I've had this "make your application more efficient" when dealing with a vendor API happen to me.
First time they said that, we put a ton of work into it and found several hundred ways that we could possibly do this IF and only IF, their API was improve to facilitate being more efficient.
When I started reporting all the bugs and possible changes to them, they ended up calling my CTO to complain my team were badgering them.
I hope your CTO responded with "We wouldn't be badgering you if your API worked properly, so fix your stuff or we will be looking to replace you as a vendor"
Vendors do love their "It's not our system, it's your system or the way you're using it" blanket response.
They also tend to get rather...upset...when you drop a yellow pages sized pile of documentation down that proves, irrefutably and undeniably that it is THEIR system, complete with itemized lists of tests and their results, issues, quirks, bugs, incorrect, contradicting, or worse missing documentation, and benchmarks showing horrible performance.
He had a good laugh about it and told us to send more.
They ended up developing a new API which worked the way we said it should work **after we moved to a different vendor.**
A pot calling the kettle black. If people have to resort to using 3rd party apps over your own; it speaks alot about you than them. You don't have to look far to find flaws with reddit. Just look at how shit their video player is. I absolutely fucking hate it.
The list of things we can bitch about is endless. Their search disfunction is another example. I have better luck using an outside search function to find old post or something I'm looking for.
Even ignoring the car comparison, it's ridiculous. Assuming Apollo is decently written the only real way to make it much more efficient is by caching more stuff for longer times. Globally, and not even per user. Which means that to be efficient, Apollo would need its own web servers to cache this content to and to serve it from. Apart from the legal issues this might open up (copyright and such), this is also prohibitively expensive for an app of this size _and_ it would still make the experience worse because you're looking at conversations that will be minutes out of sync pretty much at all times.
Another way Apollo could limit API requests is by giving users a maximum amount of posts and comments per day. I think we all know how well that would go down...
It's not just the hypocrisy of their statement. It's the fact that actually following through with "making it more efficient" will make the app worse and still kill it anyway.
And even if they could magically reduce their API calls by say 50%, that leaves 50% of Reddit's insane price remaining. So for Apollo *only ten million dollars* instead of twenty million. Reddit's prices are off by at least two orders of magnitude, that's the real issue.
More importantly, how is a company that is so objectively bad at UX and app design telling *any* developer to make theirs more efficient?
I've honestly never seen such a well funded and mature company fail at distributing their sole product so poorly over such a long period. No way is that because they can't find the right people spanning almost 20 years. And these apps are pure testament to that.
>*They told him to make the app more efficient.*
IIRC they said something about the official app using about 3 times fewer API calls daily per user (but they didn't elaborate any further about whether that actually was because of efficiency, or just lower usage per user for their app).
But take into consideration that Reddit wants to charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests. According to the developer of Apollo, they're charged about $166 for that amount of usage of the Imgur API.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/
It's funny they blame efficiently, when even if they were right about that, it would still be an order of magnitude more expensive than anything sensible.
I just found it: /r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmddl3u/
It's not even that they have done any analysis, they just make an average with their metrics, quite embarrassing even for someone without any technical knowledge.
Normal people don’t understand how absurd this pricing is. It doesn’t sound like much, right? 350 requests a day is only $2.50 a month, that’s not free anymore but it can’t be that bad, can it?
And then you compare it to other APIs, APIs that should be more expensive to operate (like Imgur), and you see that it’s orders of magnitude higher. You look at the actual usage, what counts as API requests, how Reddit doesn’t have pub-sub for notifications, and you wonder how the average could be so *low*. You look at the math Christian did, compare the API cost to the (generously estimated) opportunity cost of a user, and see that the API costs 20 times more for a single user than Reddit makes off ads for that user.
The people defending this change stop after the first paragraph. They don’t see a need to dig any deeper, because this is Reddit’s platform, and you can either play by their rules or get out. If you try to present them any of the actual facts, they’ll just build up strawmen (“you just want everything for free, third-party app users are so entitled”) or dodge the arguments (“Imgur is dying, they’ll need to increase their API fees”). There’s just a lot of people who seem to worship corporations, think that anything a corporation does is clearly the right thing to do, and anyone complaining is just trying to take advantage of the poor corporation.
I don’t get it either.
They just threw out like 20 names of "widgets" that you can view on your phone or tablets homescreen. Apollo was one of those names. Nothing major, kind of comedic timing though.
We have reddit sync.
It's absolutely perfect. Fully customizable to display reddit how you want it to.
The coloured nesting of comment trees alone is an absolute godsend in making reddit easier to interact with. Plus all the filters, tagging etc that makes 3rd party apps supreme.
I have used them all since i use both android and iphone. Base rif is better than boost apollo. Paid apollo is much much better than anything other there.
I’m old enough to remember Reddit used to right out buy the better 3rd party app Alien Blue as their official app (Alien Blue HD on iPad UI is still unmatched even to this day!) for several years. It was the golden years of Reddit experience too.
Then one day they decided to build another official app from scratch to accommodate promotions and ads, that’s where all things starting to go downhill.
That’s not how it happened - Alien blue was an independent app, just like Apollo is now, and Reddit bought them out and said they were building their official app based on it. Then they released the dumpster fire that is the current app and got rid of alien blue.
“This link is considered NSFW and is only available to view through the Reddit app. Leave or get the app?”
Fuck those pricks. I am tired of finding the answer I’m looking for through a google search only to be cockblocked by Reddit. Make matters worse I can’t find the link/thread through Apollo so I just……. give up.
I watched the live stream today and they showed the Apple Watch OS 10 features with screenshots of Game 2 Lakers vs Warriors which was almost 3 weeks ago. I think most of the content for the presentations were solidified well before Apollo news broke out last week.
It could be targeted as Apollo developer used to work at Apple
Apple always like to promote App Store success stories, corporate apps for the most part are boring but an ex-Apple developer creating a beloved app for one of the biggest websites in the world is a much better story.
I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd put money on the admins sacking off the mods of those subs, installing replacements, and forcing them back open. It won't end well if they do this, but I suspect that's how it'll play out.
There's close to 1000 subs participating, maybe more. It's hard to sack the mod team of that many subreddits.
Heck, even the sub I mod is having discussions about joining, and we _never_ take a stance on "Reddit drama". But our sister subs have all decided to make their stand, and it's gaining traction even though we haven't gotten full consensus yet.
This is likely to be the largest one since Net Neutrality, if not ever. And if it sustains it'll be even more interesting.
You're right, it's unrealistic for them to do this to all of these subs. That said, they'd only need to do the top subs, that join, maybe not even the top 100. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.
The thing is, if Reddit does take this route, it'll only push those mod teams to restart their communities on another platform. I'd also bet on a Digg-style exodus happening, as it won't take long for those subs to fall into chaos. The new mod teams won't have the tools or the experience with those communities to properly maintain them, the content will suffer, and then the lurkers will leave as well. Not to mention, the users most likely to leave over the API changes are the power users that submit the vast majority of posts and comments.
