Reddit App – Suspicious high number of recent 5 star, one word reviews | Hacker News Reader

Reddit App – Suspicious high number of recent 5 star, one word reviews

old.reddit.com

781 pointsel_hacker353 comments

The behavior of Reddit's management has inspired me to login through the series of accounts I have created over the years and delete all content I had contributed to. Doesn't management realize they are dependent on people like us to create content to generate value for the website?

He does not care about users like you.

>>I know I’m focusing a lot on that, but that’s where a lot of the protests in the community are focused. People appear to really love these apps. And, apparently, they think Reddit itself is not offering the experience they’re looking for. People talk about leaving the platform because they can’t use these apps. So if Reddit is going to shut down these apps, you’re going to lose people who loved Reddit, and that still doesn’t quite make sense. So I guess I’m wondering why hasn’t there been...

>90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit? Does that make sense?

>These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free. And that free comes at the expense of our other users and our business. That’s what this is about. It can’t be free.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

The entire article is just so bizarre and needlessly hostile that I'm amazed they're allowing him to do interviews.

I read the article and Huffman seems quite reasonable. Basically that they are asking profit making apps like Apollo to cover server costs, which seems not ridiculous if Reddit is loss making and Apollo profit making. I get the impression that some people who say they don't like corporate doublespeak are upset because Huffman just says pay or move on instead of doing the doublespeak. My biases - I did his python course and thought he seemed ok, also I use old reddit on the laptop and it works fine.

Third party apps aren’t upset that their free API access is getting charged; it’s the ridiculously high price, along with very short notices that make it painfully obvious of Reddit’s intention to permanently encapsulate all traffic in-house.

My dude, server costs are a tiny fraction of what they are charging for API access.

One API call probably costs on the order of a millionth of a cent if not less. The infrastructure costs of running a server are extremely cheap.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36357164

This link has been marked as a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354850

Still appreciate that you posted this, as otherwise I would never have seen it. Thank you!

You'll want to destructively edit them, because apparently Reddit has recently started removing soft delete flags on some content, and it's not clear to people why besides possibly this blackout.

It's not clear if Reddit has post history to rollback destructive edits.

A substantial portion of my destructive edits (that were followed by deletion) appear to have now been rolled back, so it appears they do have the ability. These were recently deleted, however; there may be a time limit based on edit time.

Why were they rolled back? Your content was deemed important?

Spez doesn't want comments that say "this comment was removed"; it hurts the IPO.

Thanks for sharing this.

This is false. Feel free to link to your source which will inevitably turn out to be someone who doesn't understand that the problem was actually in their deletion script or their understanding of it.

They must so people can't just edit away ban-worthy content

same article says they're rolling back destructive edits

Anything stopping you from editing them again?

if you've deleted the account, you no longer have a "handle" onto the comment.

Depending on how they've done the restore, you may not have a handle on the comment even if you haven't deleted the account.

Also, nothing stopping them from doing any of it again.

I have deleted all my comments and posts once. The way I did it required a lot of clicks, and I only had <100 things to delete. I couldnt find a better way to do it and neither will the average reddit user who has 1000s of comments.

There’s a number of scripts and tools on GitHub, findable by search engines. “Power Delete Suite” is the one I used.

Thanks for that. It was very easy to delete all my reddit history https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/ there's even a video tutorial, less than a minute long.

The hurdle isn’t in finding Power Delete Suite. It’s in knowing what a Bookmarklet is, or what a bookmark is, or what a favorites bar is.

Many people go to Reddit 20 times a day by typing “Reddit” (or some variation like “redit”) into Google 20 times a day and clicking the first search result.

> Many people go to Reddit 20 times a day by typing “Reddit” (or some variation like “redit”) into Google 20 times a day and clicking the first search result.

This describes my father getting to Google. It was painful to witness. I tried to explain for about ten seconds, then opted that what he was doing worked for him and chose to pick my battles.

It would be impossible for him to use a tool like a bookmarklet unless someone set it up on his behalf. The barrier to use such a tool as PDS is nothing to a bunch of people who understand tech topics. It's unrealistic for a lot of others. I was going to say that I thought young people who grew up online could figure it out, but I've seen comments about teaching mobile-first CS students about filesystems, so…

I don't understand how this is related to the post you replied to

You think the average reddit user cannot (or will not) google "reddit delete all comments"? Googling is the first resort for most people.

California consumer privacy act requires customer data deletion upon request. That includes user generated content. Just file a CCPA deletion request?

THIS is the way at least people in the EU and California could bring the asshole reddit management to its knees.

Just ab avalanche of private account data deletion under CCPA or GDPR (or ARCO in Mexico yay!) Would make break reddit where it hurts. Most companies are not prepared to automate that.

That would be impactful.

I would be shocked if they were on track for an IPO and don’t have this automated. But I also disagree it would be impactful. Reminds me of the Facebook groups from a dozen years ago: “we will quit Facebook until the old design is brought back.” Guess who won that!

There's also Shreddit.

https://github.com/x89/Shreddit

And this version which has been updated recently: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

That is an entirely different tool with the same name.

I used a tampermonkey script to do this.

They don't deserve any of it. Hope this puts and end to the site and their greed

I would question the monetization value of a user visiting reddit to read a 4 year old post about the best water pump, vs. "normie" users just flipping through their front page

These investors are trying to make back 1.3 BILLION dollars sunk into a social network in the top 10 websites visited in the US that can't make money, they're rightfully trying to go full facebook/instagram/normie. What if I told you old.reddit only accounts for 10% or less of web users. That people are actually able to browse new reddit (I personally can't).

tl;dr: For the content they're looking for, no they dont need someone like you who's deleting old posts they don't care about

Search engines refer people to those old threads. Users who care enough and are tech savvy enough to delete their post histories are more likely to have made higher quality comments in the past answering tech support questions, reviewing products, etc. Those are the old threads that appear in search results and potentially draw in new users.

Having old reddit history show up repeatedly in your search results is part of what creates perceived value to get on the treadmill and follow things happening now.

You're not hurting reddit. You're hurting also the community that could benefit from that information as you have, leaving a trail of [deleted]

I don't actually see that as something I should care about. My interest in chatting online on a forum isn't that my convo is available to everyone for eternity.

I wouldn't even grant that access to old posts is a particularly useful part of a community. Even on HN it doesn't impact my day to day except to laugh at that dropbox rsync guy once a year.

Let's be honest: you're hurting both but the latter will find other ways to hold the information in a way which may not be bound to a corporation led by a lying weasel.

u/spez needs to be removed as CEO.

It's not going to matter imo.

Once they accepted $1.3B in vc the die was cast. If it's not spez, it will be someone else.

That said, ballooning reddit from 300 employees to 2k while simultaneously (somehow?) being largely incapable of delivering the mod tools promised for a decade, making the site or the app accessible, or improving their app past what a 1.5 person dev team can deliver certainly merits firing.

Good. That community should die because reddit is leeching on it. We don't negotiate with terrorists.

Terrorists?

I must have missed something.

More of an analogy. If you kidnap US citizens then (officially) the US won't negotiate with terrorists to set the hostages free. People shouldn't try negotiating with reddit admins.

But this is the terrorism part: you're hurting random innocent people to terrorize the leadership into doing things your way.

Random innocent people are not entitled to the content I chose to freely create (however valuable said content is, or not).

That’s the point. Reddit turned on the community. So people want to remove their contributions to the community. If everyone did so there’d be nothing left.

Hopefully Reddit will exercise the prerogative to hit the undelete key. The idea that forum posts belong to the author in perpetuity is a weird mental hangup; forum posts are a conversation and after a certain grace period, contributors should not have the right to memory-hole the past.

Depending on jurisdiction, they literally do have that right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

Do you feel the same way about public posts on social bookmarking sites?

