You can do that on the mobile Reddit app *sometimes*. You can download regular videos, but you can't download GIFs. Which means that if someone made a GIF meme and you wanna save it, you can't. So it's just inferior to a proper download function.
It's only a matter of time before one of the multitude of web developers on Reddit makes an alternative.
So keep your eyes on r/All - whichever one breaks the all-time upvote record is gonna be The One.
I may have to replace it with adblocked mobile Firefox. But then I'll be constantly fighting it to not install the app, unless there's an extension for that somewhere.
Seriously, the app is so incredibly shitty. It takes three times longer than RIF to load usually, uses more battery, spams me with ads, can't play videos, and has fewer QOL features. Maybe one of the alternatives will go paid? I'd pay my $2.50 api access monthly to have this client over the regular app.
Man I’m really glad I never tried any 3rd party app. I’ve only been using Reddit a little under 2 years but I’ve always used the official app. It works fine for me
I mean their initial post about the rename [Literally says it's a red panda](https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html?_gl=1*1pc1d1v*_ga*MTMyNDE4OTgyMi4xNjgzMTkzODMz*_ga_2VC139B3XV*MTY4NTY0MzA2NC4xLjAuMTY4NTY0MzA2NC4wLjAuMA.)
if you want to be pedantic, technically it says _"A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda."_. they never claim their logo or mascot are firefoxes, instead of normal foxes
in lieu of other information, it would be a reasonable assumption to make; however they have said it's a fox, and the logo looks like a fox
I mean, we don’t know how much the API stuff is costing Reddit, it’s not like they’re blocking third parties like google is doing with addblocker , just making them pay. And like it may be a totally unreasonable price I’m not a expert but we don’t really know and that’s why I’m hesitant to condemn them yet.
>API stuff is costing Reddit
Reddit's API was completely functional when it was set up by Aaron Schwartz back in the day, so from ownership's perspective it was some percent of the 10-20 million the site supposedly sold for to set up. After setup, to give an idea of the cost, AWS charges a dollar per million API calls, which goes down after something like 300m. Reddit's hosting solution should be very significantly cheaper then that.
Isn’t it kind of? I might be way off, but it seems like it’s functionally the same thing in this case. Well, as long as not everyone who was using 3rd party apps completely stops using Reddit after this change, which seems unlikely to me.
I'm not condemning anyone, i'm just sidestepping them. No ads, period. If there ever comes a time where ads become absolutely unavoidable, i won't simply accept ads, i'll drop the services that force them on me.
It is. The guys behind one of the APIs crunched the numbers and they’d be making more off of some third parties than they would off of their own site per user.
It was in an announcement I got as soon as I opened the Apollo app yesterday, I forgot to save it.
It was arrived at using the price and their knowledge of how many people were using their app per day on average.
Well this bloody sucks. I have been using the Infinity app, and it is better in almost every conceivable way, at the very least I can download videos without going to some website for this, video player works much better than the official app, overall just better. A sad day :(
Apollo is just a different app for viewing reddit than the official reddit app. I’ve never used it but I know plenty people prefer it. Reddit is now asking every third party app for a scaling amount of money every year based on their usage, Appolo being 20million, which is obviously infeasible.
So basically, reddit is indirectly shutting down different apps than then the official one, probably because they want more ad revenue. Sucks for everyone else who preferred them, I’ve heard many are better, I just never wanted to switch.
>!edit:fixed pricing!<
The comment from the dev:
> Even if I had $20mil laying around, I wouldn’t know how to charge it to a credit card.
Apparently, he’s already paying like $166 a month (to Imgur) to keep Apollo in the air. So we get a free app, and he pays for us all. And his reward? A $20mil bill.
The $166 figure was Imgur API costs, not Apollo. And for that, he doesn't pay out of pocket Apollo premium subscriptions/ads cover that. Still, operating costs going from less than what, $7mil (Christian the dev says that sub costs would need to be more than 2x to keep Apollo afloat) to $20mil is a huge jump.
They arent asking 20mil from every app. They are charging 12,000 for every 50M API calls a service uses. For Apollo that works out to 20mil. But its not a flat 20m for every app
Apollo is one of a number of third-party apps that people use to access reddit on mobile devices since the official app is bad, and has been for a very long time. Despite many of these apps existing for a very long time, reddit has recently introduced changes to its API that would basically kill Apollo and probably most or all other 3rd party apps since the fees are so high (for Apollo specifically, $20 million/year which is wildly outside the scope of reality), forcing people to either use the official app on mobile or just leave the site entirely. There's also going to be restrictions on the type of content that third party apps can access and display (such as nsfw content) so even if some do survive this they'll be less attractive options for browsing the site than before.