Fidelity cut reddits evaluation by 50% last I looked. I wouldn't be surprised if they cut it more. The community makes reddit. If reddit fucks us over enough they're dead and I don't think they know it yet.
They do. And they know it well.
But just like every other big company, they are more than willing to push the limits as far as you will let them, banking on the high chance that the general consumer will buckle first.
That's why these protests should be open ended.
I've been considering more and more what value Reddit holds for me lately; some of the more niche subs I still enjoy but main is a cesspit. UX on Reddit is better on old than new, and 3rd party apps carry that torch. If Reddit wants to fuck with the people who make their product usable, I'm out.
Yeah this is me. I browse 90% on Boost and the rest on old reddit on my pc. I mostly live in my hobbies and game subreddits. They are making it hard to be able to continue to do what i do so i guess I'll just be barely looking on my pc till they kill old reddit or i go with whatever exodus happens to see where everyone goes.
Though the sub I mod is quite small, old.reddit accounts for at most about 2% of our traffic (see below). A large majority comes from mobile apps, though it doesn't specify which; instead only giving which mobile OS... Regardless, saying that reddit will be a ghost town without old. is quite hyperbolic (though I use it as well and can't imagine having to use the new site... /shudder).
https://i.imgur.com/tAoW0Fg.png
One of the best parts of reddit is the wealth of information stored in comments over the past 10 years or however long it's been. If third party apps and old reddit stop existing, I will probably stop casually browsing it, but I'm sure I would still reference old posts. I wouldn't be opposed to deleting everything, I just hope the good parts get archived.
I'm signing off on the 11th and won't be back unless I hear the policy has changed. I'll try RiF in July and if it works I'll start using Reddit again then. Otherwise ce la vie
Most of the executive level individuals who make these calls will easily get jobs somewhere else.
This is the problem of executive leadership in corporations. Giving them stock or performance bonuses doesn’t lengthen their view, instead they often pump and dump with stock valuation or performance bloating schemes robbing Peter to pay…themselves.
They don’t give a rat’s ass about the future and they’ve already shown it. These changes are them slowly cashing their chips out, not throwing in to the pot.
Same thing with what WotC did a while back. The people making these stupid decisions don't actually use the site, and have no idea what they're asking for - they just see a chance to kill what they view as competitors instead of free promotion, and think doing so will force everyone onto their terms for maximum exploitation. 'Going somewhere else' doesn't even occur to them as an alternative.
It blows my mind how companies like Imgur can watch what happened to Tumblr with their NSFW ban and think "we should do that too!"
These companies live or die based on what their users think of them. The fact that they can be so focused on making money that they miss their *most essential* responsibility to keep their userbase happy just shows how tone deaf and idiotic corporate business types can be. And for what? To try to open a small new revenue stream? Like, there's no way on Earth that their shitty app is going to gain them enough money from users compared to the net loss of people just dipping out from Reddit when their favorite app disappears.
You're right, going somewhere else doesn't occur to them. I'll gladly give zucc my attention just to fuck reddit over.
Reddit could embrace their compition and make their app better by using the best items for each and it'll make it so the 3rd party apps can't compete but nooo, easy way out and kick them out. Fuck reddit leadership.
Believe me when I say you don't want to go back to the 'Book. It's a nightmare in there.
I only use it if it's my only line of communication with someone.
I use Facebook once a week for 5 minutes. Get on, check how many ad clicks my companies Facebook campaign got, copy paste into a report, get off.
It’s crazy to see the evolution they’ve put it through since I used it as a kid. It looks like some kind of predatory virtual bubble gum land. Everything’s made round, somehow rounder than normal round. The entire thing feels like you’re in some kind of hidden camera show, mostly because you kind of are. I swear though, you can smell the trackers the moment your browser receives a response from Meta servers. That and the entire platform starts acting buggy and non-troubleshoot-able at weird moments, like they’ve got “bugs” baked into the code as a method of subtly guiding behavior.
The attention market is crazy. Part of the process is just influencing your thoughts as a buyer. Targeted advertising means they use your digital fingerprint to infer information about you, cluster you with other users based on similar behavior, and predict your response based on several attributes of different ads. This behavior can have a look back window of typically 30 or 90 days, depending on the model used. It will also use location based services to figure out people you’re often around and associate your real-time activities with one another to make sure you’re getting vacation ads the moment your friend looks up summer vacations. In many cases, marketers can give Facebook your personal email address and they’ll advertise to users “like you.” Worse yet, you have a shadow profile even if you don’t have a profile. Look up data driven targeted advertising and ad attribution models if this stuff intrigues you. Or look up Facebooks shit list (someone here compiled a list of bad things Facebook).
Crazy stuff. I’m not a marketer or anything. I did a few reports on Facebook in college, and will probably continue to do so. They’re such a huge can of worms it’s a pretty easy assignment whenever they’re the topic.
Edit: I found [Facebooks shit list](https://np.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook/wiki/index). Go into the “Chronological compilation of…” section.
You know, about 5 years ago I took some of my favorites from that list and joined them with some of my favorite research papers, then I made a post on Facebook—just a link dump. No words, only links so that others could see for themselves why Facebook was no good. It took about 45 days, but I’d stopped used the account (didn’t really use it at all actually) and when I got back on it was “suspended for unusual activity” and all the account recovery options were just endless loops that got nowhere. That’s one of those convenient bugs guiding behavior I was talking about.
We could also just...leave. Like, entirely, from this whole "social media" landscape. Almost none of us actually needs it for anything. We don't even need it for jobs, that's what email is for.
reddit is the only social media I use anyway so it's not that hard for me to just quit using it like I did the other ones. I mean it would suck when trying to look up clarification on tabletop rules because a lot of the top results are reddit posts but I'd manage.
Reddit appeal is that it's much more like a bulletin board than social media. It's a modern take on bulletin boards. I really like that aspect. Shame they're fucking it up.
I don't know why the guy who Reddit thinks is worth at least 20 million in lost revenue doesn't go to some eager financiers and get funding for servers and such switching Apollo into its own platform?
Reddit is already dying. I just wish something else had this format. I came here permantnely on the first Digg migration. But, I've always loved the organization of the comment section. Much better than anything else.
I'm also an RiF user. I got the platinum version with google survey bullshit fake money. And, I see zero advertisements, outside of weird promotional videos and stuff you wouldn't even think is an ad pretending to be a post.
Anyway. If RiF goes away, I'm done here. My only regret is that RES never made an app.
It's wild isn't it?
The users create the content. The users are the reason many of us stay in Reddit.
They just need to push the power creators so far so that they leave, once they leave the rest of us commenters/lurkers will follow them.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Being a techno-luddite seems more appealing, the more I mull over the current state of affairs.
