’re ones where users don’t go to Reddit, they go to r/whatever, and have usernames matched to the sub.
I doubt Reddit can survive on those sort of users, in those sort of subs, but many of them will stay on Reddit as long as it keeps working
I now only use Reddit for those subs, but rarely since I now only use Reddit thorough it’s old web interface with Reddit Enhancement Suite
Realistically Reddit will survive, but it will be a zombie of its former self, kind of similar to how Digg is these days. Let’s just hope it kills their valuation and /u/spez has to answer for it.
I really hope it survives, only because I want to preserve and archive all of it’s content. Sure, there’s a lot of duplicate data and links to other places, but there’s also a lot of unique things there. If it dies before it can be properly archived we would lose most of it, with only internet archive keeping some. That would be sad.
So you read reddit specifically through the way back at all times, so it’ll archive as you go?
I think that it’s been fairly well archived prior to July 1st. Now that API access is blocked, further backing up becomes harder.
There are some off sites reddit archives, given enough time, there will be a way to find data without visiting reddit.
…digg still exists?
MySpace does too!
Well, I couldn’t use my work computer to browse Reddit.
I just deleted Apollo off my phone, so I guess I’m done with Reddit for the most part.
I haven’t had the heart to delete it yet, but I’m also pretty much done with Reddit.
I checked it out on desktop today. Top 8 hits in 4 of my favorite subs were busted bot reposts. It was a short visit.
I feel that. I just kept hitting it out of habit and it made me sad.
I replaced the reddit app with Connect for Lemmy. Instead of opening it accidentally I get the superior Lemmy experience.
Same, I used a different app on Android but I can’t bring myself to delete it
Woweeee fucking sucks to be Reddit rn lol
Seeing as the vast, vast majority of mobile users are using the official app, it really doesn’t suck that much for them. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is.
Sure hope they don’t do anything to anger a large quantity of regular users rather than improve their native mobile apps and incentivize said users to use their official app rather than just kill the more popular third party ones…
That’s why Captain Spork is taking all these measures to eliminate the largest 3rd party apps. He wants to force everyone into using the s***** Reddit Mobile app so they can suck all that tasty, valuable user data off your phone. Becoming a millionaire off of the free content and unpaid work of other people wasn’t good enough, now he wants your data so he can sell that too.
Surprised it isn’t more.
It’s probably damped by how absolutely dogshit the mobile web and official app versions are.
When I use it on my phone I access with old.reddit.com, as desktop and I’m not sure how those are being counted.
Same here, I am willing to deal with small phone and occasionally misclick. But not willing to deal with the spams from the new format.
But now it’s all in the past, removed all my post and comments yesterday.(keep the account so if post gets restored I can run the delete again.)
not surprising, people have their phones on them much more often than their computers. Personally I browse reddit from my phone 95% of the time, only using desktop for the odd moderating duty.
This is true for most online platforms. I work in Online Education as a SaaS Admin for LMS system hosting and at a conference I went to 4 or 5 years ago the UAE did an in depth presentation on their online academic outreach program. The adoption of education on mobile phones was astounding and the only other platform that mattered metric wise was Window PCs and it was a distant second.
Do you have any links to this research? Sounds super interesting
Not anymore but they gave the presentation years ago so it may be posted somewhere. The data was very fascinating but also exactly what someone in my field already knew. I enjoyed seeing an entire countries data set vs my single institution and was pleased to see that my local trends reflected those of a country not even on my continent. I see they have a covid education trend study up also so I am probably going to read some of that info this month since it isn’t tainted by my local data biases.
Back when I used reddit… weird saying I know, I consumed Reddit on my phone, my ipad, and desktop in various combinations, pretty much constantly. Phone/ipad during work, and additional desktop use after. Desktop using Reddit Enhancement Suite (unusable without really), and Apollo for mobile. Spez made going cold turkey on Reddit stupid easy for this heavy user of over 10 years.
It’s like going to your favorite donut shop every day for a decade, where your on good terms with the employees, but the boss is shit but you hardly ever see him so it’s ok. Then one day, instead of the usual server, Spez shows up, and hands you your favorite donut with a scoop of shit on top, and says that’s how they serve them now. Yeah, I’ll go somewhere else, thanks.
