The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
It’s really that high? I’m surprised, I would have thought 3rd party app use was way more common.
Among higher than average users it seemingly was. Given that reddit was saying the third party apps were using above average amounts of API calls per user. They said it’s because of the 3PAs baing unoptimized but it was likely that more engaged users used 3PAs.
Wow so they’ve prioritised the casual users over the power users… You know, the ones who actually post the content… This should go well /s
Anecdotal, but I’ve been talking about this whole thing to my partner. She doesn’t really care though because, in her own words: “I tried to use Reddit a little while ago, but I didn’t like the app”
Had a good chuckle to myself over that
Fair enough. The official app is dog shit.
It is. I was just using it because I thought I would support Reddit with it. But the recent changes showed what you get for that. Now I’m not using Reddit anymore.
Hopefully there are other people doing the same.
i think it’s cuz a lot of us were redditors who used it before they even had an official reddit app, and so it wasn’t pushed on us as the default option. the older, more dedicated reddit accounts disproportionately made up the active userbase
Before they bought a 3rd party app. The official app was alien blue first
I can’t be the only one who was still using old.reddit desktop site even on my phone and tablet.
I noped out of the new shit the day they released it, and gladly clicked their provided link to take me back to old.
I forgot about that damn link!
I knew I always used what looked like old reddit, but I could never remember changing the URL everytime, after that I used my mobile browser and then the official app.
God that was a battery, storage, and data intensive app.
Data plans back then were beaucoup bucks.
It was the damn notifications that made me almost quit Reddit and then I finally said “Fuck it let me try what all these reddit power nerds are always going on about.”, and then I understood.
I think you’re correct. The older accounts definitely were more likely to use 3rd party apps I believe. I know I tried the mobile site and then several 3rd party apps before they developed the official Android app. I remember really hoping for “Alien Blue Android.” I tried the official app when they gave a week? of gold for trying it and concluding my app, probably Sync, was much better.
I think if they’d made the official app really competitive from the start, a lot of daily users would have switched to it. They could have done things a lot differently and been profitable by now.
If they make it halfway decent now, we would all not have a problem
And most 3rd party app users were the ones who had been on Reddit for a decade or more.
The interface for Sync, as an example, made it much easier and more efficient to use. I would argue that 3P users use more calls because using those apps allow you to browse and interact far more effectively without cutting through the swaths of “He Gets Us” ads that Sync users never even had to see. Ultimately, I suspect that tha was the true reason for the API changes. Lost ad revenue. Judging by what I saw just today being stuck briefly on the official Reddit app and the website taking care of last minute issues after Sync went down, it’s bad. Wall of ads.
If they would just charge you reasonable price, or fix their own app, none of this would be an issue.
But it’s about the data, not the money, because the data is where the real money is at.
If you had everyone who used Reddit, had all their browsing and tracking data, how long they scrolled and looked at whatever, how long they stayed on the page after, what they looked at next, so on and so on, you could sell it in multiple times to multiple people for multiple things and each data set be unique