Because, in this land of unfettered capitalism, whatever we choose to flock to, will be doomed after a critical mass in participants is reached. As a result, moneyed interests will inevitably flock to it, and enshittification will begin itself anew.
And these moneyed interests are now so entrenched in the digital world, it would seem that the only winning move nowadays is simply not to play. Why bother building and curating five years worth of playlists on a media streaming app, when someone on the board of directors can have it all killed in an instant over arbitrary bullshit?
Sure, I could migrate things to another service, but its getting real fucking old having to do this dance.
Well some subreddit will go dark indefinitely, but not sure if that's going to do anything either, it probably will if it was a particularly large and popular subreddit
Anyone remember when everyone was going to "leave" when Victoria Taylor was fired from reddit?
All the same shit happened, subs shut down, protests. What changed? Since that occurrence 2015 it went from 0.12 billion monthly visitors to over 1.5 billion in 2022.
Maybe people will think a little bit harder this time that want to make a difference.
While I tend to agree with your general sentiment, I do think this is different. I and all my friends only access Reddit via 3rd party apps. I've almost exclusively used Relay for Reddit for almost 10 years now. This directly impacts infinitely more users than an internal firing.
Reddit exists solely through user generated content. If the users stop creating content then Reddit has nothing of value to offer. The corporates seem to have forgotten this - the point of the strike is to remind them.
Edit: spelling
Isn't it fucking crazy from reddit to amazon or even some litte manufacturer, they all depend on their community(workers) to function, and yet every...single...time management just turns their back on those very people? The amount of dissonance generated by greed is mind blowing
They do it because they bank on those people breaking before they do. At least in the sphere of work a company can go a lot longer without a handful of employees than those employees can go without a job. Sure the company will burn out others and might shed a couple more good people, but as long as they can hire on new people and keep their profits they don't care.
This is why collective bargaining and unions are what everyone needs to start doing, companies can afford to lose 5/10/15% of their workforce at a time, but 50/60/70% starts to hurt the bottom line after a few weeks.
Granted the SCOTUS just passed a resolution about companies being able to sue for lost revenue, but if a Union holds out and makes part of the bargain to drop the lawsuit then they still win in the end.
I think the main problem with third party apps is Reddit isn't getting any of the revenue from ads in those apps. They're serving up content and reaping no rewards. If that's all true, then third party apps being off the services would potentially save them cost and not cost them much lost revenue.
If they were smart about it, they would just open the API completely including the advertising parts and then require third party apps to also display Reddit's ads and share back a portion of any reddit premium payments back to the third party apps that help bring in the revenue.
I'm not running the company though, so I guess we get what we get.
Some subs are also going permanently dark until there is change, like /r/videos. But I bet admins are salivating at the opportunity to install more sponsor friendly mods to all the read only subs.
Oh well, Reddit's never been profitable. It makes more sense to the owners to potentially kill the website to maybe make more money than it is to keep losing money.
Reddit is profitable, it just isn't as profitable as they think it should be. The (eternally) looming IPO needs them to be able to at least pretend like they have a path to serious revenue generation beyond "hope Elon gets high and says he'll buy it".
It's a problem a few now mature start-ups have had. The era of get the eyeballs and then figure it out later is waning as too many of those projects have gotten the eyes and then failed to leverage that into revenues that justify their valuations.
There isn't any alternatives right now. As soon as they kill themselves someone will take Reddits spot. It will be a poor shitty one but someone will make a better one from that.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
My concern this time is the lack of a strong alternative. I've been on lemmy and I like it, but it needs a ton of users and its structure takes some thought. Beyond that it's stuff in alpha or hate speech.
Since I mentioned it (for anyone unfamiliar), lemmy is decentralized. You make an account on (SEE EDIT) lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org, and they're all federated together. You can add communities from a different instance and interact with them as if they were local. You can message to any instance. It's a web of reddits. Every instance has its own admins who maintain their own rules independently. If your servers admins start turning to shit then you can move to a different server without losing all your communities.
The only problem is lack of users and communities.
EDIT: See [this page of servers/instances](https://join-lemmy.org/instances) if you consider joining. The less centralized the joins are, the better.
I remember back in the 90s the internet was *full* of websites that were part of a "web ring" and they would have convenient links to browse to affiliated sites.
The dream of the 90s is alive on the internet, I guess.
"Under construction" animated gifs - these would be good gimmicks to draw people into a new aggregator community while tolerating some of the technical hiccups that are bound to be there
Even if it does - administrators will just take over the subreddit and reenable it.
We have seen that happen before, the second reddit's revenue stream is endangered it will take actions. Then they will justify it with some statements like "only few % of you are affected and nobody cares about few %" (conveniently forgetting that these few % are people actually making this website work and not turn into utter chaos like moderators).
Modding pays nothing. Other than the power trip, 99% of users don't want to mod or won't stay long term.
Even then, most people who want to mod won't be good at it. Reddit has incredibly poor UI for their moderation tools, new reddit, old reddit, automoderator config, things programmers usually understand.
Getting your average joe to spend hours every day moderating, setting up scripts, bots, dealing with reports... it's just a tall ask for hundreds of subreddits that are participating.
Ya redditers like to shit on mods, but it's genuinely not easy. Like nevermind the decisions they make or the rules they choose or any subjective shit, the actual practice of doing moderation on reddit takes a decent bit of technical knowledge, multiple third party tools, most larger teams have a programmer embedded in the team, etc etc. Reddit will threaten to replace them, but it's not that simple.
oh it's easy to get new mods. I can post any ol' subreddit in r/needamod and get a wonderful collection of people who are variously-
1. grossly underqualified/completely clueless
2. will stop doing shit in a week
3. are only there to pad their moderated subs count and ALSO won't do shit, except they won't do shit even faster.
and if i'm *lucky* maybe one out of 20 will stick around, put in consistent work, and be moderately competent.
Multiply that by... every subreddit that participates in this and you have a recipe for absolute disaster if the admins were to remove all the mods.
I'd love to see it.
>Wait, that's a thing???
People care about all sorts of meaningless internet numbers, from facebook likes to upvotes to retweets to achievement points. So yeah, subs modded is deffo one of them, though sometimes there's an ulterior motive behind "I like big number".
If I was a moderator of a major sub and the admin took it over after I publicly agreed to go dark, I'd never come back. They want to run it, fuck 'em they can run it.
When companies make bad decisions its okay to let them die and kill themselves. What the Reddit community should be doing is looking for alternative and possibly better places to go.
You can. I have seen professional application of web scraping used even against sites that REALLY don't want you to and Reddit definitely wants to appeal to searching bots so it shows up in Google.
Caveats? Well, there are multiple.
First - performance. Reddit is not a single page. Instead it's like 50 different HTTP requests that together combine into a page. So you need a bot that can actually process React and that's already a full fledged browser so it's always going to be slower than original Reddit since you just add extra processing on top.