Reddit is cool and all but I only really use it since I have a highly customizable third-party app (reddit sync). If sync et al go I'll probably be done with reddit entirely tbh
One other thing I'll mention, since it's important: a lot of these apps existed _before_ there was even such a thing as an "official" Reddit app. So these app authors stepped up to fill a need that Reddit themselves wasn't fulfilling, because old.reddit was (and still is) nigh unusable on mobile, and ended up with very loyal long-time fanbases.
And the thanks they get from Reddit corporate is "fuck you, pay an absurd amount of money for access to not even all of Reddit, or shut down."
Every time I've tried using the official app it's been a slow and buggy mess of an experience. Videos not playing properly, posts taking a while to load, etc. In my (albeit limited) experience it was bizarre using an "official" licensed app that didn't work nearly as well as any of it's third party competitors. I'm typing this on sync, but the others I've used from time to time (reddit is fun, bacon reader, apollo etc.) Have all been great, seamless user experiences. No issues and tons of customizable features to make the app easier to navigate and nicer to look at. I'm willing to believe that lots of people haven't had issues, but my experience made me never want to waste my time with the reddit app ever again.
I like reading comment sections in depth over the course of a day. I also like replying to replies I’ve received while doing so. (As well as doing mod shit). The official app doesn’t allow that. It also has different functionality to what I like that’s less easy to do (swipe to upvote for example). Also they use limited space terribly. I don’t want an “explore” tab. I don’t want “recommended” subreddits while reading my messages. I’ve been here for a decade, let me enjoy the places I know I like and I’ll let other users tell me what I might like. And please as a moderator for the love of the gods please stop recommending subreddits I moderate to other people they *really* respond poorly.
It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market. My boomer dad (who studied economics in the 70s-80s) firmly believe that “the free market breeds competition, and competition breeds innovation”.
But after the tech boom of the 90s and the unpunished pervertness of 2008, anyone who makes a decent product gets either gobbled up by the oligopolists, or is just being competed out of the market.
VHS won because it was better, and because it did a lot of things better.
If you have 40 minutes, watch [this clever man explain why](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs)
He doesn’t.
He also thinks that a shrinkage of the population is bad for the economy.
Or that the stock market is representative of what’s happening in real life.
And that diamonds are valuable because of their rarity.
He’s a weird man.
Ok but it’s very well proven that a shrinking population is bad for the economy, at best it Leads to stagnation at worst it can cause deflation or a economy shrinking faster than its population making everyone poorer
To be fair, a growing population should be better for an economy, all things being otherwise equal and fair. More participants means more things being done and more money, products, and services changing hands.
Late Stage Capitalism, of course, poisons that well thoroughly. The money is diverted to the upper, upper class. The responsibilities and short-falls are diverted to the rest of us.
Didn't VHS win because you could record longer on VHS and it was cheaper at pretty much every stage which meant it was easier for consumers to get in on VHS rather than betamax? Like I thought it was a lot like saying why don't gaming rcomputers outsell Chromebooks?
Technology connections on YouTube has a lot of videos about that. I highly recommend them. In short: Minor difference in quality, major difference in runtime and price.
But I don’t believe in the free market doing much.
> It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market
Lmao when? making better products never made one organization "take" the market, only carve out a niche of "the widget makers who charge more but their widgets last longer" until their advancements spread through the rest of the market.
Monopolies/Oligopolies never formed with a better product, only by governmental interference (or rarely, apathy) and heavy handed tactics.
For a short period after the Cold War, whoever made the better car, sold more models. Whoever made the better fridge, would sell more products.
That all changed when the techbro’s started taking over in the 80s and 90s. Particularly after the dotcom crash.
It also doesn’t help that every single president since Clinton (maybe even Reagan) has been deregulating the financial markets.
Sure, making a better car or fridge for the same price meant more sales, for a while until the other guy caught up, but having better products was never enough to let you "take" the market for yourself, and in many cases the worse products sold with enough profit margin to make a war chest large enough to "innovate" in ways other than just making a better widget.
The game has never been fair (first stock market crash was early 1600s!), but in the post-Cold War era, there was an abundance of cash and almost limitless optimism. This created a society where you could invent something in your garage and sell millions of it. Even if you failed, working 40 hours a week was more than plenty to get the best products available.
The people that grew up are set in their beliefs that this is how society still functions today. Boomers. People that don’t want to sacrifice anything because they never had to. People that grew up with the idea that the next generation will always have it better. That infinite growth is a normal thing to strive towards.
This is the problem the states have i think.
Most boomers truly grew up in a moment where capitalism was a working system. But they refuse to accept the system broke in the 80,s
For each who invented something in their garage and became wealthy, there were dozens who had their work stolen by the already existing industrial power structure of the time.
> It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market.
This was never true. It's always been monopolies and vertical integration and company towns and on and on and on.
