I used to use RiF back in the day when it was still a buggy mess. I don’t even remember when I moved to the native app. I don’t agree with Reddit’s policy update (why I’m here) but I thought the default app was fine for normal browsing. I never had issues with the video player or anything else.
I use Samsung Galaxy devices if that’s relevant.
Reddit has the true numbers. I’m sure 90% of people use the native Reddit app which is why they decided shutting down 3rd party apps wasn’t a big deal.
I think why people are making it a big deal is because the 10% that used 3rd party apps were the most active users. A casual lurker probably didn’t care about the features of the app they used. The very active users, and mods, likely used the 3rd party apps because of the superior design and features.
Time will tell whether this just upset a vocal minority or if it upset a core group of content creators and moderators.
The 10% you speak of also made up most of the moderators, that’s why around 6,000 subs are going dark
I mostly used RiF, but installed the official app during a trip last year to do logistics with someone who was using the built in chat.
I don’t tend to always have data on my phone, because WiFi is everywhere, and just add some when I’m going on a trip like this. I’d loaded up a fiver’s worth the morning we left, which usually sees me through an entire month in these situations.
Woke up after the first night away to an alert that my data was all used up. And on further investigation, guess which app was the culprit? Just literally sitting there overnight while I was asleep, gobbling up a month’s worth of data to do god knows what.
I uninstalled the app.
You kids and your apps. I used old.reddit on my desktop.
You kids and your websites. I used Emacs to browse reddit.
I just close my eyes and imagine Reddit
The ads. Jesus. The ads that are dark design pattern close to normal posts. Ugh.
As a lifelong adblock user, I recognize your pain.
I love your honesty. I expect for many people it’s more about losing what they’re comfortable with. For others there are legitimate functionalities that perhaps don’t exist yet in the native app - a former mod will need to chime in, as I’m not sure about specifics.
Yeah, chat was probably the only thing the official app had over Apollo. As you said, I just particularly like the UI of Apollo and think it’s bullshit that I’m being forced to change. The way they’ve handled this has also just been awful, like that AMA for example and their talks with the devs
Fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. When all you ever use is a shit app, you think that’s what a normal experience is
The native app is decent, if you haven’t tried any of the other third-party apps.
I joined Reddit back during the Alien Blue days and transitioned over to Apollo when it launched. Using the native app felt like I stumbled onto a porn-addled spyware site with the ads and quirky UI/UX.
It was possible to use after some time, but after a week, I noped out and went back to Apollo.
Honestly I barely used it. If you use dark patterns to try to make me use a thing, the last thing I’m going to do is use that thing.
It’s probably ok if you’re used to it, but 3rd party apps have so much QoL stuff that it’s awful to switch
I used the official app too. For whatever reason it always had issues with video playback and comments for me, but I still never switched to another app
There is an entire subreddit dedicated to their legendarily shitty video player.
Same. RiF and relay gave me video issues and I couldn’t post sometimes. So I switched to the official app and it was SO full of ads.
It’s not just the ads, but the astroturfing on Reddit is so damn blatant. For instance, there was a video about pressing vinyl records, and the comment section felt like an ad for some movie (“that’s the soundtrack for [insert new movie] I ordered it!”). I had been posting evidence of this to r/hailCorporate but at some point I realized that’s just how the majority of Reddit was.
Bot activity is off the roof, especially on political subs. The entirety of r/Canada is taken over by antivaxxers and ford supporters with multiple bot accounts, to the point people had to migrate to r/OnGuardForThee. But what about casual users who aren’t aware of this? They are susceptible to being influenced by bots. There’s no real discourse or community anymore.
I became really disheartened when I saw people earnestly engaging in obvious bot reposts, or how effective the bot strategy of taking one response and copying it as a reply to another worked - the discussion was so mundane that sometimes you wouldn’t even realise.
I would only use it to give awards since none of my third party apps supported that. Eventually I stopped even doing that because its such a resource hog.
Possibly - I neer interacted much on my old iphone SE, mostly I just use Firefox on the desktop.
I found it completely asinine how it bitches at you when you take a screenshot and puts its watercolor on a downloaded image.
I tried it and went right back to baconreader