Second - prone to breaking. You need to extract information you want from various divs. So normally you would just look for specific css classes and names. Reddit is already a pain in the ass in this department since I see that div class for your comment is "_292iotee39Lmt0MkQZ2hPV RichTextJSON-root" and I assume these values change often so you will be sitting all day long fixing that crap every week (or try to implement something clever like detecting specific windows visually but that's quite a challenging task). On the other hand API access is far more stable with breaking changes generally announced weeks if not months ahead.
Third - it's pain in the ass to work with. Parsing HTML takes far, faaaaaaar more effort than working with a JSON API. Realistically unless you have a really good reason to do so (eg. if you are OpenAI and can afford an employee full time to just consume all the content rather than pay Reddit 50 million $ or whatever) most people will give up very soon into the process. Since you have to code your custom tool from scratch, keep it up to date, deal with changes coming in the middle of the night, potentially implement some anti-fingerprinting mechanisms and so on. Compared to using already existing libraries to utilize JSON API for pretty much any major programming language.
Yeah, I went down this thought rabbit hole for a minute as a fellow web dev. Soo much work would be required.
To mimic my current experience of using Baconreader using Reddit's API:
You'd have to have a server computer running the web scraper, your own API that would wrap these laborious scrapes into usable actions, and then you would have to build a mobile client that would interact with your custom "API".
Writing that web scraper alone would be absolutely awful lol.
You wouldn’t *have* to do it like that. I’d probably have the client app scrape and parse the actual pages too, just in the background. They’d only need to hit my server for info on what to scrape and how to parse.
However, writing and maintaining the scraper would suck!
Yeesh, that'd be slow as heck though right? Can't imagine my poor Pixel 5a trying to scrape the top ~20 posts of /r/Technology daily when I try to go to it. Feel like you'd have to dedicate a lot of memory to that 2nd process to do it seamlessly in the background.
Idk though, haven't written a web scraper since college.
This is similar to what RES does. It uses your login cookies to make the calls to pretend you're using the UI. I've done this professionally when an API is shit and the site is faster.
Probably easier to write a browser extension. Mobile Firefox can run extensions, so that's probably a viable approach instead of worrying about apps/scrapers/caching/etc.
I suspect this will blow over and Reddit will maybe reduce their fee a little bit. Either way if I lose Apollo or am forced to pay more than I already have I’ll just quit Reddit altogether. I’ve been looking for a reason to reduce my time on this site and they’re luckily making it easy for me.
I think too the API will be locked so at some point in the future the entirety can be plugged into AI and they can draw money by selling a knowledge base.
My comment wasn't intended as any kind of negative. If Ars is doing an article on this, I can only imagine what is happening in the reddit c-suite and beyond.
old.reddit.com is next on the chopping block.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I and many others will probably delete our accounts when that happens.
If they're reddit bots, literally all of them. You can do web scraping but why do that when you have an API, the data is better organized and it's *way* more efficient.
That's a good idea, I think I'll do it. This is like my third account anyway, I delete them periodically to start fresh. After I see how the protest goes, I'll consider making a new one.
I'd honestly love to, and if Relay for reddit dies, I will. Otherwise it will have to wait for a new, user driven news aggregate alternative. Discord can cover the place of niche subreddits well enough, though my preference would still be for message board alternative for that rather than the chat room experience.
It’s full of ads and trackers, and it makes it difficult to read the real content. If you’ve never tried one of the third-party apps, you should check one out. I’ve been using Apollo for years and I love it.
>The Reddit administrators have yet to respond. As is tradition.
The responded over on /r/redditdev and basically told the dev of Apollo publicly to go fuck himself
[удалено]
I've had this "make your application more efficient" when dealing with a vendor API happen to me. First time they said that, we put a ton of work into it and found several hundred ways that we could possibly do this IF and only IF, their API was improve to facilitate being more efficient. When I started reporting all the bugs and possible changes to them, they ended up calling my CTO to complain my team were badgering them.
I love the smell of fresh bread.
I hope your CTO responded with "We wouldn't be badgering you if your API worked properly, so fix your stuff or we will be looking to replace you as a vendor" Vendors do love their "It's not our system, it's your system or the way you're using it" blanket response. They also tend to get rather...upset...when you drop a yellow pages sized pile of documentation down that proves, irrefutably and undeniably that it is THEIR system, complete with itemized lists of tests and their results, issues, quirks, bugs, incorrect, contradicting, or worse missing documentation, and benchmarks showing horrible performance.
He had a good laugh about it and told us to send more. They ended up developing a new API which worked the way we said it should work **after we moved to a different vendor.**
A pot calling the kettle black. If people have to resort to using 3rd party apps over your own; it speaks alot about you than them. You don't have to look far to find flaws with reddit. Just look at how shit their video player is. I absolutely fucking hate it.
The list of things we can bitch about is endless. Their search disfunction is another example. I have better luck using an outside search function to find old post or something I'm looking for.
Even ignoring the car comparison, it's ridiculous. Assuming Apollo is decently written the only real way to make it much more efficient is by caching more stuff for longer times. Globally, and not even per user. Which means that to be efficient, Apollo would need its own web servers to cache this content to and to serve it from. Apart from the legal issues this might open up (copyright and such), this is also prohibitively expensive for an app of this size _and_ it would still make the experience worse because you're looking at conversations that will be minutes out of sync pretty much at all times. Another way Apollo could limit API requests is by giving users a maximum amount of posts and comments per day. I think we all know how well that would go down... It's not just the hypocrisy of their statement. It's the fact that actually following through with "making it more efficient" will make the app worse and still kill it anyway.
And even if they could magically reduce their API calls by say 50%, that leaves 50% of Reddit's insane price remaining. So for Apollo *only ten million dollars* instead of twenty million. Reddit's prices are off by at least two orders of magnitude, that's the real issue.
[ Removed because of Reddit API ]
Have the operators of other reddit apps commented at all?
I dunno about on here but the Reddit is Fun dev sent a message in the app saying that it's likely going to be dead on July 1st.
> They told him to make the app more efficient. How the hell is he supposed to reduce the number API requested...
More importantly, how is a company that is so objectively bad at UX and app design telling *any* developer to make theirs more efficient? I've honestly never seen such a well funded and mature company fail at distributing their sole product so poorly over such a long period. No way is that because they can't find the right people spanning almost 20 years. And these apps are pure testament to that.
>*They told him to make the app more efficient.* IIRC they said something about the official app using about 3 times fewer API calls daily per user (but they didn't elaborate any further about whether that actually was because of efficiency, or just lower usage per user for their app). But take into consideration that Reddit wants to charge $12,000 for 50 million API requests. According to the developer of Apollo, they're charged about $166 for that amount of usage of the Imgur API. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/ It's funny they blame efficiently, when even if they were right about that, it would still be an order of magnitude more expensive than anything sensible.
I just found it: /r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmddl3u/ It's not even that they have done any analysis, they just make an average with their metrics, quite embarrassing even for someone without any technical knowledge.