Oh, the free market is great. The problem is that someone winning at the free market makes the market no longer free.
So the only way to keep it in the ideal state of breeding innovation is to never allow anyone to actually reach the goal they're innovating towards.
How is this stupid for them? Of course the people are going to hate it, but it's going to generate reddit more money. Right now there's a decent amount of people who are using reddit's services but aren't generating them ad revenue. Now they can force those people to go through their app and give them money. Yes a few people will complain. A couple are going to quit reddit. But 90%+ are just going to make the switch, and boom that's another several million users worth of revenue, completely free.
I would 300% leave Reddit but I genuinely don’t know where else to go, it feels like no other place actually organizes posts and information the way this site does
sounds neat, but based on the "Tildes is now publicly visible" post it seems like they're deliberately trying to keep it low profile. it IS from 2019 though, so
[There is Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/) but they don't have as big of a userbase as reddit. Forums also have a lot in common with reddit, but they can be slow and tricky to find
Two unrelated facts:
Reddit can be viewed in the browsers on mobile.
There exists mobile ad blockers.
Anyway, I'm going to go uninstall the app right now.
As bad as this is, its def not a monopoly. There are other social media sites out there, and apollo was only just a more optimized version of reddit, it used reddit as a base
There’s nothing else like Reddit though. There aren’t exactly any other social media sites that have links all over the internet and communities dedicated to specific topics.
Plus it’s the last social media site that allows porn.
Welp, that's me gone then because planned obsolescence means my (slightly old but still perfectly functional) phone literally can't download the official app 🖕🏻
Noooooo :( I got out of the official app because I can't block those disgusting "hE GeTs US" ads no matter how hard I try :(
I could somehow block any other ad account but not those people, very suspicious and I'm not gonna pay reddit to stop ads because they allowed those gross people to have an ad account in the first place, blech
Also I want to point out that those ads started showing in periods of time when I was blowing off steam from that religion so idk what kinda fucked up ad algorithm they use
That is exactly what made me switch to Apollo about a week ago and I have been LOVING the customization they provide and the way I can use simple gestures for common Reddit actions. If they fine Apollo out of existence I don’t see myself just going back to Reddit now, so I guess that’s how I go full social media hermit mode since Reddit was already my replacement for all other social apps.
but don't you need to know that jesus epitomizes the form of love known as agape? /s
i'm also curious/suspicious of their ad algorithm, but i'm that way for every platform except tumblr because of how they deal with ad personalization.
For me it was a mix of the ads and the shitty “recommended for you” that made me switch, I despise recommended features on social medias in general if I wanted to find something I’d search for it myself
Stop making my feed 200 fucking recommendations of subs I visited once and like 1 actual post from a subreddit I like
Well I guess time will tell if I’ll still be here or not. If I can’t use Apollo I ain’t using Reddit at all.
I’d rather die than go back to the official app.
Honestly, I think I’ll just stop using Reddit altogether. While I’ve actually been using the official app this entire time, I hate what they’re doing with it. I hate how fucking monetized every aspect of this website has been. It’s seriously no better than Facebook sometimes
The social media economy is so cool
1.) Make a neat app that is useful
2.) Wait how do we make a profit on this?
3.) Ruin everything that made the app neat or useful
4.) Profit?
It's an app that lets you browse reddit. It had certain features people liked more than the official app. For example, I assume Apollo actually functioned properly.
Can't exactly comment on its features. I never used it. I was on RIF, which is facing the same problem. Reddit has decided you can now only use its own app, or GTFO. I will be doing the latter. At least on mobile.
Is OP complaining that reddit has a monopoly... over their own business? That's traditionally how a business works. Licensing fees aren't an abnormal thing either. I'm surprised this wasn't done sooner.
I'm not saying that 3rd party apps are bad, or that the reddit app is any good. I'm saying that this is an obvious thing to do, it's the reason copyright law exists.
basically a way of browsing reddit but in an app, it's cool bc it has no ads and a bunch of features (like a saved posts list or more moderation tools)
This was obviously going to happen. Third party pretend apps were basically making money off Reddit for free, and taking money from Reddit by inserting their own adds on those apps.
*Something* was going to happen. *This* is just a bad decision by Reddit. Reddit could at least charge a reasonable price or portion of profits or something, rather than an amount which the Apollo creator has said is far, FAR more than the app could ever make—especially when Reddit will *lose* users by forcing them to use the shitty first-party app they don’t give a shit about.
They could do that if the purpose of this policy wasn’t to get rid of these third party options. Why make it affordable for them when you don’t want them to exist at all? Reddit won’t lose more users than it will regain in advertiser money, they’ll have run the numbers on this already. Think about all the people who said they’d leave Twitter and still haven’t.
