> API restrictions effectively killed alternative frontends, so I simply don't look at Reddit posts anymore.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
>They also decided to do presumably costly ui rollouts that a lot of their most veteran community members opt out of.
The original UI works well, and it's great they kept old.reddit. Everything since has been horrible, along with the dark patterns pushing their mobile client. It reminds me of all the craigslist UI redesign posts on hacker news many years ago that completely missed the point.
Reddit has definite value (really important as Google quality declines IMO), and I'd love if they could find a way to sustain without destroying the community... but I'm not optimistic.
>I am quite okay with the planned API costs, timeline, and communication. How were you affected by the changes?
Every app of choice I'd use for reddit is shutting down in a week. I don't like the supposedly official app.
I already disdained reddit for several reasons over the years and this is the camel that broke the straw. I have no issues paying for good service (I bought a SomethingAwful account over a decade ago, and I donate to Tildes) and I don't think reddit is a good service, in its platform, its community, nor its general paradigms. It is not moving in a direction that I want to support. If that means a lonely migration to a new community, so be it. Not the first time, won't be the last.
>but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.
and reddit didn't benefit from that free labor at all.
This is always such a weird angle to take. That some dude paid 2 other people part time and hes stealing from a billion dollar coporation who employs 2000 people as is. Shocker that one is profitable and the other struggles.
>uch as updating CSS flair based on a remote set of changing assets
yeah, remember when reddit said it would implement native flairing? Glad you did that work for them (likely built on the work of others' free labor).
> so lots of smart people from big companies put lots of thought how to make it fast, and I still get a feeling of overwhelming anger when browsing the new web Reddit on a 4-years old phone.
That's more the problem of Reddit's code being a pile of bull dung. Someone high-level in there decided to ditch the "old" API for the "redesign" in favor of GraphQL and as everyone who has ever worked with GraphQL is likely to have discovered, GraphQL is a hell in itself.
And because whoever was moronic enough to call that decision doesn't want to admit they have fucked up and Reddit can't/doesn't want to afford maintaining two distinct APIs, they decided to rather shut down the old, working and performant API.
>Reddit seems like an example of a successful acquisition
For whom? For people who uses it since the beginning it isn’t even the same place anymore. It’s UX (and I’m not talking about the aesthetics of the new design, I don’t mind those) is legitimately the worst I’ve ever experienced and the quality of discussion has went down the drain. Even if you find a tightly controlled community dedicated to a topic you’re interested in it’s either one extreme to another or doesn’t last long.
That doesn’t even get into the constant rolling out for Facebook-tier features that no Reddit user ever wanted. I stopped using Reddit last month after ~12 years and I’ve since realized I was getting nothing but regurgitated memes and anger from a dozen people replying to my every comment who aren’t even addressing what I was saying just arguing for arguments sake.
It’s basically what Facebook groups were in 2016 at this point. I’m sure it’s a great acquisition for those who bought it, but for the old power users it’s anything but.
>Reddit has completely jumped the shark in its UI design, the 'direction' its taken, and its basically complete capitulation to censorship at a corporate level. Its interesting to that they haven't IPO'd yet, because in my view, its a zombie carcass waiting for its replacement to find its way onto the net.
They're never going to IPO, because they're owned by Advance Publications. Reddit hasn't been a startup for like a decade.
>Which of course leaves me wondering how long it is before reddit pulls the plug on their API and forces people to use the busted mobile site or their app.
Of course. How will they do it? That's yet to be seen. Instead of pulling the API entirely, I'd bet they simply wont introduce API for new features. This will leave 3rd party apps as inferior while Reddit doesn't have to deal with the backlash of pulling the API entirely. I'd argue this is already occurring.
> Is it just accessibility and moderation tools or something else?
The information density and UX are terrible in new Reddit and the official app (in my opinion of course). I find them completely and utterly unusable. I just tried opening new Reddit and going to /r/all. I can see exactly 2 posts on my screen, compared to 14 on old Reddit. I tried clicking on something, it opens up in a narrow popover. Middle clicking to open it in a proper tab takes a lot longer than in old Reddit.
When it comes to the app, there are similar issues, it's just _so_ much slower than using RiF, the information density is abysmal, comment chains are painful for me to read and it uses _significantly_ more data than RiF. I'm guessing it preloads lots of assets in the background or something.
When they kill off 3rd party access, I will stop using it on my mobile. I already feel like I waste too much time on Reddit, ruining the experience will make it much easier to quit. If they ever kill old Reddit, then I guess I'll finally quit Reddit for good or make an extension that makes it look and work like the old version.
> Is the missing ADs revenue the crux of the problem?
No, it is the whole shebang which is why Reddit is forcing this extinction event for 3rd party apps.
