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
Actually, currently 8446 are currently dark. Number is still rising.
We’ll see after today. The subs were saying 48h which clearly is not going to be effective enough… And if it’s too effective then Reddit will just replace the mods. Horrible sight to behold 😔
That’s the thing though. The current mods are volunteers. Is Reddit going to replace them with paid mods or are they going to hope other volunteers step up? It could turn into a shit show if subs go unmodded or are poorly moderated.
Or Reddit is going to have to spend money paying for moderators, which is great but another consequence of their decision.
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
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 found it completely asinine how it bitches at you when you take a screenshot and puts its watercolor on a downloaded image.
The ads. Jesus. The ads that are dark design pattern close to normal posts. Ugh.
As a lifelong adblock user, I recognize your pain.
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
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
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.
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.
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 have also only ever used the official Reddit app. It’s funny because I thought I would finally try a different app a couple of weeks ago. I downloaded and installed RIF and it opened with a banner explaining the situation, which was barely on my radar at that point. That’s when I started looking into Reddit alternatives and ended up on Lemmy.
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.
I just tried it out for the first time in a few years, solely for this comment im writing now. And I have to admit it has improved and adopted a lot of features that the third party apps have had forever (e.g. tap to hold to close threads, amoled theme). And i think thats kind of part of the problem. These apps basically defined how reddit should work on mobile, before reddit even had a mobile app. Reddit then copycats these features and now is trying to kill off these apps that paved the way. Theres a reason the third party apps are popular, people like them more than the official app.
Well, the official app works and does most of the tasks. I tried Apollo once and is is/was so much better. So sad to see Apollo go, I used it daily.
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.