(If yes, you might want to update your FAQ and privacy policy.)

No, I think it applies to public forum conversations, like the one we are having. You shouldn't have the right to prevent future generations from seeing how I zinged you good.

Maybe they should replace all comments and posts with something like

"This content was removed by the user in protest of Reddit's draconian actions toward third party developers."

How long until the adults at Conde Nast step in and stop the madness? This whole thing is:

1. Doing long term damage to search position for Reddit content. Results, short and long term reduction in SEO generated traffic, fewer ad clicks, lower revenue, and a loss in valuation. Also, paying to get traffic will cut into margin, further reducing valuation.

2. Causing users to delete their accounts, lowering active user counts, and cutting Reddit's valuation.

3. Forcing people doing work for free to stop, meaning that Reddit will have to spend money to either hire or recruit and train more free moderators, resulting in increased operating costs, thus reducing profit margins, resulting in a lower valuation.

4. If it is true that management at Reddit is undeleting deleted users and accounts, they may be creating a situation where they claim they have more users than they do. Because this is the result of management's actions, it could be viewed negatively by regulators and law enforcement.

What is going on needs to be stopped. It's insane.

There are two possibilities that I can see:

1) Spez is right, this is a tempest in a teapot that hasn't (yet) had a big impact on traffic, and won't once they seize control of the rebelling subreddits. A vocal minority cares of the public about the impact on the community, but stakeholders realize the business will be fine.

2) Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum. Maybe he misrepresents it to internal stakeholders too. The situation will appear under control right up until the moment the wheels fly off.

Could be a little of column A, a little of column B.

As you suggest, it's not binary.

Even if he's "right" what "Spez" has done here is pure idiocy.

Even if Reddit comes out of this largely unharmed, why did they even take the risk? Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time? What he's doing is simply bad from a strategical perspective.

But further, this event has put me off ever wanting to invest in Reddit post-IPO. "Spez" seems approaching conflict like a child in an argument with their parents might. Even if you like Reddit's product I don't know how anyone in their right mind would invest in a company where a child is calling all the shots. The dude edits comments to pwn people he doesn't like, he lies, he's comes off as arrogant and entitled. It's just so unprofessional.

If anyone else was in charge I'd have assumed they wanted the controversy.

> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time?

Might just be a rip-off-the-bandaid type of calculation. Maybe the response sucks now, but it'll resolve in a week or two (vs having smaller protests every time one of these incremental changes take effect). Similar to how people were really angry when companies had more than one round of layoffs.

btw not an endorsement of spez's actions; just trying to game out why he might be doing it this way.

That's an interesting idea - though it'd speak really poorly of Spez's qualities as a leader. There's a reason the gas station near has a much higher price over than two decades past while from week to week you'll never see anything more than a 20cent difference and often times see a bit of price lowering to break things up. This may be due to our hunter past or something else but humans are terrible at noticing large gradual changes - but suddenly double the price in front of us and we'll definitely notice.

> Why didn't they just incrementally increase API pricing or implement policies that slowly kill off 3rd party apps one at a time?

I guess that the goal is not to kill all the 3rd party apps, but only those that make profit from the Reddit API (which doesn't include their advertising if I understand well). Now assuming that a progressive price increase would be put in place, I guess that these apps would simply offload the API tax to their user base with each new raise. As it has been mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, with an abrupt price raise in a very short time, the apps would not have enough treasury to be able to "buffer" the cost until the users pick the pace up - assuming users would, which is perhaps a more important (read: long term) worry.

It should be observed that the goal is not to kill off all 3rd party apps, since there are special exemptions for non commercial apps. I don't know if these exemptions are actually useable in practice, or if actually this is just a part of a larger scheme to get rid of all those apps while having a plausible line of deniability.

It is certainly sad for iOS users as Apollo seems to be their only option besides the web site, but I wonder why they did not see that coming miles away. Maybe they did expect a price to show up at some point, but not with such a magnitude.

The last guy like that got elected President, so…

If #1 were true, literally _anyone_ in spez's position would shut up and get on with things. The fact is that he initially did that — and then as the week has gone on, he has begun giving more and more unhinged interviews with the press. He's not saying "it blew over", he's blaming anyone and everyone he can think of, making objectively false statements about history and his own actions, and making overt threats to his perceived enemies.

It is very plainly having a much bigger impact than spez anticipated.

spez was on NPR this morning and it was hilarious. Also sad that Steve Inskeep didn't realize (alternatively: care) about the bullshit verbal games spez was playing with his answers.

That seems to be the NPR way the past few years. Allow guests of all stripes on the air to say whatever nonsense the can dream up. And then move on to the next question with no follow-up or pushback. All in the name of "neutrality".

It's not journalism and it does a disservice to their listeners.

I think HN underestimates the truth behind #1.

(Don't shoot the messenger! Just adding some objective data amid the flames.)

Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc)

AFAIK the only huge holdouts are r/videos and r/music.

Mods and some users have been very vocal...but there's a quieter, larger group that is fine with the official app and just wants a place to post.

---

EDIT: My bad. r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics have disabled new posts.

Plenty of others...r/funny, r/askscience, r/earthporn, r/explainlikeimfive, r/food, r/gadgets, r/nottheonion, r/space, r/sports went dark and are now back.

Total affected subscriber count has fallen ~60% [1] since the peak.

FWIW, I think #2 is true as well. This is by no means a inconsequential disruption. But it's also far from "the death of Reddit."

[1] https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

There's no doubt that Reddit, in some form, would survive if Spez were to keep a firm line, unilaterally replace volunteer moderators, and cater to that "larger group."

But that in some form should be terrifying to institutional investors evaluating or underwriting this IPO. Will users under the new status quo have significantly different retention patterns and lifetime value when consuming content moderated by the moderators that led Reddit to the point where it's able to IPO in the first place?

It's very possible that retention numbers drop through the floor because subreddits lose the unique character that made Reddit different from any other social media platform - a character traced through a continuous history of mods on large and small subreddits, chosen as stewards of established per-subreddit culture, now to be wiped away. In the current market environment, doesn't that make Reddit a riskier investment than ever?

And it wouldn't take a lot to fix. Spez doesn't even necessarily need to reverse the API restrictions. He just needs to communicate and listen to mods with empathy, and establish that empathy publicly and privately as a top company priority. It's not too late for him to do that and save the company. And the more he refuses to do that, the more questions investors will ask about his readiness to lead.

I agree with the first paragraph. As to the rest, the finance people could dump the stock on someone assuming there will be a period of (un)reasonable optimism not far from the IPO. This is par for the course with overhyped stocks AFAIK. They even can have some semblance of profitability from running Reddit completely as a Skinner box internet chum feeder with brand recognition.

I think the best scenario (globally) is that a new generation of internet power users, at least 5-20% of them, would learn federation and forums. This could be a lesson for... half a decade, maybe. The ones foolish enough to stay in their pens will be only having it worse as time goes on.

>But that in some form should be terrifying to institutional investors evaluating or underwriting this IPO

Far more terrifying is a site that is perpetually at the mercy of a handful of powerusers. That if the winds change, they collectively could tank the value of the product with no way for investors to intervene. If I were going to invest in Reddit, I would want the CEO to show that ultimately he/reddit is in control. He is a known, predictable quantity. He is also someone that can be replaced if things go too far off the rails. The whims of the pseudo-aristocracy is completely out of my control.

While this is true, a significant part of Reddit's appeal are the smaller communities, and they are staying closed in droves [1] [2]. There are thousands and thousands of these that are still dark, and have announced no intention of opening back up until their demands are met.

I understand that the big subs are either no longer dark, or can be forced to reopen. But that is significantly more difficult to force upon the smaller, more numerable subs.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...