And apparently (was) almost 84% here in Canada!
Not anymore LOL
/agedlikemilk
To be honest, I really doubt they felt the exodus. Most people don’t care what Reddit is doing and /r/videos alone had more users than entire Lemmy network. I wish they felt it. I refuse to open Reddit now. They could have had a different, more user friendly approach, but no… quick and easy way to earn money.
I mean I think I saw a chart before the change and over 50% of people use the official app. So it’s less then I had thought.
Depressing, but I’m also excited for new things here
That’s gonna drop. Right?
Only by a little bit
Goodness, you have 8 duplicates of this comment…
OMG
Probably not by too much, realistically a lot of people are going to switch to the official app
I used to use the official app then started using rif just after the blackout and then moved here it seems alot of other people who used the official app are switching too
I’m not going to switch to the official app. If anything thing, I’ll use Firefox with UBO.
I too am not going to use the official app, however, we’re both on Lemmy.
People using the official app are still on reddit. We’re in a nice little bubble on this issue for sure.
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Worth mentioning that mobile ≠ app. Many people use Reddit in their browsers. Or the official app for that matter. This article doesn’t really give those numbers which I’m sure unfortunately place the third party app users in a smaller minority. Still, I never used a third party app personally and I was still outraged enough at Reddit’s behavior to leave. Hopefully more will follow suit.
That would be a reasonable assumption to make, with one big caveat: reddit originally had no official app, so third-party apps were our only options. If we suppose that people rarely change their habits until they’re forced to (a claim that seems almost self-evident to me), then it would be reasonable to suppose that a lot of users would still be using those same 3rd-party apps they started out with. Especially considering the official app was kind of crappy from its inception.
If third-party app users made up a large percentage of users, it might also partly explain why spez is so hellbent on his crusade.
I was under the impression the initial plan just started with top api usage apps, which I didn’t think would affect my app yet. Still left immediately and now turns out my app was shut down.
Aren’t they also pushing changes to have mobile browsers redirect to the app with no option for staying in the browser?
Actually yes. When i began ussing reddit about some years ago i was a lurker on the mobile browser. Then they started pesterin for me to make an account at very much every turn of the corner. Then they started blocking various fucktionalities like visiting subs and blocking nsfw stuff. So i made an account and the subs where still unaccsesible saying something like “this comunity is abailable in the app” an at random too. So i downloaded the app. Used it a couple of months, then learned rif existed and never looked back. Tl;DR: Yes redit has been realistcally unusable on moblie browser for years now. At least for me. Dont know how others manage to use it like that.
Felt like they were doing that for a while. It’s why I went on Boost. I refused to be pushed onto their mobile app.
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It could stop you from using the browser altogether and point you to the app.
That’s what they’re currently testing out, yes.
What an unnecessarily user-hostile move. No wonder they’re going to implement it.
You can just enable “desktop site” checkbook in your mobile browser, it would send non-mobile user agent to the server. That’s the only way a server can detect a mobile browser.
While that’s an option the desktop site is barely navigable on a desktop let alone on a mobile device
old.reddit.com is still an option, for now at least.
But honestly? I’m going to stick to lemmy as much as I can.
old.reddit.com sucks on a phone though. It’s very difficult to navigate without zooming in and out all the time to click on links.
I really hope it drops a lot, but it probably won’t :/
I honestly don’t care what happens to Reddit. I’ve found something new to occupy my time. If Reddit stays, goes, prospers, flounders, or whatever, couldn’t mean less to me. At the end of the day, it’s just a fancier bulletin board. Which have existed for 25+ years at this point. Look at Lemmy or other instances of the fediverse for example, it was able to quickly and effectively pick up the people flocking, and the experience is largely the exact same thing. It’s a little buggier, but it’s early days at this volume. And it doesn’t come with any of the bullshit, you don’t like your experience for example, you can quickly find another instance and carry on.
Sure, now that I can’t have a good app I don’t care about reddit either, but if the content is on there people will still find value in it
That’s fine though, since the mods and frequent posters are likely to be pissed off, so the website will get much worse. It’s an opportunity for us.
Yeah, that’s for sure, but how large will the impact be?