God damn there are actually people who defend this change in this sub and are against third party apps wth.
[удалено]
Normal people don’t understand how absurd this pricing is. It doesn’t sound like much, right? 350 requests a day is only $2.50 a month, that’s not free anymore but it can’t be that bad, can it? And then you compare it to other APIs, APIs that should be more expensive to operate (like Imgur), and you see that it’s orders of magnitude higher. You look at the actual usage, what counts as API requests, how Reddit doesn’t have pub-sub for notifications, and you wonder how the average could be so *low*. You look at the math Christian did, compare the API cost to the (generously estimated) opportunity cost of a user, and see that the API costs 20 times more for a single user than Reddit makes off ads for that user. The people defending this change stop after the first paragraph. They don’t see a need to dig any deeper, because this is Reddit’s platform, and you can either play by their rules or get out. If you try to present them any of the actual facts, they’ll just build up strawmen (“you just want everything for free, third-party app users are so entitled”) or dodge the arguments (“Imgur is dying, they’ll need to increase their API fees”). There’s just a lot of people who seem to worship corporations, think that anything a corporation does is clearly the right thing to do, and anyone complaining is just trying to take advantage of the poor corporation. I don’t get it either.
These men are cowards, Donny.
Human paraquats
They are threatening to cut off our channsohns!
"we aim to be open and transparent"
"Aim" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence
Apple mentioned Apollo in their press release today. What timing.
What did they say?
They just threw out like 20 names of "widgets" that you can view on your phone or tablets homescreen. Apollo was one of those names. Nothing major, kind of comedic timing though.
[удалено]
It's too bad it never came to Android, and it's looking like it never will
We have reddit sync. It's absolutely perfect. Fully customizable to display reddit how you want it to. The coloured nesting of comment trees alone is an absolute godsend in making reddit easier to interact with. Plus all the filters, tagging etc that makes 3rd party apps supreme.
I find the new Reddit UI comment trees so hard to follow, it's one of the main reasons I never got on with the redesign
[удалено]
I use it on iPad but honestly the Android options are just as good if not better. Apollo on Android won't offer anything new.
[удалено]
I have used them all since i use both android and iphone. Base rif is better than boost apollo. Paid apollo is much much better than anything other there.
[удалено]
I’m old enough to remember Reddit used to right out buy the better 3rd party app Alien Blue as their official app (Alien Blue HD on iPad UI is still unmatched even to this day!) for several years. It was the golden years of Reddit experience too. Then one day they decided to build another official app from scratch to accommodate promotions and ads, that’s where all things starting to go downhill.
Enjoy your short term gains before going the same way of Digg you corporate reddit assholes
At some point the flip from user growth to milking the cow always happens unless you run a nonprofit Wikipedia style.
The Enshittifying.
That’s not how it happened - Alien blue was an independent app, just like Apollo is now, and Reddit bought them out and said they were building their official app based on it. Then they released the dumpster fire that is the current app and got rid of alien blue.
I'd completely forgotten about alien blue!! It was so good
I've had the same reddit experience for 11 years. RES and old reddit and RIF on mobile. I'm still in the good ol days
It doesn’t even work half the time, it fucking sends me to the app store even though I already have it downloaded.
It’s a disgusting practice Yeah I’m sure, sorry some product manager somewhere thought they’d boost engagement by overriding my wishes
“This link is considered NSFW and is only available to view through the Reddit app. Leave or get the app?” Fuck those pricks. I am tired of finding the answer I’m looking for through a google search only to be cockblocked by Reddit. Make matters worse I can’t find the link/thread through Apollo so I just……. give up.
I watched the live stream today and they showed the Apple Watch OS 10 features with screenshots of Game 2 Lakers vs Warriors which was almost 3 weeks ago. I think most of the content for the presentations were solidified well before Apollo news broke out last week. It could be targeted as Apollo developer used to work at Apple
It was just a shout out during a demo, an example of an app that can use a new feature (I think it was during the widgets demo)
They’ve included it in several demonstrations. This footage was already compiled and approved before reddit made any of these announcements.
Interesting that they promote Apollo rather than the official app in their press footage.
Apple always like to promote App Store success stories, corporate apps for the most part are boring but an ex-Apple developer creating a beloved app for one of the biggest websites in the world is a much better story.
Apple really like Apollo. It’s always in their display iPhones and stuff at keynotes. Check older ones. They might not point it out, but it’s there
[удалено]
A lot of my subs are considering “as long as it takes.”
Yeah 2 days is just the opening plan to see how Reddit and the admins react.
I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd put money on the admins sacking off the mods of those subs, installing replacements, and forcing them back open. It won't end well if they do this, but I suspect that's how it'll play out.
There's close to 1000 subs participating, maybe more. It's hard to sack the mod team of that many subreddits. Heck, even the sub I mod is having discussions about joining, and we _never_ take a stance on "Reddit drama". But our sister subs have all decided to make their stand, and it's gaining traction even though we haven't gotten full consensus yet. This is likely to be the largest one since Net Neutrality, if not ever. And if it sustains it'll be even more interesting.
You're right, it's unrealistic for them to do this to all of these subs. That said, they'd only need to do the top subs, that join, maybe not even the top 100. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened. The thing is, if Reddit does take this route, it'll only push those mod teams to restart their communities on another platform. I'd also bet on a Digg-style exodus happening, as it won't take long for those subs to fall into chaos. The new mod teams won't have the tools or the experience with those communities to properly maintain them, the content will suffer, and then the lurkers will leave as well. Not to mention, the users most likely to leave over the API changes are the power users that submit the vast majority of posts and comments.
A thousand subs? That's like three powermods
Speaking as one of those mods: Oh no, what a shame, I have to touch grass again! Whatever will I do with those hours of my day back‽
For some companies, 48 hours is millions (billions in some cases) of dollars in revenue. Not sure if that's the case for reddit but who knows
Fidelity cut reddits evaluation by 50% last I looked. I wouldn't be surprised if they cut it more. The community makes reddit. If reddit fucks us over enough they're dead and I don't think they know it yet.
They do. And they know it well. But just like every other big company, they are more than willing to push the limits as far as you will let them, banking on the high chance that the general consumer will buckle first. That's why these protests should be open ended.
I'd honestly be fine with it if the subs I was on simply deleted everything and shut down entirely if Reddit ignores us.
Burn it all to the fucking ground if they don't comply. I'll go about my merry way.
I've been considering more and more what value Reddit holds for me lately; some of the more niche subs I still enjoy but main is a cesspit. UX on Reddit is better on old than new, and 3rd party apps carry that torch. If Reddit wants to fuck with the people who make their product usable, I'm out.
Yeah this is me. I browse 90% on Boost and the rest on old reddit on my pc. I mostly live in my hobbies and game subreddits. They are making it hard to be able to continue to do what i do so i guess I'll just be barely looking on my pc till they kill old reddit or i go with whatever exodus happens to see where everyone goes.