[2] https://reddark.untone.uk

More to the point: it's that long tail of niche communities where people talk about the things that make for good site: searching. In marketing terms, these are extremely qualified leads. Many of them are people looking for reviews for something they're about to buy, or who want to talk about something they bought. It's exactly the kind of impression advertisers want to run an ad on.

> Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc)

As of this writing, per https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/, r/aww, r/gaming, and r/pics are all restricted to new submissions. r/music is the largest subreddit still in private mode.

The important thing is, what's the overlap between vocal users, and reddit contributors. It's always been known that reddit (as well as most of the internet really) is driven by a small % of power users. The posting, the commenting, the moderating. /u/spez says 90% of users use the default app, but I would wager that if you look at people who are actively contributing, that number will be much different.

Every person I know who uses reddit app does so very passively. They are read-only users who just ingest posts and rarely contribute. Yes the vocal minority is mostly mods and power users, but the argument here is that those are also the people who make reddit what it is.

While I think it is true, that many are overestimating the impact, I'd like to correct your comment:

At least r/gaming, r/aww and r/pics are still restricted and do not allow new post or comments.

So the protest is still going with some really big subreddits supporting the cause.

I posit that this means there is (c)

Mods are out, making a tempest in a teapot, but consumers are fine -for now. Medium/longerm, no one really knows if mods will permanently quit, and whether anyone replacing them (or not) will have an effect in traffic.

It appears like a bet. Not sure if its one i'd take though if i were the CEO.

> Roughly half of the biggest subreddits went dark. And almost all of them are back (r/funny, r/gaming, r/aww, r/todayilearned, /r/pics, etc)

Are they? They're not private, but (last I checked) at least some of those were not allowing new posts or comments.

As the resevoir of astroturfed marketing that is still a problem for Reddit.

> but there's a quieter, larger group that is fine with the official app and just wants a place to post.

That'd be me, although slightly different. I've been on that site a long time. I have an account is amongst the first thousand to join it. 17 years.

The official app is fine for me when I decide to use it, which is rare. I just don't use my phone for "apps" that often unless I really need to. Otherwise I'm still on the site daily, on a computer.

I don't get the hatred. It shows ads, unlike what you can get on the computer. Other than that? I guess I'm not the target market. It works.

Just like the new site, I can't comprehend how people like the official app. Although I've been using Reddit since 2008, having access on a mobile phone has always been vastly more convenient for me personally. Redditisfun, Diode, BaconReader, Apollo; all of these third party apps kept me going to reddit.

For me reddit without the superior functionality of a group of competing third party apps just isn't worth participating in anymore.

But I recognize a lot of people don't care, or won't be bothered by the changes. For me it just gets added to the list of sites I watched crumble to a shell of their former selves. I was addicted to Reddit in 08/09 and had many sleepless nights digging around niche subs for interesting stories. But like my daily slashdot habit from the early 2000's I move on when its time to give up on a site.

The lifecycle of website enshitification rolls on.

I'm glad it works for you, but its never worked right for me. It always seemed to be messing up links and the UI is so bad. I prefer my client to be minimal and functional and that's why I went with Reddit is Fun. Simple UI that worked and could manage the comment section successfully.

Honestly, it feels like the Reddit team saw one of the "Everything Apps" from China and thought its UI and UX where something to be modeled after.

I simply wish they would have attempted to buy Apollo and RiF. Then offer them up as official clients. RiF is the only way that I will interact with Reddit because of the way it is laid out and how functional it is. That's where my hate come from. They are effectively killing Reddit for many of us.

Do you use the new reddit.com? It’s almost unbearably slow and bloated, and rather than optimizing it they’re just stuffing it full of idiotic "social" features. And if you use old.reddit.com, well, I doubt it’s going to live much longer.

Honestly as someone who's tried a bunch of android 3rd party apps, I think the official one is good for browsing the site. Customization/feature set is very limited, and the TikTok-vertical-video mode is annoying, but you can swipe between posts horizontally which I use a lot to browse through posts and read comments. That flow isn't present on a lot of third party apps. Also, some other apps don't vary post layout by post type which means if I'm scrolling down through reddit and want to see full size images, it inevitably means link posts have enlarged thumbnails which takes up feed space.

If someone made the official reddit app have customizable colored comment depth lines and added a toggle for the video mode I would be very happy with it.

Obviously I'm just being picky here, I'm very used to the official app. Also, people can patch out ads on Android with revanced anyways.

I'm the same. PC master race, as they say ;)

And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward.

> And this is why I always say that "but but but the mods aren't getting paid" argument makes no sense. Clearly the mods are getting _something_ out of modding, and that's their reward.

That cuts both ways, however. If moderators get compensated with a sense of satisfaction rather than money, then site changes that affect their "quality of life" carry extra weight.

In plain English: if you do this for fun, then you stop doing it once it's no longer fun.

The API changes are the proximate cause of the protest, but the widespread participation suggests that many moderators were already near the breaking point. (ed: was capitulation)

Regarding 1: I don't believe the company saying this at all.

My $DayJob has been running Reddit Ads campaigns for the last couple months. Starting Monday we saw a ~60% drop in impressions. They have not come back up yet, they've continued to decline all week.

I can guarantee you that there are reporters who would love to talk to you. You should seriously consider approaching one of those, and I hope that you do so.

I remember seeing a public statement from Reddit saying their revenue hasn't been impacted by the blackout.

Maybe ad impressions are dropping while ad clicks remain steady? Assuming ads are PPC.

We saw that he's a fucking liar when dealing with Apollo. Credibility is now zero. Zero.

Yeah whether he’s ‘right’ is kind of immaterial - he’s shown himself to be untrustworthy, and that’s enough for me. I don’t deal with liars, they’re not worth my time.

Having modded a phpBB forum with <1k active users in the late 00s/early 10s, I used to have some sympathy for bearing the burden of being the world's biggest forum admin, but that all vanished when he started defaming the Apollo dev by spreading blackmail rumors. That's some Alex Jones-tier hyperbole, completely unbecoming of anyone in a position of leadership (and should be concerning to any reddit shareholders from a liability perspective).

What Spez is wrong about is the "opportunity cost" of third party apps that he keeps citing as reason for his "business decision." He has no basis to assume that the same people who use third party apps will use the official reddit app, or ever spend any money on reddit.

It mostly likely a combination. This could blow over with the correct PR campaign. Spez idiocy is making this way worse than it should have been and risking everything.

If Reddit just came out and said they can’t support third party apps. They are not profitable and they need to focus on their ad business. Third party undermine the business.

Inside they killed third party apps, while lying about it. They keep doubling down on this passive aggressive point of view.

This is making the community and mods realize that they are providing all the value and not getting any of the benefit. This is becoming much bigger than about third party apps.

> Spez is wrong, and is comfortable misrepresenting the situation to the public at minimum.

I don't know if he's right or wrong, but it's pretty clear that he's comfortable misrepresenting things to the public.

My theory: Reddit wants total control over the UI, the current one (as bad as it is) supports dangerous levels of discussion and collective cognition, and having the masses thinking for/between themselves is rarely a good idea if one is in the business of maintaining an illusory political regime. Just think of how much of reality is manufactured and distributed among nodes on this single platform.

I think it comes down to if there is a viable alternative. People don't stop what they like to do but they will move with sufficient pressure.

What people crave is not a site with up/down vote, or even a site with specific information about topics.

What they crave is community.

I am betting that the big winner of all this will be Discord.

I feel like discord has long since won this battle. It was over as soon as nearly every subreddit started to create community discords.

Which is still a bad thing as now all that hoarded reddit data that comes up when I look for problem solutions is going to move to tech support discord channels for that community and vanish from the public web.

