Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment 7 months after the APIcalypse
Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment 7 months after the APIcalypse
Apollo dev: "I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership... cares about developers anymore."
TLDR: not worth reading the article, it's just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you'll see the "this content has been removed by" (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in "hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now". It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests
lasts(edit: lasted) for "weeks" - not the more truthful "months", not "permanent changes", but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as "news".
totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats
The author asked multiple devs about these things - they all had the same reply: Can't talk about it because NDA.
more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
That's not the stated objective of the article, which was "Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment."
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”.
No, it doesn't. You don't call it an "APIcalypse" if you're shilling for Reddit. You don't pull out the most critical quote right at the top if you want to shill for Reddit. ("I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership... cares about developers anymore.") You don't mention Lemmy, or Threads, or Tildes if you're shilling for Reddit.
You admit that you're biased; good, thank you. This article isn't.
It is possible that both are true.
gottem
I'm still protesting. Haven't been back since. Probably will protest until the sun is cold and black.
I've been back to Reddit a couple times... to make sure the automatically blanked content stays blanked 😶
Very rarely there may be something that you need. Even so, it is becoming increasingly rare to find that knowledge. Spez decided that he owns it now, though some of us here happen to disagree:-).
Nor do you need a mobile app to use Reddit in any case:-). Anyway I think I am with you - we almost hear more about how Reddit is doing here in the Fediverse than we did back when we were on Reddit:-).
Meh. I mean it's not surprising. A lot of people including open source enthusiasts stuck with reddit despite everything.
Valid, but from a truth-in-reporting standpoint, those protests went on for MONTHS and MONTHS. Which I suppose could technically be reported as "weeks", but they could also be reported as "femtoseconds" and yet... seems to lose accuracy that way? :-P
And like, I understand that the title of the article means that it is focusing narrowly on third-party apps not the state of Reddit as a whole, but (1) the scope still includes anything that it does choose to say, e.g. how long those protests lasted, and (2) it does not mention anywhere how e.g. third-party apps compare to the official Reddit app, or what their market share is with respect to one another, which seems the two most relevant questions of all?!
Continuing on, a third question could be: do people like those apps? From the comments even in the article, it seems not... but without usage stats, even an app used by a single person counts the same as e.g. the former Apollo.
i.e., How DOES the third-party app market look nowadays, after the protests? After reading this article, I still have no idea whatsoever... All I know is that there is a list of apps, which sounds like a singular detail devoid of any context that Reddit would very much like us to know, rather than anything that I would actually care about knowing in order to get a better picture of the situation as a whole.
But that's just my two cents.:-)
It's always good to keep one's shill detector up on Ars vis-a-vis Reddit given the ownership situation. I've so far not seen anything that rises to that level, including here, because of the audience. If you're on Ars and don't know what Reddit is, this story isn't going to be of interest and thus is not going to push you to try using Reddit.
That said, this story only seems relevant to the minuscule-if-at-all-extant sliver of Ars readers who know what Reddit is and haven't been using it only because they've been waiting to hear what paid apps look like eight months after the whole fiasco started. That's not a demographic I've ever seen represented in the comments.
There's quite a few mentions of Lemmy/Kbin in the comments, so at least word is spreading.
I mean, only like 3 comments out of ~116 total, but yeah, they were solid mentions I agree.
It’s always good to keep one’s shill detector up on Ars vis-a-vis Reddit given the ownership situation. I’ve so far not seen anything that rises to that level, including here, because of the audience. If you’re on Ars and don’t know what Reddit is, this story isn’t going to be of interest and thus is not going to push you to try using Reddit.
That said, this story only seems relevant to the minuscule-if-at-all-extant sliver of Ars readers who know what Reddit is and haven’t been using it only because they’ve been waiting to hear what paid apps look like eight months after the whole fiasco started. That’s not a demographic I’ve ever seen represented in the comments.
I mean, I remember it being weeks myself.
But it's not as if things went back to the way they were either. There were definitely effects due to those weeks.