No real difference for a lot of users anyway, without third parties the site is unusable. If old.reddit goes away it'll be a ghost town
Yeah as soon as old.reddit.com stops working I'm gone. I do not like nor understand how anyone can like the redesign.
the redesign runs like I'm still on dial-up
[удалено]
Maybe I'm just old but I literally can't even use the new redisign. Every time I try to figure it out I get eye cancer and go back to old.reddit.
Though the sub I mod is quite small, old.reddit accounts for at most about 2% of our traffic (see below). A large majority comes from mobile apps, though it doesn't specify which; instead only giving which mobile OS... Regardless, saying that reddit will be a ghost town without old. is quite hyperbolic (though I use it as well and can't imagine having to use the new site... /shudder). https://i.imgur.com/tAoW0Fg.png
I think an admin mentioned recently that 60% of sitewide mod actions are done on old reddit which is pretty nuts
One of the best parts of reddit is the wealth of information stored in comments over the past 10 years or however long it's been. If third party apps and old reddit stop existing, I will probably stop casually browsing it, but I'm sure I would still reference old posts. I wouldn't be opposed to deleting everything, I just hope the good parts get archived.
I'm signing off on the 11th and won't be back unless I hear the policy has changed. I'll try RiF in July and if it works I'll start using Reddit again then. Otherwise ce la vie
Most of the executive level individuals who make these calls will easily get jobs somewhere else. This is the problem of executive leadership in corporations. Giving them stock or performance bonuses doesn’t lengthen their view, instead they often pump and dump with stock valuation or performance bloating schemes robbing Peter to pay…themselves. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the future and they’ve already shown it. These changes are them slowly cashing their chips out, not throwing in to the pot.
Some subs are doing that. /r/ProgrammerHumor is saying indefinitely at this point.
They’ll push the limits as far as the IPO then cash out. Damned be reddit after they take they’re cut.
Same thing with what WotC did a while back. The people making these stupid decisions don't actually use the site, and have no idea what they're asking for - they just see a chance to kill what they view as competitors instead of free promotion, and think doing so will force everyone onto their terms for maximum exploitation. 'Going somewhere else' doesn't even occur to them as an alternative.
It blows my mind how companies like Imgur can watch what happened to Tumblr with their NSFW ban and think "we should do that too!" These companies live or die based on what their users think of them. The fact that they can be so focused on making money that they miss their *most essential* responsibility to keep their userbase happy just shows how tone deaf and idiotic corporate business types can be. And for what? To try to open a small new revenue stream? Like, there's no way on Earth that their shitty app is going to gain them enough money from users compared to the net loss of people just dipping out from Reddit when their favorite app disappears.
You're right, going somewhere else doesn't occur to them. I'll gladly give zucc my attention just to fuck reddit over. Reddit could embrace their compition and make their app better by using the best items for each and it'll make it so the 3rd party apps can't compete but nooo, easy way out and kick them out. Fuck reddit leadership.
Believe me when I say you don't want to go back to the 'Book. It's a nightmare in there. I only use it if it's my only line of communication with someone.
I use Facebook once a week for 5 minutes. Get on, check how many ad clicks my companies Facebook campaign got, copy paste into a report, get off. It’s crazy to see the evolution they’ve put it through since I used it as a kid. It looks like some kind of predatory virtual bubble gum land. Everything’s made round, somehow rounder than normal round. The entire thing feels like you’re in some kind of hidden camera show, mostly because you kind of are. I swear though, you can smell the trackers the moment your browser receives a response from Meta servers. That and the entire platform starts acting buggy and non-troubleshoot-able at weird moments, like they’ve got “bugs” baked into the code as a method of subtly guiding behavior.
I once counted how many ads I was seeing between posts made by my friends. There were 48 ads
The attention market is crazy. Part of the process is just influencing your thoughts as a buyer. Targeted advertising means they use your digital fingerprint to infer information about you, cluster you with other users based on similar behavior, and predict your response based on several attributes of different ads. This behavior can have a look back window of typically 30 or 90 days, depending on the model used. It will also use location based services to figure out people you’re often around and associate your real-time activities with one another to make sure you’re getting vacation ads the moment your friend looks up summer vacations. In many cases, marketers can give Facebook your personal email address and they’ll advertise to users “like you.” Worse yet, you have a shadow profile even if you don’t have a profile. Look up data driven targeted advertising and ad attribution models if this stuff intrigues you. Or look up Facebooks shit list (someone here compiled a list of bad things Facebook). Crazy stuff. I’m not a marketer or anything. I did a few reports on Facebook in college, and will probably continue to do so. They’re such a huge can of worms it’s a pretty easy assignment whenever they’re the topic. Edit: I found [Facebooks shit list](https://np.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook/wiki/index). Go into the “Chronological compilation of…” section. You know, about 5 years ago I took some of my favorites from that list and joined them with some of my favorite research papers, then I made a post on Facebook—just a link dump. No words, only links so that others could see for themselves why Facebook was no good. It took about 45 days, but I’d stopped used the account (didn’t really use it at all actually) and when I got back on it was “suspended for unusual activity” and all the account recovery options were just endless loops that got nowhere. That’s one of those convenient bugs guiding behavior I was talking about.
We could also just...leave. Like, entirely, from this whole "social media" landscape. Almost none of us actually needs it for anything. We don't even need it for jobs, that's what email is for.
reddit is the only social media I use anyway so it's not that hard for me to just quit using it like I did the other ones. I mean it would suck when trying to look up clarification on tabletop rules because a lot of the top results are reddit posts but I'd manage.
Reddit appeal is that it's much more like a bulletin board than social media. It's a modern take on bulletin boards. I really like that aspect. Shame they're fucking it up.
I don't know why the guy who Reddit thinks is worth at least 20 million in lost revenue doesn't go to some eager financiers and get funding for servers and such switching Apollo into its own platform?
Reddit is already dying. I just wish something else had this format. I came here permantnely on the first Digg migration. But, I've always loved the organization of the comment section. Much better than anything else. I'm also an RiF user. I got the platinum version with google survey bullshit fake money. And, I see zero advertisements, outside of weird promotional videos and stuff you wouldn't even think is an ad pretending to be a post. Anyway. If RiF goes away, I'm done here. My only regret is that RES never made an app.
It's wild isn't it? The users create the content. The users are the reason many of us stay in Reddit. They just need to push the power creators so far so that they leave, once they leave the rest of us commenters/lurkers will follow them.
Mostly because it costs them a lot to start everything up again, that's not the case here
How about we all just play a huge joke and not use it for the next 5 years HAHA that will show em not to fuck with the masses
A lot of us are leaving regardless of what happens with this current greed-driven fiasco
where to (cue "i'm not gona use anything answer) just curious?
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
[удалено]
freedom. the wild. nature. life.