The social media site cycle iterates again. I hope Discord takes a while to go to fall apart, it is nice for small group chats (just a couple old friends); it will be a pain to replace that platform.

I think the 10% active participants will be happy with discord. I'm less sure the other 90% lurkers will.

I don't know how much sway Conde Nast has. Reddit spun out in 2011, and since then has raised about $1.25bn (!!) dollars.

So I doubt Conde Nast has much say, if any, at this point.... and while I dislike everything spez is doing, I imagine he has the full backing of investors looking to IPO soon.

Whoever invested the $1.25B has the say now. Hence this drama.

But do these people realize what is actually happening?

And to think it all started because of API pricing increase...

Manager of an investment fund is told to invest in social media, so they do so. Put a bit of money into each one.

Market's aren't rational.

Has the WSJ reported on it yet?

Maybe they just want to burn it to the ground.

They are probably realizing that it's not the cash cow they wanted.

Ars Technica still puts this blurb at the end of their Reddit-related articles:

> "Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/the-reddit-protests-...

(That article is a day old now, and I still don't think it includes everything that's happened late this week.)

Largest, but not controlling. They have one Board member. The others are J.D. Power (David Habiger), Joy (Porter Gale) and Y Combinator (Mike Seibel), among others. They can't "step in and stop the madness."

$300 million of that was raised against a $3 billion valuation, and another $700 million against a $10 billion valuation. All in all fairly little dilution for Conde Nast / Advance Publications.

Interesting that Reddit seems to forget it really made it after Digg's disastrous web 2.0 launch.

They're hell-bent on getting everyone onto new Reddit (Reddit 2.0).

Hopefully this is the move that kills Reddit, and we get something even better to take its place.

It's being a lot of fun watching the Reddit shitshow these days, I keep wondering how low they can stoop to and they keep surprising me every day :)

If they're undeleting anything they're going to get fucked by EU privacy regulations. I hope they are.

Reddit is an independent subsidiary of Advanced Publications, a holding company. There are no adults in the "running the business" room. There is a BoD though.

But everyone invested is crazy rich and doesn't have time to waste micromanaging a $5-$50M investment.

With how hard they're doubling down, I'm beginning to wonder if their financial situation is just so bad that they have no other option than to keep doubling down and hope the IPO works out.

Even if Condé Nast has any influence over the situation, do you really think the "adults" there know anything about the situation beyond the status reports they're getting from Reddit leadership?

> If it is true that management at Reddit is undeleting deleted users and accounts, they may be creating a situation where they claim they have more users than they do. Because this is the result of management's actions, it could be viewed negatively by regulators and law enforcement.

Woah. Ianal but that sounds like a gdpr nightmere. Are they doing it to european accounts too?

Also, it would need to be disclosed before the IPO, you can't be undeleting users and counting them as active users.

>4. If it is true that management at Reddit is undeleting deleted users and accounts,

Haven't heard about accounts, but the HN thread about comments being undeleted had multiple HN comments confirming that their own comments they had scrubbed had been reverted

>How long until the adults at Conde Nast step in and stop the madness?

The company is bleeding cash. There's a good case to be made that this is the only way to make it stop bleeding cash. So either this needs to work, or the company will die anyway.

Probably wont happen unless people start threatening to cancel their wired/etc. subscriptions

It’s a dinosaur company with a dinosaur board. Other than the CEO of YC every other single member of the board is some aging boomer who has probably never used Reddit 2 days in a row

I feel bad for spez at this point. We obviously are seeing what he deems as the boards request of him. We have no idea what he really feels about everything going on

Saying spez is such a victim here seems quite wrong.

If spez is going against the will of the board/shareholders he’ll be fired any day now…

This seems like it's implicitly painting a false dichotomy between an implied autonomous Spez that is causing damage and a subservient Spez that is just a name attached to board action. How about this, if Spez is being asked to do stupid things by the board, he's failing extraordinarily to even cushion them with PR, which is the actual least he can do.

>We have no idea what he really feels about everything going on

"My bank balance is going to look so good once we finally IPO", probably.

But he sold is original shares in 2006. All of them, and for cheap. Any shares he has now are part of his CEO compensation package which is minuscule compared to the investors

Even though he’s a cofounder, his current position is like the one of a non founder ceo in a post-exit company

No way. spez is the one hamfisting this whole thing.

Yes Sam Altman paid Condé Nast millions for shares of Reddit. And he totally is against all this. But the all mighty spez is ignoring him and doing everything he wants

Sure

That is a very generous interpretation of his actions.

He’s (at this point) a non large shareholder CEO. His income is highly dependent on the board not firing him every single day. It’s not a great situation to be in

> It’s not a great situation to be in

I'll give it a shot!

Isn’t he already a millionaire? I doubt he’s living paycheck to paycheck.

Poor miserable spez taking in multiple millions every year in salary. He'll die without that income! Such a terrible situation to be, to simply be a millionaire.

Do you realize how tone deaf that sounds?

I'm not sure who you mean, but if it's sama, he's no longer the CEO of YC nor is he on the board anymore. Michael Seibel seems to still be on the board, but he's no longer the CEO of YC.

>We have no idea what he really feels about everything going on

Idk he's made his views quite clear at this point. Although he may edit them and everyone else's comments again.

It's capitalism, baby!

Also Conde Nast hasn't owned reddit for a while, they became an independent subsidiary of Conde Nast's parent company Advance Publications.

It's just upset nerds on the internet review bombing the app because they're raging at their issue of the week, it's not really more complex than that IMO.

Fool me once, ...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

I don't see much of an issue with them astroturfing the site when it first launched in 2005. Content begets content so something needs to get the ball rolling.

I don't think it's so much and issue as it's pretty clear evidence that the current leadership is capable and comfortable with using that tactic. If you told me Jamie Dimon had personally sanctioned fake reviews for the JPMorgan app, I'd tell you to fuck off, there's no way that man would know how to do that. If you tell me the /u/spaz is doing it himself, I'd roll my eyes and say obviously.

Why is Aaron Swartz not given co-founder status in this article? I'm not saying he was part of this review faking allegedly going on, just odd he's memory holed.

Because he wasn't a co-founder, he came in later and got a co-founder title retroactively for reasons. You can tell the story either way and there's nothing nefarious about failing to mention Swartz, who is not at high risk of being forgotten.

>Steve Huffman & I founded Reddit. We acquired Aaron Swartz's company infogami 6mos after we launched.

https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904

They were the original founders, he was given the title when he joined?

To be fair, most apps on the play store have these one-word five-star reviews...

I upvoted something this morning and got an immediate "Are you enjoying Reddit?" popup that was a gateway to leave a review, I am curious if that is related.

Perhaps, tho basically every app does that now (should be against policies IMO). At worst they tweaked the frequency flag

This and apps sending advertisements in push notifications are the two things that grind my gears about the iOS experience. The latter is already against the TOS as far as I’m aware but apparently never enforced since basically any food delivery app out there violates it.

Marketing push notifications used to be entirely banned. They're permitted now, but they're supposed to be behind a specific opt-in.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

It used to say:

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information.

I suspect Uber's in too-big-to-fail territory here.

Notification channels is legitimately top 3 features I missed going from Android to iOS as my daily driver. Rideshare apps (Lyft, Uber) are by far the worst offenders, with Amazon coming in a close third. I want notifications when I need to go downstairs and when I can expect service to be delivered, I do not need a notification for 10% off some aspect of the app I’ve never used and will now never use as a result.

It’s wild that I cannot opt out of these forced ads without fundamentally crippling the app itself.

Or the use of "should not" instead of "must not" is giving them the leeway they're using.