Some subs did not protest at all. Some users even went into subs dedicated to discussing the topic like Reddit Alternatives and anti-protested, and still others went so far as to brigade many small, entirely unrelated niche subs, taking over polls asking the actual MEMBERS of those subs what they wanted to do, making any discussion of the situation held hostage by a toxic barrage of venomous filth, often by accounts that seemed to have been created for just that purpose in mind due to their highly suspicious age. In my own sub, we had to record comments by hand b/c we felt that we could not trust automated polling as a result.:-(
Some subs shut down for merely a day or two (as mine did). A few more shut down for a little longer - measured in days to weeks.
But several subs, including some of the top ones on the entire site, shut down for MONTHS. And some even shut down permanently, only to have their decisions overturned by Reddit who sent in scabs to open them back up, months later.
So... it was a spectrum ofc, and perhaps the subs you were interested in were primarily affected for a couple weeks. But on the whole, the long tail of the protests lasted much longer than a mere few days, or even weeks, and the likes of John Olivier pic spam lasted for months.:-)
Narwhal made a small amount of profit before, thanks to a small ad at the bottom of the app. Narwhal 2 "barely" makes a small profit, too. However, most of the money from Narwhal 2's subscription fees goes to either Apple or Reddit.
This makes me irrationally angry. The dude was making something people wanted to use, without getting much of anything from it, and now the men upstairs have decided they're not happy with that situation unless they can force him to squeeze his users for a little bit, so that they can keep it, and leave him still with pretty much nothing.
*rationally angry
Great band name!
The essential part at the end:
“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit's API FAQ page and said the company couldn't comment further because it's in a quiet period and doesn't "comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements." ”
We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.
More telling is their silence. Who doesn't want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.
Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.
They might want to, but it's illegal.
The "quiet period" is a reference to an SEC law that forces any company to be radio silent for a strict 40 day period during the IPO process. Reddit is in that period now and therefore they cannot say a word.
JPMorgan was fined almost a billion dollars for answering questions on a phone call during their quiet period.
I love this personally. The admins had a vision for the future that was not based in any form of reality, but rather the same wealth extraction tactics that have collapsed so many other services.
Anyone who remembers the Digg exodus, there are reflections of that in reddit's stittastic new policies.
Just more proof that enshittification isn't a slow erosion of quality over time but rather direct actions taken by a profit-seeking leadership.
If you go back now and look in older technically complex threads it is a wasteland of [Deleted] and various account scrubber script Lorem Ipsum as a good chunk of decent contributors have left and burned their accounts.
Good.
Looking forward to the day that they don't prop up google anymore.
I no longer have a reddit account I'm often I search and a reddit thread comes as a result but I can't read it because you have to sign in to view "18+" content. So annoying.
I'm pratty sure old.reddit.com lets you bypass this.
for now..
I have an old iPad on my nightstand and I paid for Narwhal. I have no idea why I can still use it like the 'old times' but I'm grateful that I can still browse Reddit.
It's a husk of the former site I loved but the niche communities I care are still there. I wish for and 2nd and 3rd, 4th etc dramas on Reddit to get people here but sadly it's a numbers matter game.
Once we reach critical mass it's all over for reddit. Federation is so much better at a fundamental level
Community isolation is still a big problem. Federated services like lemmy will never reach critical mass until owners start limited communities to force more user interaction, and cross posting becomes more streamlined. My favorite proposal as a solution is to allow mods of a community to subscribe to another community, and allows it to synchronize posts and comments.
Oddly Joey still works if you moderate at least one subreddit (which you can immediately make private)
I still use Boost for Reddit. It's never stopped working.
Some folks have api leniency periods. It will eventually stop working
I'm amazed RedReader doesn't get more love. It was my chosen third-party app before the API changes and it continues to function flawlessly (with the exception of NSFW content) after the changes. I have stopped browsing Reddit at this point, but feel that a list like this really should celebrate RedReader more..