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Reddit Tries to Get Users to Pay by Making App Icon Ugly
(9to5mac.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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VC money very likely dried up and the IPO was the opportunity to raise more funding. all they needed to do was put ads in 3rd party apps and they take a cut of revenue…
I honestly thought that after all these things they would spring back but I honestly now feel like they’re going to go the way of Digg
Or just require an account to have reddit premium in order to use the API.
I mean I honestly don’t understand. I’m just going to assume that they aren’t actually retarded and want the best for the company, but this sounds like one person over there is making the decisions and everyone else is terrified of calling out the bad ideas. How else does a company just implode like this? I’ve worked in creative tech environments with super dominating bosses that was scary to even ask a question let alone call them out. So sad.
I was a daily (hours) Reddit user for the past 15 years and I quit…completely. I have not gone back. The hour Apollo shut down I was done. I said I would leave and I keep my word. Been here ever since. It’s taken some time but this is filling my Reddit need.
Only problem is looking up tips on video games always links to a Reddit discussion and I just refuse. Fuck u/spez
It’s crazy how easy this recent drama has made leaving Reddit for me. Saw all the user-hostile changes and just deleted my Reddit apps and have only been visiting it via google searches on very domain-specific knowledge.
I agree with everything you said. However, I almost couldn't finish reading your comment because of your use of the R slur. I'm not reporting it or anything, just something to think on.
Is Reddit the new r word?
Yeah, It’s unnecessarily cruel. Hits like a gut punch ever time I see it now. Thanks for saying something.
Thanks for pointing that out
A week or so on Lemmy and I've seen this slur on like 3 different occasions. It's disappointing. I guess I was just more familiar with what communities to avoid on reddit (wsb) if I didn't want to see it.
You know what, I appreciate your callout. As an 80s kid there was a LOT of terms we used and our vocabulary was quite robust when it came to offensive words. Although we never truly meant to hurt any person or group those slurs were associated with. I’ve done an incredible job of eliminating all that stuff from my lexicon, but this word in particular has been difficult for me and if I use it I’m always angry.
I’ll try and do better
Just keep in mind there are words you use today, oftentimes daily, that will be considered hurtful and maybe even a “slur” in a matter of years and at most a few decades. All we can do is try and be conscience of this and work hard to eliminate them from your vocabulary but it’s not easy when you’ve used a word or term for decades
Here’s a selection of words from a list that a Harvard group just recently deemed “harmful”:
American, You guys, Prisoner, Crazy, Victim, Karen, Walk-in.
Just something to think on
In the 21st century the that word is widely understood to be a slur and thus violates rules 1 and 2 on lemmy.ml (where this community is hosted).
Also, you're quoting the definition of the verb, which is typically not applied to people, while the (now deleted, on lemmy.ml at least) grandparent comment was using the word as an adjective... which is.
Yeah, it was even a medical term and then a bunch of kids (and less gracious adults) went around using it as an insult and now it's taboo. Welcome to living languages, they change. I said what I said, your "umm, actually" adds nothing to the conversation.
It’s totally appropriate to use in that context e.g. retarding a fire or the brakes retarding a car, but OPs are clearly not using it like that.
Well you see, finding a way to reliably deliver ads via the API would have taken far too much developer brainpower for a company that can't make a functional video player or a mobile app that doesn't annihilate battery with ridiculously excessive cpu use and keepalive requests...
It honestly wouldn't be that hard at all. You deliver ads via the API alongside actual posts, as if they are an actual post, and forbid altering them in the developer ToS. If you want to be anal about enforcement, run popular 3rd-party apps in an emulator to verify that the JSON returned by the site is unaltered when it's rendered in the app. You could put this together in a weekend.
Which really just speaks to quality of talent at reddit, or the management at reddit suppressing that talent. Or both.
I'm pretty sure the real issue is the data collection Reddit wants about user habits. They can't get thst from 3rd party apps, even if they make browsing habit data (scroll speeds, post linger time, ads displayed, etc) a mandatory part of the API they cannot verify what the 3rd party app is reporting and it becomes junk data that advertisers cannot rely on. They need complete ecosystem control to make the marketing optimizers happy. So, fuck the consumer!
Speaking of which, how on Earth it's such a slug these days? I pretty much quit Reddit when the protest started and moved to Lemmy. I never used any other Android app since I was reasonably happy with the official app. However, when I launched it to check how my old subs fared, I was quite surprised at how slow, laggy and bloated POS it had come.
I honestly don't remember it being this crappy just a few weeks ago.
It's some combination of developer incompetence- they've basically never put out any decent running code- and intentional resource use for the ridiculous amount of tracking they run. Reddit tracks everything about your browsing habits as well as actively loads ads in the background. It's entire purpose was never for quality user experience, it was for revenue generation (which 3rd party apps get in the way of)
There is still the free option of revanced, that patched the original reddit app so that you don't have any adds... You can also change the icon of you want.
They had a golden goose and rather than let it continue laying golden eggs, they cooked it for dinner.