Is it fruitless to try reporting a delivery app to apple? I used to get literally 10 marketing push notifications per day from an app so I disabled notifications and now wait for them to call me to get my order (paying COD)

IIRC custom "are you enjoying this app? please review!" popups are against guidelines. Apple has an API to prompt for reviews which it enforces a limit of three prompts per year, and you can (supposedly, i've never seen the option) disable it system wide. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/requestin...

Both of these are correct, if you use the native API. A lot of apps hide behind their own “are you enjoying” pop up and then only give you the apple API prompt to leave a review if you say yes lol. I also dislike it, and have mine set to not allow in the system settings.

However I also have the native API prompt appear after ~2 weeks of use in my own app, at the end of the day good reviews and actual money to devs is the only way the business works, App Store is super competitive. I’d love to bypass the App Store and not deal with reviews and be able to cleanly offer upgrade pricing!

Yeah, I just tend to give one star and a review along the lines of "was pretty good, but popped up a marketing window that interfered with using the app." At least with the required Apple UI for the popup the app can't filter that out before it goes to Apple, although I assume this kind of review gets filtered out without consequence somewhere in the pipeline.

It's especially frustrating for food delivery apps. Other then messaging apps, there's no app I more want a push notification from than food delivery, but the sheer amount of spam forces me to turn off notifications.

Now my dinner is sitting on our porch getting cold because they "notified" me that my food was here, but didn't knock or ring the doorbell :-(

Hmm, I see a market for an app that can turn on and off notifications, e.g. "Allow Evil Delivery App to send me notifications for the next hour". It'll probably be impossible to pass through the app store overlords.

Or a notification "firewall". I know Pushbullet has permission to see all my notifications and to forward them to my desktop PC, I can also dismiss them from the PC, so I guess it'd be possible to make a similar app that filters notifications and dismiss the spammy ones.

The worst is Snapchat. I like Snapchat, I want to have it installed and with notifications turned on, but the advertising notifications were just beyond the pale. Clickbait text leading to content I have 0 relation to or interest in, sent super frequently

I thought this was disallowed nowadays, but I've been seeing it a lot from a lot of random different apps..

For a while, you'd get these "Enjoying app?" popups where yes -> "Post a review!" and no -> "Wad up your feedback and throw it in this trash can"

They disappeared for like 5 years, but they've been back in force recently

There’s a large body of growth hacking specialists, working in agencies or who go from one company to another, who try anything. They get slapped on their finger a lot but pretty much never face the consequences of pushing the line.

I suspect that some of them have tried that continuously for the last five years, repeatedly got their pop-up censored—until, one day, it went through because the person who cared about it left that position.

I’m astonished that Apple isn’t more proactive on those. Underwhelming apps not being downvoted and pushing people to use browser interactions will kill their ecosystem more surely than fraud.

Then again, the fiasco of trying to find the ChatGPT OpenAI app doesn’t sound like they care enough about that platform.

That one boggles the mind… how long would it take to clean up the imposter apps - a few hours? I guess leaving them up might be a 4D chess tactic against Microsoft

The one reality Apple must face is that if they were hostile enough to large companies in curtailing their bad behavior there would be more incentive for them to make noise about issues with the App store, either via the legal system, legislation, or supporting alternative platforms in earnest.

There's alot of people who, for instance, if Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google all supported a different platform, they could migrate with little effort.

Right now you're usually missing some or all of them which is why alt operating systems often have support for Android apps (APK compat) so users can have a lower switching cost.

iMessage is only so good in terms of lock in

When I get those I open open the store and rate them the lowest possible with the comment "begging for stars".

You have to do it in the app/play store directly as they usually highjack non 5-star ratings in-app.

Probably that’s it. So apple heavily rate limits this pop up(IIRC, an app can ask for a review 3 times in 365 days), it’s possible that they are spending their allowance to counter for the negative reviews that they are likely receiving right now.

The developer can't know if a dialog is displayed, so it's a standard practice to time these strategically but if you like you can spend it in a row.

I don't know why Android and iOS allow apps to nag people to rate them. Even worse is, they have also shipped SDKs to allow to directly rate the app without leaving it at all. One recent pattern I've also noticed is apps asking you to "enable" notifications after you've blocked them.

the problem is probably that you're not using old.reddit.com. reddit is unusable in its redesign form

Reddit has a lack of machine learning and infra investment to justify any sort of high IPO price, so their management hired ex Meta and Twitter employees and trying to figure out how to make more of what they have so they can go back to Wall Street with a stronger message during these stricter economic times where money is not raining from the sky like a few years ago. If Wall Street was smart they would wonder why invest in a platform that has barely evolved the format of discussion from threads and message board posts even though they had 18 years to do it. They should also consider the fact that conditions are ripe for disruption. Overall investing in Reddit right now as both an investor and a user seems very dangerous.

IMO, Reddit is valuable. It has the necessary scale in terms of footfall or eyeballs [whatever metric is appropriate]. Where they have failed is to evolve and deliver on customer promises. Not having sufficient mod tools, suboptimal experience on official apps are just few issues that get the majority of limelight. Inability to build enterprise products or tiered data API for businesses and education are also missing, that they could have leveraged.

If eyeballs were that important advertisers would be banging down their doors to place ads. Reddit's problem is that it's full of anonymous people that are hard to reach with targeted advertising.

It’s true that users are anonymous to others, but Reddit still has treasure trove of data on what likes, dislikes, political leaning and in some cases current emotional state/wellbeing of individual users.

Unless they are stating that they can’t process this data, they surely should have enough knowledge to do targeted ads.

Most likely scenario is that they have not invested enough on RnD and BD.

I would say it has devolved. It is unusable to me without using old.*.

unfortunately you’re not their target user/customer. Many people, that aren’t the HN crowd, are happy with swiping over loads of vids/photos in the app, happily generating advertising revenue. That’s where the money is now. Pivot the younger userbase to be some sort of TikTok clone etc. That is their aim. Get the advertising CPM.

TikTok has a good interface that is highly addicting. Reddit does not

I'm amazed at how unprofessional the management's reaction has been to the blackout. They could've waited a couple of weeks for the controversy to die down. Instead they further escalated the issue and are now making utterly nonsensical decisions like undeleting people's entire posting histories and now things like this [if this isn't a false flag]. What are they thinking?

I have avoided reddit for a couple of years now because I found the unpleasantness of it it was greater than any value I got from it. But I'd still follow links to specific reddit entries when discussions brought them up (on HN, for example).

But, purely because of Reddit's (and especially the CEO's) behavior around this issue, Reddit now occupies the same position for me that Twitter does: I'm not even following occasional links to it. It's radioactive to me. (Musk fans: I treated twitter this way before Musk bought it, it's unrelated to him.)

Not that this will affect Reddit in any way, but it's better for my own well-being.

They’re not thinking.

They never really have. They add features nobody wants all the time instead of making changes the community asks about for years. Who wanted live streaming or instant messaging on Reddit? Spez has edited users’ comments in the past as well.

Basically Reddit the company is incompetent for failing to understand their product and run by a child.

Reddit was always doomed - it's kind of a surprise it's lasted as long as it did. They call themselves the "front page of the internet" and that's what they've always wanted to be. But to be that, they have to be _completely_ open. No banning subreddits. No banning users. No deleting comments. And for the most part, that's what they were when they started (and I loved it back then). But that's not just not workable as a business model, it's not workable even if there was no cost involved, it invites too much blowback. The only reason we ever got the internet we have (or had, anyway...) was because it was completely decentralized, not in any one person's or organizations hands, and there was nobody to blame for "the whole thing" rather than one part of it.

I'm sure their NFT system will be super profitable /s

Instant messaging? Yeah, not sure about that, but reddit was really lacking there.

About live threads: the existing static threads were annoying to use for ongoing sport events for example. So I did like the idea, but the implementation was poor.