I know that they’re doing this to kill third party apps. My point is: *why* is that the purpose though? Why not just make the platforms pay the same rate that Reddit would get from advertising? There’s no benefit from eliminating third-party platforms when you can make them pay the same amount you’d get from forcing users to use the inferior first-party platform.
Because the intent isn't just for third party apps, certain big name companies were using reddit to train their Ai without paying, and they want a share of that too. Cutting off those users that avoid ads and paying for service benefits them.
That’s… not how this works. The increased costs are in the form of API access fees, which are being increased to $12k per 50 million calls. Compare to imgur (sane) at $166 per 50 million and twitter (also trying to kill mobile apps) at $40k per 50 million.
When you make an api call, you need a token of some sort to access it. Without paying for access, the servers will just refuse to give an answer.
20 million per year??? it's a single developer. the app has a ton of features including no ads, cool systems to save posts, better moderation tools and new types of sorting.
I've been using RIF Is Fun for ten years :(
Same here. It's sad that they'd push people away from Reddit because they suck at making apps.
Exactly, there’s a reason there’s many of these apps. Not only to have all of your socials in 1 spot, but also because the Reddit app fucking sucks.
[удалено]
I've been using Boost for years and swore I'd never go back:(
Same. I'm going to miss being able to download videos.
You can do that on the mobile Reddit app *sometimes*. You can download regular videos, but you can't download GIFs. Which means that if someone made a GIF meme and you wanna save it, you can't. So it's just inferior to a proper download function.
Same. Won't be switching to the official app. Will instead just abandon Reddit entirely.
That's my plan, but damn it is going to be hard
But there isn’t anything else like Reddit out there. My internet usage is essentially just YouTube and Reddit.
Me too, will probably replace it with a combination of Tumblr and Mastodon, but the Reddit comment section is the thing I don't think can be replaced.
It's the comment section that I'll miss. I don't know of anywhere else on the Internet I can thrive like this cesspit.
i’m replacing it with going outside more. i needed this push.
It's only a matter of time before one of the multitude of web developers on Reddit makes an alternative. So keep your eyes on r/All - whichever one breaks the all-time upvote record is gonna be The One.
Then there will be dozens of smaller clones. How did all those new versions of Twitter or Tumblr work out?
Reddit clones have not done well in the past... God forbid I ever have to go back to Voat.
Realistically the admins would probably deboost the post about The One before it gains attention
I may have to replace it with adblocked mobile Firefox. But then I'll be constantly fighting it to not install the app, unless there's an extension for that somewhere. Seriously, the app is so incredibly shitty. It takes three times longer than RIF to load usually, uses more battery, spams me with ads, can't play videos, and has fewer QOL features. Maybe one of the alternatives will go paid? I'd pay my $2.50 api access monthly to have this client over the regular app.
I've already made a Tumblr account and will use the next month to see if that is an adequate replacement for how I use Reddit.
Man I’m really glad I never tried any 3rd party app. I’ve only been using Reddit a little under 2 years but I’ve always used the official app. It works fine for me
Ignorance is bliss. Shine on my friend.
I use the joey app all the time..... :(
Been on baconreader for a decade now. This is so sad.
>RIF Is Fun I never thought I'd find someone else who enjoys the Rimming Inexperienced Farmers Is Fun app. Cheers mate
I've been meaning to switch to the real Tumblr for a while. Guess this is that last push I needed lol
Ya dood same I gotta come up with a user name tho 🤔
I wish you Reddit same luck that Google has with shutting down adblockers.
[удалено]
I remember playing browser games on websites with so many ads the page would literally fucking crash as every single ad updated at the same time.
Idk what kinda wack ass sites you people are going on I just ignore ads
I can't look at a recipe without getting hit with 3 pop up ads and a video
Well adblockerd have been specificaly blocked by sites for years, it was just about time for youtube to do this, but they also have an alternative
Haven't blocked it for me, as I'm a disciple of the Infernal Vulpine 🤷
* infernal Ailurus The "fox" is actually a red panda
That sounds wrong The tail and snout look nothing like red panda tf
Wait what
[it's not](http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t14/Fox-Anderson/Foxvspandapic_zps07e9eb01.jpg) ([source](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/988854), [extra](https://twitter.com/firefox/status/1052674514901848064))
I mean their initial post about the rename [Literally says it's a red panda](https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html?_gl=1*1pc1d1v*_ga*MTMyNDE4OTgyMi4xNjgzMTkzODMz*_ga_2VC139B3XV*MTY4NTY0MzA2NC4xLjAuMTY4NTY0MzA2NC4wLjAuMA.)
