It is too crazy for a company as big as Reddit to make a pretty good app that will make you not want to install 3rd party ones? well, seems like it is…
You’re giving Reddit way too much credit. It’s not that challenging for something as simple as a forum app. The real “challenge” is the very, very large difference between what’s optimal for users, who want content; and what’s optimal for the company, who wants all your data and ad clicks and couldn’t give the tiniest rat’s ass about what the users want.
The official app is built on top of Alien Blue, which used to be considered the ideal user experience. They could have done nothing but OS support updates and it would still be perfectly fine. The entire current unusable clusterfuck is COMPLETELY INTENTIONAL FROM TOP TO BOTTOM.
I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.
Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.
Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.
I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.
I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.
These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.
But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.
Dear lord. Random UX changes are among my least favorite things. I have issues with focus/concentration and eyestrain, and I would genuinely rather have a crappy but consistent UX than random changes.
the hilarious part is the entire Reddit app is built on top of Alien Blue, which used to be the de-facto best Reddit app ever. They bought the entire app out way back in 2014 and built the current slow, buggy, security-hole-infested clusterfuck right over the top of what used to be a good app. During the official app beta, every beta tester complained about every problem they still have- poor battery life, shitty performance, unintuitive and space-inefficient UI, excessive ad placement. Reddit made exactly zero changes as a result of this feedback. Nothing has ever been truely fixed.
They could have done literally nothing but put a tiny bit more advertising in to Alien Blue and made every other 3rd party app basically become irrelevant. But no. They are simply outright incompetent and driven by standard corporate middle managers chasing the next KPI.
During the official app beta, every beta tester complained about every problem they still have- poor battery life, shitty performance, unintuitive and space-inefficient UI, excessive ad placement. Reddit made exactly zero changes as a result of this feedback.
Well, kind of. They were already working on the official app. Buying AlienBlue was simply a way to force a migration. AlienBlue actually had very little impact on the official app’s functionality, because they weren’t interested in AlienBlue’s code at all; The buyout was for the user base, not the app itself.
This most recent API change is simply the next step in the process. They realized they couldn’t buy out every single third party app, so they just cut off access instead.
I just realized I’m taking my ad-free experience in Lemmy for granted. It’s refreshing to have a little corner of the internet that doesn’t slam you with advertising.
The start of ads seems to always lead to a path of enshitification. One of the reasons I really like jellyfin is because they realized this and intentionally disabled recurrent donations. They saw what it does to Plex and saw the eventually the leadership’s will try to sell out and sell the company or IPO.
Jellyfin saw the way every service seemed to go once the revenue picked up and decided they want to prevent that.
For those who don’t know: DNS blockers can be sketchy unless you’re hosting it yourself. Something like a pihole that you set up would be fine, but external DNS services are almost guaranteed to be data-mining you even worse than the ads and trackers they’re blocking.
A lot of subreddits moved to Lemmy.world so in turn I think a lot of the reddit migration ended up here (myself included). Mastodon.world already had a large user base so it probably just made sense to rely on their new lemmy instance to handle the new users. Other instances like lemmy.ml sort of froze new signups at the time so that also funneled more users this way.
It was the first to throw some real money behind it’s server infrastructure. A month ago most Lemmy instances - even the “big” ones ran on $10 a month 2 vCPU VPSs.
There was another influx early in June when the API changes were announced but before the blackouts even happened.
Most instances with public signups started struggling but Lemmy.world launched and Ruud upgraded the server hardware almost daily to keep up.
Other instances even had to pause signups from time to time but world kept working and so gobbled up most signups on those days.
Once it got to be a top 3 instance and then top 2 and then first it became a self sustaining snowball as a lot of people chose the biggest instance by default.
lemmy.world
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