For live streaming, I meant live video streams. They were pushing it hard for a while. It was a lot of musicians taking requests and a therapy frog (?!). It was fun for a minute but the novelty wore off quickly and I doubt it was worth whatever they paid to build it.

It’s like they want to be every social media app at once instead of focusing on their strengths.

It's the "alternative facts" shitposting school of crisis management.

It would have been so easy for them to deescalate that they must think there's something to gain from it, they can't be that incompetent right?

It'll be interesting to see if the current outrage machine actually has any long term effect or if next year things will just be business as usual at Reddit.

The UI team who designed this atrocity of a web app needs to be made public and shamed and the executives who signed off on it need to be fired and never allowed to work in the industry again.

Yeahhhh I don’t think it’s engineers fault. Reddit used to be gorgeous. It’s about showing more ads, measuring engagements, fitting different (more casual) usecases as validated by A/B tests, etc. “the engineers and designers are just dumb” is intellectually lazy IMO, with no offense intended :)

Yes and no. The engineers and designers probably are dumb, but they were specifically hired by management to engineer and design management's vision. They would not have been hired if they did not share management's vision.

If they have better taste, then they should quit. I bet lots have, but they don't work at Reddit anymore.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU

Never said engineers. The engineering is fine.

Designers though..absolutely.

If what youre saying is true ..implementing dark patterns to increase ad sales and user engagement over quality ui, content, and a historical beloved ui is a big middle finger to their users.

All involved should be made public and shamed.

Apologies, I wasn’t reading carefully enough! Not sure I agree that UX is more or less culpable for dark patterns than SWE, but I see the distinction

Always found they distinction interesting. At my last role UX was very technical, and I’ve taken design/HCI courses as part of CS curriculum, so it’s always weird to see them sectioned off as a type of… artists, I guess? When HN dies down from the blackouts perhaps I’ll broach the more academic “what is an engineer?” question. :)

The term engineer is a little vague can be applied to anyone who makes something. My buddy who put pontoons on a picnic table could be considered an marine engineer. ;)

I guess graphic designers could be considered engineers, since they use color science and UX research.

There's definitely a subjective element there.

I personally define engineering where the design ends and code/implementation begins, otherwise its UI, UX, and design and even the tools used are different up to that point.

And typically in a lot of companies the design vs code responsibilities are differentiated as well.

Above the designers I'd take a hard look at the PMs, who probably broke what was a better initial re-design to maximize ads / metrics.

I wouldn't necessarily shame the developers and designers that were just doing what the PM/leadership at Reddit told them to do while getting paid to do so. It's a job - nothing more.

Yeah that's why I didn't mention developers. I know they're just doing what they are supposed to and I've been there spitting out shitty code for management.

This app monstrosity reeks of nepotism driven management or friend driven management. No UI team in their right mind would create something like this

Go to the popular third-party apps that are getting killed and scroll past the RIP messages for latest reviews and you will see a lot of one word 5-star reviews. Are those suspicious as well? No, that's just what people do.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda...

I think it's frivolous that people in that thread (and here) take this at face value.

I clicked your first link and scrolled for one whole minute.

0(literally zero, not "few") one word 5-star reviews found.

You might want to clarify what you actually meant.

Same here, and it's not region-targeted (I'm not from US/EU). This is borderline FUD.

> 0(literally zero, not "few")

Admittedly I included reviews like "Great app" and "Good. " but if we're strictly going on one word only:

"Awesome."

"Great!"

"Perfect"

"Works"

"Great"

"Perfect"

Not sure why that's a requirement though. Isn't the point that the reviews are low effort or is one word exactly indicative of something? If I bought fake reviews I would expect a tiny bit higher standard than that.

Edit: HN stripping emojis but they were thumb ups.

Especially people HERE on this site.

I've worked at companies that paid for reviews, and they usually don't look like this (I do not condone buying reviews personally).

If you're paying usually you won't be satisfied with 1 word reviews and they won't contain slang like "gud"... they'll be more like:

"This is good app that solved my problems"

Usually at least a sentence, vague, with a minor grammar error here and there.

I've also seen people try to sabotage an app by paying for reviews and trying to frame the app owner.

There are also cases where a review bomb will start to generate counter-protestors. These people often don't support the app or really case about the protest, but are simple contrarians who will go against the grain of any popular opinion.

I suspect this is annoyed users doing the minimum because they were prompted with a review request in-app and wanted it to go away.

It would be hilarious if they managed to get themselves banned from Google Play and Apple's App Store. After essentially killing off third-party apps, they'd have neither those nor their own.

(Disclaimer: I'm taking a lot of stuff at face value. I'm not privy to info about whether the API pricing is specifically intended to kill third-party apps, whether these ratings are definitely fake, or whether that can be traced to Reddit.)

I mean, stuff like this could quite easily be sabotage as retaliation for the other more legitimate problems like direct statements by reddit leadership. I have enough direct evidence to consider leaving, so I'm not going to spend lots of energy getting outraged about things that aren't as cut-and-dry.

Are you a current employee?

How’s the mood internally? What was the internal take on the API price increase? Are there problems that you feel are more worrisome that are not being discussed? Is the CEO popular? Are you “marked as available for a conversation” on LinkedIn?

Definitely not a reddit employee, though if I was right now, I wouldn't be for much longer. I'm moving to lemmy and building some tools to help others do so too.

They might mean leaving as a user

Yeah, that's what I meant. Sorry for the confusion.

I'm surprised how many people are willing to dismiss on its face the idea that a tech company doesn't engage in astroturfing despite all evidence to the contrary (eg Yelp, Glassdoor).

I don't know if it is or not but 5 star reviews with one word are suspiciou and the idea is entirely credible.;

This is going to continually happen with all UGC sites until the community enjoys collective ownership of the value they're creating. Until then the owners are incentivized to extract as much value as possible from their value-creators.

wish r/programming was still up, one of the last top posts was someone going through the post of a anti-protest account. one of the accounts recent posts was something along the lines of "Im sorry Im not allowed to generate content like that" in an advice post

Found a screenshot of it.

https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg

User profile in question has since been deleted: https://www.reddit.com/user/Joseph_Harris2

Archive that includes the comment (can't find an old reddit one though): https://web.archive.org/web/20230611231119/https://www.reddi...

The /r/programming thread has other examples of pretty obvious astroturfing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddi...

Nice! That's the one I was referring to. Pretty wild.

Surprised those didn't get more attention

Just clicked on a post. Now they are pushing users on phone browsers to either login or download native app. I don’t know when they changed it. I have been able to access posts without logging in.

There were (are?) A/B tests being done to lock people out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411

I wonder if Reddit just bought Apollo and sunset it over like 2 years (think darksky), if this would have all blown over.

The official iOS Reddit app was already from a purchased third party client that people used to like (AlienBlue).

The issue is the popular apps will inherently be at odds with Reddit's goals, because popular apps are popular due to their user-friendly experiences, and Reddit doesn't want a nice app where users can get in and out without interference. They want dark patterns that get you mindlessly scrolling forever, showing you ads, and tracking every tap and fling you do.

Right, agreed, which is why the very long sunset period would make people grumble but theoretically not yell for blood.

That said I’m not sure if it would work. Just speculating.

I think people would pick up the change of ownership and flee for greener pastures. Think MySQL.

Actually, to be honest... can anyone think of an example where a company bought a competitor with a large user base, and then just outright, or even gradually destroyed their acquisition? Mismanaged, sure. But destroyed? Nothing comes to mind immediately. Like was Vine destroyed or mismanaged?

Maybe this distinction doesn't matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apollo is only one of many third party apps. RIF, Relay, Sync, Narwhal, BaconReader, Readder, and Slide are the ones I can recall off the top of my head. There are dozens of others out there, and Apollo is iOS-only. Apollo just happens to have arguably the most dedicated userbase and made the most noise when these actions were taken, which is why it's front and center.