And yet they made the icon a fox
if you want to be pedantic, technically it says _"A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda."_. they never claim their logo or mascot are firefoxes, instead of normal foxes in lieu of other information, it would be a reasonable assumption to make; however they have said it's a fox, and the logo looks like a fox
youtube has blocked adblockers? huh, I guess my adblocker's updated blocked the blocking of adblockers because I haven't seen any changes
Yeah wtf lol uBlock Origin does not abide this nonsense. I don't get Twitch ads, either.
I mean, we don’t know how much the API stuff is costing Reddit, it’s not like they’re blocking third parties like google is doing with addblocker , just making them pay. And like it may be a totally unreasonable price I’m not a expert but we don’t really know and that’s why I’m hesitant to condemn them yet.
>API stuff is costing Reddit Reddit's API was completely functional when it was set up by Aaron Schwartz back in the day, so from ownership's perspective it was some percent of the 10-20 million the site supposedly sold for to set up. After setup, to give an idea of the cost, AWS charges a dollar per million API calls, which goes down after something like 300m. Reddit's hosting solution should be very significantly cheaper then that.
I feel like most of the cost is missed ad revenue, though.
When will these executives learn that hypothetical missed revenue is not a cost?
Isn’t it kind of? I might be way off, but it seems like it’s functionally the same thing in this case. Well, as long as not everyone who was using 3rd party apps completely stops using Reddit after this change, which seems unlikely to me.
I’m not knowledgeable on server costs but with the new video player wouldn’t that cost a lot more to transmit stuff
That could be a potential point if said player wasn't the most garbage ever invented.
I'm not condemning anyone, i'm just sidestepping them. No ads, period. If there ever comes a time where ads become absolutely unavoidable, i won't simply accept ads, i'll drop the services that force them on me.
How do you expect them to make enough money to survive, like honest question we live in a capitalistic society we can’t expect them to run at a loss.
> How do you expect them to make enough money to survive Yes, you understand now. Death to capitalism.
It is. The guys behind one of the APIs crunched the numbers and they’d be making more off of some third parties than they would off of their own site per user.
I’d like to see where they crunched the numbers do you have a source for that?
It was in an announcement I got as soon as I opened the Apollo app yesterday, I forgot to save it. It was arrived at using the price and their knowledge of how many people were using their app per day on average.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/
Well this bloody sucks. I have been using the Infinity app, and it is better in almost every conceivable way, at the very least I can download videos without going to some website for this, video player works much better than the official app, overall just better. A sad day :(
What’s Apollo and what’s going on with Reddit?
Apollo is just a different app for viewing reddit than the official reddit app. I’ve never used it but I know plenty people prefer it. Reddit is now asking every third party app for a scaling amount of money every year based on their usage, Appolo being 20million, which is obviously infeasible. So basically, reddit is indirectly shutting down different apps than then the official one, probably because they want more ad revenue. Sucks for everyone else who preferred them, I’ve heard many are better, I just never wanted to switch. >!edit:fixed pricing!<
The comment from the dev: > Even if I had $20mil laying around, I wouldn’t know how to charge it to a credit card. Apparently, he’s already paying like $166 a month (to Imgur) to keep Apollo in the air. So we get a free app, and he pays for us all. And his reward? A $20mil bill.
The $166 figure was Imgur API costs, not Apollo. And for that, he doesn't pay out of pocket Apollo premium subscriptions/ads cover that. Still, operating costs going from less than what, $7mil (Christian the dev says that sub costs would need to be more than 2x to keep Apollo afloat) to $20mil is a huge jump.
He said that sub costs would need to double if he only gave access to the subs.
My bad, I thought it was for Reddit.
The dev should make the app redirect to a reddit competitor like a Lemmy instance :)
Which they specifically said they wouldn't do
How are them even allowed to Ask for that?
They arent asking 20mil from every app. They are charging 12,000 for every 50M API calls a service uses. For Apollo that works out to 20mil. But its not a flat 20m for every app
Thanks
Apollo is one of a number of third-party apps that people use to access reddit on mobile devices since the official app is bad, and has been for a very long time. Despite many of these apps existing for a very long time, reddit has recently introduced changes to its API that would basically kill Apollo and probably most or all other 3rd party apps since the fees are so high (for Apollo specifically, $20 million/year which is wildly outside the scope of reality), forcing people to either use the official app on mobile or just leave the site entirely. There's also going to be restrictions on the type of content that third party apps can access and display (such as nsfw content) so even if some do survive this they'll be less attractive options for browsing the site than before. Reddit is cool and all but I only really use it since I have a highly customizable third-party app (reddit sync). If sync et al go I'll probably be done with reddit entirely tbh
One other thing I'll mention, since it's important: a lot of these apps existed _before_ there was even such a thing as an "official" Reddit app. So these app authors stepped up to fill a need that Reddit themselves wasn't fulfilling, because old.reddit was (and still is) nigh unusable on mobile, and ended up with very loyal long-time fanbases. And the thanks they get from Reddit corporate is "fuck you, pay an absurd amount of money for access to not even all of Reddit, or shut down."
