Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:
Ads
Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
Obtrusive Ads
Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
Ads masquerading as real submissions
Paid promotions
Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.
Back in 2021 Reddit released an update for the official app that caused scrolling to stutter, instantly heating up my battery and deplete battery life at an absurd rate. This was on Apple’s newest top phone at the time (12 Pro Max.)
I immediately knew something was fucky, so I switched to Apollo that same night. I checked back for about 3 more updates over a few weeks. During that time, Reddit never acknowledged the bug or fixed it. Since then, it looks like they’ve repeatedly caused the same issue with iOS and some android phones.
If they didn’t shit the bed back then, I’d never have discovered Apollo or realized it was better in every way - not just at not physically destroying my new phone.
And now here we are again, discovering new and better alternatives in Lemmy and decentralization thanks to Reddit’s incompetent fuckery. Thanks Reddit!
just reminds me to Nolan Sorrento from ready player one
This is the first of our planned upgrades. Once we can roll back some of Halliday’s ad restrictions, we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures
idk which one is more sad, that reddit is actually doing this or that i had to specify “ready player one” when looking up the exact quote because otherwise it referred me to completely serious marketing articles
Or for really old-school nerds, Max Headroom. There were the Zik Zak “Blipvert” ads that were hyper-accelerated until they literally made people’s heads explode (like in Scanners).
Also the “actual fucking content” is a mindless repost bot, with a bunch of reposted comments trying to build fake internet points so when the accounts switch to being spam advertising bots they last a little longer.
My 18mth deep depression exacerbated by doom-scrolling Reddit 12hrs per day may have been a fucking bot psyop to make me miserable. Lemmy has been a huge boost to my mood. Feel like I’m waking from a coma since coming here.
Me too feel way better than I did on Reddit. The comments and post don’t piss me off and I enjoy posting on here. Also nice not worrying over karma and if my post our comments are getting attention.
It’s a symptom of the platform altogether. It has karma, which isn’t just ‘some number’, it actually changes how quickly your post hits hot and the front page. This is why people sell accounts.
I think Lemmy will have a much more organic feel until the major instances realize they can also manipulate posts for cash. However, I feel it will still lack a huge portion of reposts and repost bots
okay, that i didn’t know. i have come across subreddits with karma requirements and i’m also aware of the logarithmic relation between upvotes and post age (basically for every X amount of time you need 10x the upvotes to stay at the same relevance) but not that account karma actually counted for that one. it can help a lot with comment rate limits though.
it (karma) actually changes how quickly your post hits hot and the front page.
Now I remember I suspected this, before I deleted my account a couple of years ago. I bet that’s contributing to reddit getting worse. It breaks the user response mechanic.
Truly have no idea if this or other similar projects will succeed long-term, but I do think that any alternative puts much needed pressure on social media companies to stop sucking ass.
Here’s to hoping it keeps growing. Gonna need content other than beans though.
Every platform has their “bean” content. I spent enough time on Reddit to have dealt with the constant “the narwhal bacons at midnight” comments we used to deal with.
Oh I agree, it’s more that lemmy doesn’t really have “big engagement” content yet to spread out amongst the beans. Even text-based posts would do wonders. Mid-profile AMAs or a good asklemmy post going viral and hitting some of the content creators on other sites would really help boost this as a true alternative.
For my part I just hope my niche communities migrate over so the twelve of us that play ToME can geek out about the updates.
what really makes me sick is – these fucking people are completely devoid of any taste or pride or care. it looks like absolute fucking garbage and they do not care; they’re wealthy beyond belief WITH OR WITHOUT destroying reddit, but still, they must.
lemmy.world
Oldest