Not really, it's not like Apollo has 90% of the 3rd party app users, there are tons of other apps, and this would have happened regardless. Apollo just gave them a martyr to make it a bit easier

never underestimate the ability of redditors to find something to get angry about

I have received and rejected more offers for this particular app than any other.

I've never said, "No" to anything more in my life than YouTube Premium. Now that I've started browsing Reddit using Firefox on my phone it might just take the lead.

The 5 star reviews (via my IP and an anonymized proxy) don't look like that to me.

Then again, even real human reviews are kinda lazy jibberish so...

The Play Store displays different star ratings and comments depending on your country/language/device form factor (at the very least - probably also other dimensions).

I was looking at it through the browser, specifically on Bromite through the anonymized view through startpage.com.

I've noticed that the I'm getting WAY more push notification from Reddit (mobile web) than I ever did before.

They need to find the DAU one way or the other. I guess a lot of heavy active users would have started going dark as the blackout is extending. The power user curve must have started leaning left, and engagement might be tanking.

I would not be surprised if people who can pay monthly fees to a third party app for better experience, on an otherwise free website, would also be the ones buying gold.

I've used the official Reddit app for a few years. I don't find it that bad. Can someone enlighten me as to why it is terrible?

My biggest problem with the official Reddit app is the inefficient use of space. I've been using Reddit is Fun (RiF) for many years now and moving to the official Reddit app feels like having desktop zoom permanently enabled.

Aside: The recommendation feature is completely broken... By default it injects completely inappropriate content from seemingly random subreddits right in the middle of everything. Example (looking at the app right this second) I see posts from /r/AskReddit, /r/plumbing, and /r/linux_gaming then "similar to /r/other communities" (wasting vertical space) is a post from /r/PeopleFuckingDying titled, "sICk FuCkS INJecT cAt WiTH PEptO bisMal".

So unless you turn off the "recommend other subreddits" setting (on by default, could've been a useful feature) you're going to get that, "Random bullshit, go!" stuff injected into your feed constantly every few pages of posts. It'd be fine if they just recommended the subreddit but they include the day's top post from that subreddit and if you have NSFW posts enabled you may need to regularly visit /r/EyeBleach

No tabs.

But take a step back. We shouldn't _need_ to use an app to browse a sodding WEB SITE!

The only reason I installed the app is because Reddit deliberately made their mobile web site so appallingly annoying to use!

UX and UI design preferences notwithstanding, here's the list of bugs I regularly experience that drive me insane:

* Opening comments regularly takes 30-45 seconds, I sometimes think I mistapped, and end up with 2 post comments activities overlaid on top of each other

* Comments often open the wrong post comments

* Opening comments on a video post sometimes opens a non-loading video player with missing comments button, have to repeatedly re-open or try sharing the link to desktop in order to get to comments (assuming the next bug doesn't lose the post for you)

* Backing out of comments has a significant chance of returning you to the top of the feed instead of where you left off

* App just straight up crashes out of nowhere

* Autoplay settings don't seem to be reliable

* Another huge peeve of mine is due to the shared "video mute" setting in the video player, if you play a video with audio, the mute control may fade out and not return, requiring you to scroll to a different video, deal with the autoplay audio, and then hope you can use that video's mute button to get your feed muted again. This is especially annoying when the feed gets unmuted and I come across a video ad

I'm surprised by how many people say they use the official app without any issues, from my perspective it seems chock full of bugs, race conditions, and overall bad code. I don't know how people are managing to avoid these bugs.

PERFORMANCE

The app is so slow that it actually has loading screens and scrolls kind of janky sometimes on a 2021 phone.

LAYOUTS

Lots of wasted space as is fashionable these days. Layouts are very spread out and no compact mode is available. Top and bottom bar stick around at all times limiting space for actual content

FONTS

Font is weirdly bold, moderately large, and with lots of extra space as is fashionable these days, neither text nor layouts are customizable. In dark mode text below post titles is light grey making it hard to read.

ADS

Promoted posts with autoplaying videos even if you have gold (paid reddit).

AUTOPLAYING VIDEOS

No way to disable autoplaying videos.

NO MULTIREDDITS

Multireddits are user created mashups of multiple reddits allowing you to view a customized feed of a subsection of reddit here is an example.

https://www.reddit.com/user/michaelmrose/m/linuxm/

This is not exhaustive apps generally have lots of knobs to configure your experience to your liking. Personally I use reddit is fun

So many advertisements in the app. I use the browser on my phone and have tried, on a few occasions, the app and giving it a go, but am quickly deleting it after being bombarded with all the ads. They’re less pervasive and in your face on mobile web and I think I see fewer of them.

I said this elsewhere, but the experience in the reddit app and 3p apps is like browsing an entirely different social media platform.

The "old reddit" experience was basically: Only see posts from the subs you subscribe to, unless you want to see what's on "the front page of the internet" where you can go to /r/all (or /r/popular). Or if you're feeling brave, /r/new.

If you subscribe to a lot of self-post heavy subs you'll probably get a very snappy experience, not too many gifs/videos/memes/images etc, and you might even just want to browse with them closed by default.

"new reddit" is nothing like that. Intrusive notifications, suggested posts, ads in your face, oh and loading times are garbage (I don't even know how it's possible: a 3p app can serve things without loading screens at all, wtf is Reddit doing?)

I dislike the notifications that I get (initially until I disable them) for subreddits I don't describe to.

Apollo is also just /so much/ better. It is 95% of my reddit experience.

Once it's gone I'll probably just move onto old.reddit.com. With the way things are though, I wouldn't be surprised if old.reddit.com gets removed.

It sucks for blind community for example. It doesn't affect me personally but the way reddit has handled this whole saga is "short term corporate profits".

Reddit is dead. Highest contributors will move on.

You've just gotten used to it.

If you've felt the greatness of third party apps, then there's no going back.

i dont think thats what people are saying, they're just saying that 3rd party apps shouldnt be destroyed. people have built companies and they're livelihoods around them.

Reddit has essentially declared war on its users, they’re going to fight back.

too many reddit.com posts getting linked up in here.

Is it weird that people are into continuing tech drama?

No. But it's weird that reddit would engage in this obvious vote rigging at a time when they are under a microscope.

Reddit and Twitter will be interesting to look back on as case studies

Will case studies be allowed under the dictatorship?

DONT USE THEIR APP!!!

They've purposely remove i.reddit and reddit.compat first to not provide a proper mobile web experience.

then they cut off their api's to mobile developers.

Don't reward their deplorable behavior

It all depends on us now. If we just leave our content there and don't delete our users, it will continue like nothing happened.

Um, just a thought. Shouldn’t people be posting these things outside of reddit? The admins can always take down posts like this.

Does anyone else notice the increasing number of bots following you on Reddit? It started ~2 weeks ago. Before that point, I never got follow notifications from anyone.

Before that point in time there were feeds to other sites that let mods and devs catch that sort of spam, using tools developed by 3rd parties. Reddit cut the feeds off. Go figure.

Will Google look into this? Probably not.

This Reddit thing is starting to border insane conspiracy. This is a boring legacy tech company who’s best selling point is being a discussion forum for the chronically mid. The employees are probably checked out and hiding at home, I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.

Is it that big of a stretch to assume Reddit boosted their own apps ratings with fake/paid reviews, given one of the main arguments is that their apps still suck while they're killing third party ones?

> I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.

Employees are probably not happy but they are still working. And you can literally find a page offering paid reviews in seconds, add an item to _a basket_ and pay with a credit card

> is it that big of a stretch to assume

Absent evidence, for the HN front page, yes.

