Technology

To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.

The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.

Spot fucking on.

Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it's by a corporation but that's ok, because it's a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it's more annoying and it keeps offering services you don't want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.

Hell I've watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it's Samsung food... Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can't just read the recipes from, and that's ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it's designed for.)

I'm just sick of "How do we make more money" instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.

I get your point and you’re not wrong, technically . Technically that is what Reddit is trying to do but you need to remember that this is Reddit. They fucking suuuuuck at everything.

I remember years ago a disaffected ex employee wrote something about what it’s like to work the and in just remember thinking to myself: “Imagine going in to work and they call an important meeting, all hands, to discuss “brigading” and then, without an ounce of irony they proceed to sternly discuss this important topic.”

Just imagine those little snot nosed shots puffed up with so much self importance discussing how these “brigades” are destroying their “bastion of free speech”.

I thought I was going to pule in my own mouth again just typing this.

The fact that the app is still so bad after so much time has gone by indicates that it is the desired product that the company wants to offer. And after realizing that they were still losing users to better competitors, their solution was to destroy the ability to compete in the first place rather than improve the product.

They like the app as-is, with all of the terrible performance and UX that goes along with it. The reason behind that is because they're getting user engagement metrics and other telemetry data, more control over ad delivery and the content users see (including astroturfed sponsored Reddit content), and more monetization.

Third party apps, like Apollo and AlienBlue before it, cared about providing a good user experience. It just happens that users typically prefer experiences that aren't trying to capitalize their every interaction, and companies take that personally.

Alien Blue wasn’t rebranded. They bought it, called it the official app (with the name Alien Blue) for a little while, then launched their own app and stopped supporting AB.

Yeah I paid for alien blue pro or whatever it was called. Then they killed the app and gave me a year of Reddit premium (my memory is shit, idk the proper name). After a month or so I switched to Apollo, Reddit’s app was just so shit. I left when Apollo died and now only use dystopia (an app designed for blind users) for the infrequent times I visit Reddit. No adds. It’s almost read only. But it’s ideal for visiting niche subs that aren’t on lemmy without giving Reddit clicks/seeing ads.

You can also see this with the old website being much better than the new one and apparently there's an even newer one that people who like the old new one generally hate.

This is one of those things where, I totally feel for all the big tech employees who’ve been laid off, and it is ultimately the fault of the companies, but like, that’s just too much.

And so many unpaid moderators... Which is an acceptable trade when the site isn't cashing in on your work.

Wtf are they even doing.

Depends on the sub. The news, technology, and politics subs are 99% link sharing. The subs around DIY stuff, health, etc are often people sharing personal experience and advice. The latter is likely the most valuable thing for AI to crawl.