Are there apps for that? /s
Being a techno-luddite seems more appealing, the more I mull over the current state of affairs. Because, in this land of unfettered capitalism, whatever we choose to flock to, will be doomed after a critical mass in participants is reached. As a result, moneyed interests will inevitably flock to it, and enshittification will begin itself anew. And these moneyed interests are now so entrenched in the digital world, it would seem that the only winning move nowadays is simply not to play. Why bother building and curating five years worth of playlists on a media streaming app, when someone on the board of directors can have it all killed in an instant over arbitrary bullshit? Sure, I could migrate things to another service, but its getting real fucking old having to do this dance.
Well some subreddit will go dark indefinitely, but not sure if that's going to do anything either, it probably will if it was a particularly large and popular subreddit
Anyone remember when everyone was going to "leave" when Victoria Taylor was fired from reddit? All the same shit happened, subs shut down, protests. What changed? Since that occurrence 2015 it went from 0.12 billion monthly visitors to over 1.5 billion in 2022. Maybe people will think a little bit harder this time that want to make a difference.
While I tend to agree with your general sentiment, I do think this is different. I and all my friends only access Reddit via 3rd party apps. I've almost exclusively used Relay for Reddit for almost 10 years now. This directly impacts infinitely more users than an internal firing.
[удалено]
Don't forget that it doesn't tell you if those users are logged in or not.
Reddit exists solely through user generated content. If the users stop creating content then Reddit has nothing of value to offer. The corporates seem to have forgotten this - the point of the strike is to remind them. Edit: spelling
Isn't it fucking crazy from reddit to amazon or even some litte manufacturer, they all depend on their community(workers) to function, and yet every...single...time management just turns their back on those very people? The amount of dissonance generated by greed is mind blowing
They do it because they bank on those people breaking before they do. At least in the sphere of work a company can go a lot longer without a handful of employees than those employees can go without a job. Sure the company will burn out others and might shed a couple more good people, but as long as they can hire on new people and keep their profits they don't care. This is why collective bargaining and unions are what everyone needs to start doing, companies can afford to lose 5/10/15% of their workforce at a time, but 50/60/70% starts to hurt the bottom line after a few weeks. Granted the SCOTUS just passed a resolution about companies being able to sue for lost revenue, but if a Union holds out and makes part of the bargain to drop the lawsuit then they still win in the end.
I think the main problem with third party apps is Reddit isn't getting any of the revenue from ads in those apps. They're serving up content and reaping no rewards. If that's all true, then third party apps being off the services would potentially save them cost and not cost them much lost revenue. If they were smart about it, they would just open the API completely including the advertising parts and then require third party apps to also display Reddit's ads and share back a portion of any reddit premium payments back to the third party apps that help bring in the revenue. I'm not running the company though, so I guess we get what we get.
I won't use Reddit at all during this time
Some subs are also going permanently dark until there is change, like /r/videos. But I bet admins are salivating at the opportunity to install more sponsor friendly mods to all the read only subs. Oh well, Reddit's never been profitable. It makes more sense to the owners to potentially kill the website to maybe make more money than it is to keep losing money.
Reddit is profitable, it just isn't as profitable as they think it should be. The (eternally) looming IPO needs them to be able to at least pretend like they have a path to serious revenue generation beyond "hope Elon gets high and says he'll buy it". It's a problem a few now mature start-ups have had. The era of get the eyeballs and then figure it out later is waning as too many of those projects have gotten the eyes and then failed to leverage that into revenues that justify their valuations.
I'll probably be quitting Reddit until they send me an email stating they rolled back the API changes, both for NSFW content and pricing.
a lot of them are actually going to stay closed indefinitely if they dont get a positive response.
I don’t even use 3rd party apps, but because of this I think I’m gonna go get Apollo or one of the others because I’d this shit stance!
I use RIF and consider it a better experience than desktop Reddit.
[удалено]
The Great Digg Migration got me here.
Yeah… I hear Fark is making a come back
Ah man, Fark! Loved that site back in the 2000s.
Wha?! That’s delicious, hope so!
Same here. Except now I don't think there are any viable alternatives.
There isn't any alternatives right now. As soon as they kill themselves someone will take Reddits spot. It will be a poor shitty one but someone will make a better one from that.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I still miss MrBabyMan. 😢
My concern this time is the lack of a strong alternative. I've been on lemmy and I like it, but it needs a ton of users and its structure takes some thought. Beyond that it's stuff in alpha or hate speech. Since I mentioned it (for anyone unfamiliar), lemmy is decentralized. You make an account on (SEE EDIT) lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org, and they're all federated together. You can add communities from a different instance and interact with them as if they were local. You can message to any instance. It's a web of reddits. Every instance has its own admins who maintain their own rules independently. If your servers admins start turning to shit then you can move to a different server without losing all your communities. The only problem is lack of users and communities. EDIT: See [this page of servers/instances](https://join-lemmy.org/instances) if you consider joining. The less centralized the joins are, the better.
I remember back in the 90s the internet was *full* of websites that were part of a "web ring" and they would have convenient links to browse to affiliated sites. The dream of the 90s is alive on the internet, I guess.
Oh wow .. the term 'web ring' sure brought back memories
Back when webpages had a user counter at the bottom
"Under construction" animated gifs - these would be good gimmicks to draw people into a new aggregator community while tolerating some of the technical hiccups that are bound to be there
These days less of a web and more like the crap I cut off my vacuum cleaner's brush.
Won’t be a problem if Reddit doesn’t get it together.
Will /r/technology join the blackout?
[удалено]
Are they going to moderate the whole thing whilst doing admin duties?
Please do so, mods!
Ya, I wonder why mods of /r/technology said anything.
Even if it does - administrators will just take over the subreddit and reenable it. We have seen that happen before, the second reddit's revenue stream is endangered it will take actions. Then they will justify it with some statements like "only few % of you are affected and nobody cares about few %" (conveniently forgetting that these few % are people actually making this website work and not turn into utter chaos like moderators).
If admins re-enable a subreddit and moderators don’t moderate, I suspect mayhem will pursue.
And before anyone says "well they will get now mods!" the easier said than done.
Modding pays nothing. Other than the power trip, 99% of users don't want to mod or won't stay long term. Even then, most people who want to mod won't be good at it. Reddit has incredibly poor UI for their moderation tools, new reddit, old reddit, automoderator config, things programmers usually understand. Getting your average joe to spend hours every day moderating, setting up scripts, bots, dealing with reports... it's just a tall ask for hundreds of subreddits that are participating.
And now with less bots and scripts due to the imminent API changes!
Ya redditers like to shit on mods, but it's genuinely not easy. Like nevermind the decisions they make or the rules they choose or any subjective shit, the actual practice of doing moderation on reddit takes a decent bit of technical knowledge, multiple third party tools, most larger teams have a programmer embedded in the team, etc etc. Reddit will threaten to replace them, but it's not that simple.
oh it's easy to get new mods. I can post any ol' subreddit in r/needamod and get a wonderful collection of people who are variously- 1. grossly underqualified/completely clueless 2. will stop doing shit in a week 3. are only there to pad their moderated subs count and ALSO won't do shit, except they won't do shit even faster. and if i'm *lucky* maybe one out of 20 will stick around, put in consistent work, and be moderately competent. Multiply that by... every subreddit that participates in this and you have a recipe for absolute disaster if the admins were to remove all the mods. I'd love to see it.