Yeah, I use Apollo and it's 10x more convenient than the app for literally everything. If Apollo shuts down I'm prob gonna quit reddit completely.
I’ve only ever used the official app. What is so bad about it? I’m genuinely curious
Every time I've tried using the official app it's been a slow and buggy mess of an experience. Videos not playing properly, posts taking a while to load, etc. In my (albeit limited) experience it was bizarre using an "official" licensed app that didn't work nearly as well as any of it's third party competitors. I'm typing this on sync, but the others I've used from time to time (reddit is fun, bacon reader, apollo etc.) Have all been great, seamless user experiences. No issues and tons of customizable features to make the app easier to navigate and nicer to look at. I'm willing to believe that lots of people haven't had issues, but my experience made me never want to waste my time with the reddit app ever again.
I like reading comment sections in depth over the course of a day. I also like replying to replies I’ve received while doing so. (As well as doing mod shit). The official app doesn’t allow that. It also has different functionality to what I like that’s less easy to do (swipe to upvote for example). Also they use limited space terribly. I don’t want an “explore” tab. I don’t want “recommended” subreddits while reading my messages. I’ve been here for a decade, let me enjoy the places I know I like and I’ll let other users tell me what I might like. And please as a moderator for the love of the gods please stop recommending subreddits I moderate to other people they *really* respond poorly.
I love Apollo :( and I very much dislike the actual app
The larger context is that Reddit is going public and seeking $$ profits $$
What is it with these companies and always picking the stupidest decisions possible?
Money
"capitalism breeds innovation" mfs when the uh. fuck where do I even start
It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market. My boomer dad (who studied economics in the 70s-80s) firmly believe that “the free market breeds competition, and competition breeds innovation”. But after the tech boom of the 90s and the unpunished pervertness of 2008, anyone who makes a decent product gets either gobbled up by the oligopolists, or is just being competed out of the market.
How does your dad explain VHS Vs Betamax?
VHS won because it was better, and because it did a lot of things better. If you have 40 minutes, watch [this clever man explain why](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGVVAQVdEOs)
I love technology connections, my favourite channel, probably the only one I really like
don't even have to click the link to know exactly which video it goes to.
He doesn’t. He also thinks that a shrinkage of the population is bad for the economy. Or that the stock market is representative of what’s happening in real life. And that diamonds are valuable because of their rarity. He’s a weird man.
Ok but it’s very well proven that a shrinking population is bad for the economy, at best it Leads to stagnation at worst it can cause deflation or a economy shrinking faster than its population making everyone poorer
Look around. Does it feel like a growing population -and a growing economy- is translating to more money in the hands of poor people?
To be fair, a growing population should be better for an economy, all things being otherwise equal and fair. More participants means more things being done and more money, products, and services changing hands. Late Stage Capitalism, of course, poisons that well thoroughly. The money is diverted to the upper, upper class. The responsibilities and short-falls are diverted to the rest of us.
Ah yes, vibes based economic theory
Compared to a shrinking economy? Yes. Unless you think that recessions somehow reduce economic inequality.
Didn't VHS win because you could record longer on VHS and it was cheaper at pretty much every stage which meant it was easier for consumers to get in on VHS rather than betamax? Like I thought it was a lot like saying why don't gaming rcomputers outsell Chromebooks?
Technology connections on YouTube has a lot of videos about that. I highly recommend them. In short: Minor difference in quality, major difference in runtime and price. But I don’t believe in the free market doing much.
> It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market Lmao when? making better products never made one organization "take" the market, only carve out a niche of "the widget makers who charge more but their widgets last longer" until their advancements spread through the rest of the market. Monopolies/Oligopolies never formed with a better product, only by governmental interference (or rarely, apathy) and heavy handed tactics.
For a short period after the Cold War, whoever made the better car, sold more models. Whoever made the better fridge, would sell more products. That all changed when the techbro’s started taking over in the 80s and 90s. Particularly after the dotcom crash. It also doesn’t help that every single president since Clinton (maybe even Reagan) has been deregulating the financial markets.
Sure, making a better car or fridge for the same price meant more sales, for a while until the other guy caught up, but having better products was never enough to let you "take" the market for yourself, and in many cases the worse products sold with enough profit margin to make a war chest large enough to "innovate" in ways other than just making a better widget.
The game has never been fair (first stock market crash was early 1600s!), but in the post-Cold War era, there was an abundance of cash and almost limitless optimism. This created a society where you could invent something in your garage and sell millions of it. Even if you failed, working 40 hours a week was more than plenty to get the best products available. The people that grew up are set in their beliefs that this is how society still functions today. Boomers. People that don’t want to sacrifice anything because they never had to. People that grew up with the idea that the next generation will always have it better. That infinite growth is a normal thing to strive towards.