I use the Now for Reddit Android app and Reddit Enhancement Suite extension on desktop. With this combination, Reddit has stayed visually identical for the past decade. I never saw things like NFT avatars, RPAN livestreaming or any of the things Reddit has added to make it something other than an old school messageboard.
Users like me are a disaster for Reddit because I treat it like a PHPbb forum from 2010. There is no hope of upselling me into something I would pay for. Reddit's owners however believe that they should be multiplying their wealth many times over for running a bigger Phpbb instance. That is the crux of the problem.
> They have been hostile to old reddit for a long time - many new features don't work with it like polls, free awards, inline pics, avatar, and so on.
I didn't want or appreciate some of those features anyway. Old Reddit with RES pretty much feels feature-complete to me. In some sense it's also refreshing to use a popular social media UI that isn't going through constant redesigns and tweaks.
> I for the life of me can't figure out why they are charging so much money for the API.
The claim (made by several mods) is that they are spending > $10m annually on the API once you include eng effort, and they want a return on the opportunity cost, not just the pure compute cost.
Additionally, they've run reddit so shockingly incompetently that they appear to have separate, better APIs that they only allow their internal apps to use. So when they complain about the inefficiency of use of the available APIs, keep that in mind...
Clearly, however, they just don't want other frontends. See eg them moving to measuring API calls on a per-app basis, rather than on a per-app per-user basis. It's dumb, imo, to not just say so.
And like everything reddit does, this was done wildly incompetently. I'd ask how they could possibly have not thought through the impacts on accessible frontends, or mod tools (which itself demonstrates the fractal incompetence of reddit: why do mods have to build or buy their own tools?), but... well, reddit.
NB: so fractally incompetent that they apparently can't even measure api usage and share that with API users in real or near-real time. Like... how. Just how.
Which I think is kind of OP's point, i.e. that maybe reddit is focusing its resources on the wrong issues. Afaik the website was and still is generally responsive from a networking point of view, there are some 503s here and there from time to time but nothing that could throw me away as a regular user, on the other hand the redesign (if it manages to overwrite all the present ways of getting past it, such as using old.reddit or i.reddit) will definitely turn me away as a regular user, and I say that as a really long-time user of that website.
The more general issue is that there are a lot of technical people around SV that do, well, technical stuff, because they are really, really good at what they're doing (so I'm in no way downplaying this post). The issue is that focusing only on technical stuff and ignoring how users actually use your website/product might turn those users away and you're left with a technical behemoth which has no users (see Google+ for a relatively recent example).
> Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experience downgrade to the small group of savvy users who won't ever use new reddit no matter what roadblocks are put in their way.
This small group includes the moderators and power users who make most of the content and moderate it.
Reddit might pull it off but we need to wait and see the long run effects. It feels like the structure is intact but it has rotted from the inside.
> I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.
> But Reddit has repeatedly said that they will not depreciate old.reddit.com. They have zero reason to, as many of their powerusers rely on it.
Let’s be honest. Every company says this. Some actually try to stand by their statement. Public companies very often wipe those statements from existence because some MBA found a way to increase profits 27% this quarter (who cares if it the company borders on bankrupt in 2 years) or some intern found a way to double clicks.
If someone demonstrates that old Reddit results in fewer ad views, shutting it down is a matter of when and not if.
>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.
It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.
There are a lot of seemly intentional defects being added to these interfaces, I suspect as a strategy to force users to migrate to the new one. Galleries and some profile features are not supported, and it is (again intentionally) slowed down on mobile.
Reddit jumped the shark already and the current state of affairs is an offense to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Problem is that a new mass migration (as happened in the Digg?Reddit) is way more difficult due to the inertia and amount of content available. I just hope that, when it finally happens, it would be to a distributed or federated system -- Lemmy.ml seems to be the most promising for now.
>>but the vast majority of the userbase is on the mobile website or app.
proving that the world truly is insane, I use old reddit on mobile as well as new reddit is more or less unusable on a mobile browser they hard force you in to their terrible app. If I need a mobile app I use a 3rd party app as the offical app is TERRIBLE
When/if they kill old.reddit is the say I stop using reddit, I would say my usage is already down 80% since the launch of reddit, as I pretty much only use the technical subreddits for news now, staying away for all other area;s of reddit.
> To quit Reddit, I wanted the Pavlok to deliver a painful shock every time I visited Reddit
That's a bit...extreme.
Fortunately Reddit is doing a great job diminishing its own usability. When Reddit enables their paid API and locks out 3rd party clients in the process, there will be greater friction to browse. When they eventually kill old.reddit.com that'll be the nail in the coffin.
They recently did a poll to users, asking which UI you use most. I put old reddit because it is. I cannot understand how in what? 6+ years they developed new reddit and still don't have true feature parity? This tells me they don't have their priorities in line, and they want to IPO to boot.
Personally I think some websites don't really have any need to become publicly traded companies, I rather they become profitable and not controllable by the whims of tech illiterate investors.
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