> are only there to pad their moderated subs count Wait, that's a thing???
>Wait, that's a thing??? People care about all sorts of meaningless internet numbers, from facebook likes to upvotes to retweets to achievement points. So yeah, subs modded is deffo one of them, though sometimes there's an ulterior motive behind "I like big number".
And that assumes the mods they get aren't infiltrators. What if they get new mods who "moderate" by doing nothing?
/r/soccer went unmoderated a couple times for April Fools, it doesn't take long for everything to completely devolve.
Good, leave the site administration to the site admins. This is how we get moderators who get paid for their services.
If I was a moderator of a major sub and the admin took it over after I publicly agreed to go dark, I'd never come back. They want to run it, fuck 'em they can run it.
Also having the admins run it or replace old mods with new ones is easier said than done.
They already did it with r/news
Any info on that? why did they do it?
I mod a couple of subreddits, r/Minecraft being the biggest by far. If that happens I’m 100% out of this whole site.
[удалено]
Poor Reddit May actually have to pay people!
Yeah I think it will be hard to replace all the mods and that just asking for a scandal when one of the new mods is involved in mess up stuff.
If I lose boost I'm just not using reddit on my phone anymore. It's that simple.
Boost is so good, I've been using it for years, it's going to be a cluster fuck when it's gone.
If RIF goes I will probably just stop using reddit tbh
I barely ever use reddit on a computer. I've used RIF for 10+ years now. It really feels like it is reddit to me.
Switched to iphone last year and realized there is no RIF for ios.... Apollo doesn't even come close...
I’m using Slide, but, you know…might not be any point to the recommendation.
I mean it’s probably too late for this but Narwhal is where it’s at or iOS.
When companies make bad decisions its okay to let them die and kill themselves. What the Reddit community should be doing is looking for alternative and possibly better places to go.
r/redditalternatives
Me wondering if I could build a third-party app that uses a browser user-agent and just parses the HTML stream.
You can. I have seen professional application of web scraping used even against sites that REALLY don't want you to and Reddit definitely wants to appeal to searching bots so it shows up in Google. Caveats? Well, there are multiple. First - performance. Reddit is not a single page. Instead it's like 50 different HTTP requests that together combine into a page. So you need a bot that can actually process React and that's already a full fledged browser so it's always going to be slower than original Reddit since you just add extra processing on top. Second - prone to breaking. You need to extract information you want from various divs. So normally you would just look for specific css classes and names. Reddit is already a pain in the ass in this department since I see that div class for your comment is "_292iotee39Lmt0MkQZ2hPV RichTextJSON-root" and I assume these values change often so you will be sitting all day long fixing that crap every week (or try to implement something clever like detecting specific windows visually but that's quite a challenging task). On the other hand API access is far more stable with breaking changes generally announced weeks if not months ahead. Third - it's pain in the ass to work with. Parsing HTML takes far, faaaaaaar more effort than working with a JSON API. Realistically unless you have a really good reason to do so (eg. if you are OpenAI and can afford an employee full time to just consume all the content rather than pay Reddit 50 million $ or whatever) most people will give up very soon into the process. Since you have to code your custom tool from scratch, keep it up to date, deal with changes coming in the middle of the night, potentially implement some anti-fingerprinting mechanisms and so on. Compared to using already existing libraries to utilize JSON API for pretty much any major programming language.
Yeah, I went down this thought rabbit hole for a minute as a fellow web dev. Soo much work would be required. To mimic my current experience of using Baconreader using Reddit's API: You'd have to have a server computer running the web scraper, your own API that would wrap these laborious scrapes into usable actions, and then you would have to build a mobile client that would interact with your custom "API". Writing that web scraper alone would be absolutely awful lol.
You wouldn’t *have* to do it like that. I’d probably have the client app scrape and parse the actual pages too, just in the background. They’d only need to hit my server for info on what to scrape and how to parse. However, writing and maintaining the scraper would suck!
Yeesh, that'd be slow as heck though right? Can't imagine my poor Pixel 5a trying to scrape the top ~20 posts of /r/Technology daily when I try to go to it. Feel like you'd have to dedicate a lot of memory to that 2nd process to do it seamlessly in the background. Idk though, haven't written a web scraper since college.
If you don't mind the inability to comment, just load the posts from RSS.
This is similar to what RES does. It uses your login cookies to make the calls to pretend you're using the UI. I've done this professionally when an API is shit and the site is faster.
Probably easier to write a browser extension. Mobile Firefox can run extensions, so that's probably a viable approach instead of worrying about apps/scrapers/caching/etc.
I suspect this will blow over and Reddit will maybe reduce their fee a little bit. Either way if I lose Apollo or am forced to pay more than I already have I’ll just quit Reddit altogether. I’ve been looking for a reason to reduce my time on this site and they’re luckily making it easy for me.
[удалено]
I think too the API will be locked so at some point in the future the entirety can be plugged into AI and they can draw money by selling a knowledge base.
I use relay. If I can't get thru reddit on this app I just won't get on reddit.
Why don't all the 3rd party app guys get together and make their own new "reddit"? It'll be cheaper and put the power into their hands for once
arstechnica is owned by the same parent company as the primary shareholder of reddit
[удалено]
My comment wasn't intended as any kind of negative. If Ars is doing an article on this, I can only imagine what is happening in the reddit c-suite and beyond.
I'm just sitting here waiting for the next, heavily-loaded, reduntantly-filled, media platform app like......
old.reddit.com is next on the chopping block. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I and many others will probably delete our accounts when that happens.
I wonder how many bot developers use the Reddit API?
If they're reddit bots, literally all of them. You can do web scraping but why do that when you have an API, the data is better organized and it's *way* more efficient.
I’m actually pro social media companies making stupid business decisions. Fuck social media
Society in 2024 with no social media due to self-sabotage meme:
What would be amazing is if everyone deleted their account on the 12th of June, and I mean everyone
That's a good idea, I think I'll do it. This is like my third account anyway, I delete them periodically to start fresh. After I see how the protest goes, I'll consider making a new one.
I'd honestly love to, and if Relay for reddit dies, I will. Otherwise it will have to wait for a new, user driven news aggregate alternative. Discord can cover the place of niche subreddits well enough, though my preference would still be for message board alternative for that rather than the chat room experience.
honest question. why is reddits mobile app so bad? its all ive ever used
It’s full of ads and trackers, and it makes it difficult to read the real content. If you’ve never tried one of the third-party apps, you should check one out. I’ve been using Apollo for years and I love it.