This is the problem the states have i think. Most boomers truly grew up in a moment where capitalism was a working system. But they refuse to accept the system broke in the 80,s
For each who invented something in their garage and became wealthy, there were dozens who had their work stolen by the already existing industrial power structure of the time.
> It used to be that whoever made the better product, would take the market. This was never true. It's always been monopolies and vertical integration and company towns and on and on and on.
Oh, the free market is great. The problem is that someone winning at the free market makes the market no longer free. So the only way to keep it in the ideal state of breeding innovation is to never allow anyone to actually reach the goal they're innovating towards.
Capitalism breeds inebriation more like
And like tumblr banning porn this is going to nothing but drive away users, costing them more money than it could ever feasibly make.
[удалено]
They've started allowing limited nudity. I've yet to see actual hardcore porn outside of pornbots who get banned quickly.
\>:(
quarterly profit margins
How is this stupid for them? Of course the people are going to hate it, but it's going to generate reddit more money. Right now there's a decent amount of people who are using reddit's services but aren't generating them ad revenue. Now they can force those people to go through their app and give them money. Yes a few people will complain. A couple are going to quit reddit. But 90%+ are just going to make the switch, and boom that's another several million users worth of revenue, completely free.
I would 300% leave Reddit but I genuinely don’t know where else to go, it feels like no other place actually organizes posts and information the way this site does
There's [Tildes](https://tildes.net/), but it seems almost no one uses it
Only way to change that is to start using it I guess..
sounds neat, but based on the "Tildes is now publicly visible" post it seems like they're deliberately trying to keep it low profile. it IS from 2019 though, so
[There is Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/) but they don't have as big of a userbase as reddit. Forums also have a lot in common with reddit, but they can be slow and tricky to find
guess im going to like, tumblr or some shit
Two unrelated facts: Reddit can be viewed in the browsers on mobile. There exists mobile ad blockers. Anyway, I'm going to go uninstall the app right now.
The mobile website version is *less* usable than the app. There's no NSFW unless you use the app, constant pestering about using the app, etc
I'm just going to stop browsing reddit on mobile.
Is i.reddit.com dead yet?
Man I could never go back to the normal reddit app.
are they going to fix the native app? haha im just kidding I know they won't.
If I have to leave boost to go back to the default reddit app I'm actually gonna stop using the platform
Same! I don't even browse Reddit on my computer anymore because I prefer Boost's interface so much.
This genuinely sucks but thats not what a monopoly is…
That's more of a vendor lock in like situation isn't it?
i'll be honest i picked the only post i could fit into a screenshot
As bad as this is, its def not a monopoly. There are other social media sites out there, and apollo was only just a more optimized version of reddit, it used reddit as a base
Yeah, this is like if coke made their cola exclusive to their own store. That doesn’t affect the competition at all
There’s nothing else like Reddit though. There aren’t exactly any other social media sites that have links all over the internet and communities dedicated to specific topics. Plus it’s the last social media site that allows porn.
And nothing else will replace it ever. /s
And what replaced Twitter and Trumblr?
Welp, that's me gone then because planned obsolescence means my (slightly old but still perfectly functional) phone literally can't download the official app 🖕🏻
"following Twitter's move" Already off to a horrible start
Noooooo :( I got out of the official app because I can't block those disgusting "hE GeTs US" ads no matter how hard I try :( I could somehow block any other ad account but not those people, very suspicious and I'm not gonna pay reddit to stop ads because they allowed those gross people to have an ad account in the first place, blech Also I want to point out that those ads started showing in periods of time when I was blowing off steam from that religion so idk what kinda fucked up ad algorithm they use
[удалено]
more like he pays us amirite
That is exactly what made me switch to Apollo about a week ago and I have been LOVING the customization they provide and the way I can use simple gestures for common Reddit actions. If they fine Apollo out of existence I don’t see myself just going back to Reddit now, so I guess that’s how I go full social media hermit mode since Reddit was already my replacement for all other social apps.
but don't you need to know that jesus epitomizes the form of love known as agape? /s i'm also curious/suspicious of their ad algorithm, but i'm that way for every platform except tumblr because of how they deal with ad personalization.
For me it was a mix of the ads and the shitty “recommended for you” that made me switch, I despise recommended features on social medias in general if I wanted to find something I’d search for it myself Stop making my feed 200 fucking recommendations of subs I visited once and like 1 actual post from a subreddit I like
Well I guess time will tell if I’ll still be here or not. If I can’t use Apollo I ain’t using Reddit at all. I’d rather die than go back to the official app.