I wouldn't be surprised if a marketing team, either internal or external, coordinated contractors. It's their job.

its also not a big stretch to acknowledge anybody could harm anybody else’s app with an astroturfing campaign

something more obvious right now given how bad the astroturfing campaign is. one word reviews?

everyone knows Reddit is vulnerable to a thousand cuts right now, its the perfect time to do so

I’ve seen that in a lot of crypto projects, because people consistently develop a parasocial relationship with the founders and then try to digitally harm them after the founders dont do what they expect

this looks and acts like the same thing

It's not an insane conspiracy when you acknowledge that they bootstrapped their community through fake accounts[1]. This shows they have no reservations about using deception to increase their brand's reputation. Fake app reviews falls into that category.

1. https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

They (admins) recently started a couple of new German language subreddits, that were 1-to-1 translations of existing successful subreddits, like r/showerthoughts and r/explainlikeimfive. They very clearly created fake accounts that then posted badly translated copies of existing posts from those originals onto the new subreddits. Then after that they sent unsolicited private messages to users subscribed to certain organic German language subreddits (like r/de) inviting people to those new subreddits.

The r/de subreddit is still in blackout, so I can't really provide a working source right now, but once that ends, you can check it out here: https://reddit.com/r/de/comments/13orxh0/milde_interessant_r...

not to mention the ceo also edited user comment because he disagreed with it, banned subs with no consistency, and for the r/place event, people caught admins cheating by placing tiles with no cooldown. who knows what other shady stuff goes on in the background

I’ve heard of many schemes like that, and with one exception, employees are not involved or even told this is happening. One senior executive with the budget and incentives to make a metric go up contracts an external party.

The one exception is a company that asks employees to review their employer. They seem to verify that the reviews are coming from actual employees.

Yeah Spez and a marketing director probably hired a bot farm or a mill in a developing country. If you use your employees, it’ll leak.

Maybe circa/before 2020, I'd have agreed, but something changed with Reddit in 2021. Before that the site was your average "moderately functional trainwreck" that you can call pretty much every social media site out there.

In 2020, for some reason Reddit went hard on just... loony shit. Things like pushing the redesign even though it was blatantly not ready for use, switching their mobile site for some completely dogshit PWA that doesn't even function properly 75% of the time. In terms of community, they started putting people older Reddit had pretty much exiled for being horrible on the emergency mod reserve list (which notably led to them putting a thrice accused rapist on the mod list for /r/rape, who only deleted their account after completely different drama linked them back to their old identity). They also hired a convicted pedophile as an admin, mentioned her by name and surname in the announcement of her joining and then tried to double down when people expressed discomfort when they found the conviction (and even banned people for pointing it out).

Similarly, things like April Fools went from "niche fun tech thing" to "next marketing campaign". Older Reddit had things like The Button - simple in premise, utterly byzantine, entire community was user-invented. Newer reddit just has completely given up on doing anything like that, the closest it came was trying to redo /r/place, and it failed completely (since e-celebs knew it was coming and began mobilizing their userbase to hijack it).

They also completely gave up on trying to moderate spam when COVID-19 began; it's now all up to the mods of individual subs to get rid of it. Reddits admins don't bother banning spam accounts anymore, so mods have resorted again to using shared banlists just to get around repost karmafarm bots.

The company is completely floundering when it comes to community management and it's hard to keep presuming it's not malice when it's this consistently bad. Buying 5 star reviews for their apps is genuinely not out of the managements ballpark.

I think you’re underestimating how little work an App Store astroturfing campaign would be

As a side note for others, mid means mediocre or poor of quality, and hence chronically mid means extremely mediocre or very low quality.

Chronically doesn't mean extremely. It means long-term or inescapably.

On one hand, I find the phrase "mid" to be pretty fucking awful, but on the other I'm old (30s) so who knows.

Slurs like "chronically mid" don't belong on HN.

It also seems to be a sly reference to the “midwit” meme.

It’s not a conspiracy if it’s just one person doing it. All indications point to spez being in an increasingly tenuous situation. He created a firestorm and now he’s desperate to get out of it.

His real problem is that he cast his lot with the “strongmen” (such as Elon). Now he can’t walk that back without appearing weak and (even more) incompetent to his investors. It really sucks to be him right now!

There's a playbook people who have zero control over a situation use to try and trigger influence anyway, and "insane conspiracy" is one of the chapters of that playbook.

Like it or hate it, Reddit can run however Reddit wants, and the vast majority of its users won't care, basically no matter what, as long as the core value prop (endless scrolling of relevant content) remains.

Subs going dark for a few days doesn't materially move the needle to the owners of Reddit, and in fact I'd bet a lot of the "normal" users are only dimly aware of how, why, or even if it happened at all. Regardless, if they are aware, they're probably mad about it, and want their content back.

Mods have no control here in the long run, users who are upset have no control in the long run, so the only hail mary chance they have is creating chaos, so that's what they do. Steady hands at the wheel are the antidote, and we'll see if spez has what it takes. So far no, but it's not over.

They faked in the beginning, so maybe now too.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

What sort of effort do you think this takes? I did a quick search for 'buy android reviews' and there are tons of sites that seem perfectly legitimate. The prices are also extremely reasonable, the reviews are guaranteed, and it's not illegal.

The only thing you have to risk is if you somehow get discovered and your reputation takes a dive, but Reddit's already made it extremely clear that they take their current users for granted, so from their perspective there is probably 0 perceived risk and a reasonable potential upside if they believe their review score can help drive more signups tomorrow. So basically you're looking at a low effort, low cost, low risk, mid+ reward type task.

That's how reddit started out - posting fake comment to make the site seemed more popular[0]. And how they continue to operate - admin editing user comment because he disagreed with it, then posting a terrible apology[1]. Also how they continued to things like giving admins ability cheat by putting down r/place tiles with no cooldown[2], and censoring the canvas[3]

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1x6iyo/til_t...

[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/tv2lmx/redd...

[3]https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/twfvl6/the_truth_in_...

I'm having trouble believing that you could believe anything alleged is out of reach for a random tech company.

What do you do to prevent falling for unfounded or false claims?

> This is a boring legacy tech company who’s best selling point is being a discussion forum for the chronically mid.

I've been a redditor since day one and I can't figure out what this sentence is supposed to mean. Can you flesh this out some more?

What is chronically mid?

Is this a new feature i'm unaware of?

He means mid as in mid-tier people. Average folk. Salt of the earth. You know, morons.

I think his attitude biases his thinking, though. But I guess I can't truly understand how an alpha like him thinks :)

He is calling you a plebe.

I think it means mid grade.4, 5, 6, or 7 on a scale of 1-10. Basically saying it's poor quality. OP please correct me if I'm wrong.

It’s just OPs superiority complex for being on hacker news instead of “low-grade” Reddit.

Mid is slang for average. Same connotation as calling someone basic

you can buy likes for trivial amounts of money from indian review farms

On long enough timescales, capitalism destroys anything good.

The root cause behind all of this drama is Reddits need to maximise their valuation, and the impact that has on their decision making.

I’m driving this week across several states and it’s quite depressing how many small town grocery stores have a recent Dollar General next door that will kill them sooner or later (mostly sooner).

We really need more ways to measure value than dollar bills.

just gonna leave this here: https://kbin.social

It does look rather suspicious.

Very high likelihood of a bad actor doing this. Reddit is already drowning, there is zero chance of this changing the narrative in places where it matters (media).

That was my first thought too. However as someone pointed out above though senior Reddit management has a history of creating fake accounts, plus there was that incident of using database access to alter someone’s comment so this seems right up their alley in terms of ethics

It doesn’t matter what someone said or not. It makes no sense to do stupid one-word reviews that can trigger an app review if people report that an app is generating fake reviews, which is likely the intention by the bad actor.

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