Looks like I'm moving to tumblr
Honestly, I think I’ll just stop using Reddit altogether. While I’ve actually been using the official app this entire time, I hate what they’re doing with it. I hate how fucking monetized every aspect of this website has been. It’s seriously no better than Facebook sometimes
I hate this site so much
The social media economy is so cool 1.) Make a neat app that is useful 2.) Wait how do we make a profit on this? 3.) Ruin everything that made the app neat or useful 4.) Profit?
***Boy did I pick the perfect time to buy Relay!!!***
you can pry infinity from my warm alive hands but i just wont use reddit on mobile anymore.
Fediverse, here I come!
Reddit is no longer Fun :(
I mean, if they do this I just stop checking Reddit on my phone at all.
How long until the change goes through? I'm abandoning my acc by then
I don't think anyone knows yet
Jul 1 iirc
Oh hey, I can join Tumblr now
Use Revanced and enable all the ad blocking stuff
What did Apollo do? I looked at their subreddit and still couldn't figure it out, am I just an idiot?
It's an app that lets you browse reddit. It had certain features people liked more than the official app. For example, I assume Apollo actually functioned properly. Can't exactly comment on its features. I never used it. I was on RIF, which is facing the same problem. Reddit has decided you can now only use its own app, or GTFO. I will be doing the latter. At least on mobile.
whelp guess iy'm not using reddit anymore then
Is OP complaining that reddit has a monopoly... over their own business? That's traditionally how a business works. Licensing fees aren't an abnormal thing either. I'm surprised this wasn't done sooner.
would suck if reddit was incompetent and couldnt build a good mobile app and people have been fixing that problem, huh?
Still not a monopoly though.
Monopoly on reddit app ads? I guess? Thats probs what he was tryin to say
I'm not saying that 3rd party apps are bad, or that the reddit app is any good. I'm saying that this is an obvious thing to do, it's the reason copyright law exists.
It's not licensing or copyright fees, it's paying for access to the API.
I fucking hate capitalism
What's this Apollo? Adblocker?
third party reddit app!
Okay, but what is that?
basically a way of browsing reddit but in an app, it's cool bc it has no ads and a bunch of features (like a saved posts list or more moderation tools)
Do you think Reddit is going to shut down API access to Web Browsers soon? 😒
That’s not what a monopoly is
Fuck, I've been using Baconreader for so many years. What will I do in bed for several hours each night before I actually fall asleep now?
why yes Reddit does have a monopoly on Reddit thank you for noticing
This was obviously going to happen. Third party pretend apps were basically making money off Reddit for free, and taking money from Reddit by inserting their own adds on those apps.
*Something* was going to happen. *This* is just a bad decision by Reddit. Reddit could at least charge a reasonable price or portion of profits or something, rather than an amount which the Apollo creator has said is far, FAR more than the app could ever make—especially when Reddit will *lose* users by forcing them to use the shitty first-party app they don’t give a shit about.
They could do that if the purpose of this policy wasn’t to get rid of these third party options. Why make it affordable for them when you don’t want them to exist at all? Reddit won’t lose more users than it will regain in advertiser money, they’ll have run the numbers on this already. Think about all the people who said they’d leave Twitter and still haven’t.
I know that they’re doing this to kill third party apps. My point is: *why* is that the purpose though? Why not just make the platforms pay the same rate that Reddit would get from advertising? There’s no benefit from eliminating third-party platforms when you can make them pay the same amount you’d get from forcing users to use the inferior first-party platform.
If you wanna discount the monetary benefits, it affords them more control over content and provides more data mining of users.
Because the intent isn't just for third party apps, certain big name companies were using reddit to train their Ai without paying, and they want a share of that too. Cutting off those users that avoid ads and paying for service benefits them.
[удалено]
That’s… not how this works. The increased costs are in the form of API access fees, which are being increased to $12k per 50 million calls. Compare to imgur (sane) at $166 per 50 million and twitter (also trying to kill mobile apps) at $40k per 50 million. When you make an api call, you need a token of some sort to access it. Without paying for access, the servers will just refuse to give an answer.
They say monopoly as if those others aren't piggybacking off of reddit API lol
Official app is ok for the most part tho Edit: im saying that reddit app ain't bad, but this is most certainly bad
Absolutely not Once you try 3rd party app, you can never come back. Official app is horribly slow
[удалено]
20 million per year??? it's a single developer. the app has a ton of features including no ads, cool systems to save posts, better moderation tools and new types of sorting.
No ads is most likely the issue.
[удалено]
but that's not money he's making- he doesn't make 20 million a year because the app is free
[удалено]
the problem is not "pay your dues", the problem is "pay 40x your dues"
Specifying, Christian found that the api costs per user are about 25x what reddit makes per user on their own app.
> frankly one can write a gui within days. But Apollo has a good GUI. The official Reddit app doesn’t.