Apollo is dead. Long live Apollo
I was actively using the app on my phone and it suddenly crashed at 4:10pm PDT. I thought it was just my phone acting up but then I realized that’s about 12am UTC. With the death of Apollo also goes the metaphorical death of all the best parts (IMO) of the internet: open-source, creativity, entrepreneurial spirit. Sad day. I guess I’ll go outside now.
Edit: sorry, Apollo wasn’t open source. That’s what happens when I make a post while two beers deep I guess. Hopefully you get the general spirit of what I was trying to convey.
389 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadApollo was Open Source?
See here https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend
Such a shame. Made it super easy to browser Reddit anywhere.
The same dev also has “mini” Apple Watch apps for Steam, Wikipedia, and Elon’s Musk.
The latter is a necessity but for the former there’s other communities to satiate my needs. It’s just that it’s a bit of a fragmented way of diving into my interests.
Is there such a thing as a forum aggregator?
EDIT: was in junethack while typing this, yes 5pm PDT is 12 UTC :)
> Well, looks like Reddit pulled the plug a little early. Apollo started crashing, but I just manually revoked my token and it looks like it fixes the crashing, but no more Reddit access haha. Those folks are fun to the very end! > @ChristianSelig > 6:49 PM (CDT) · Jun 30, 2023
Source: https://twitter.com/ChristianSelig/status/167492828678112461...
and yes, I totally get that there's a wider point to be made in reddit and twitter both going hostile on the same day.
Reddit, you’ve burned so much goodwill.
I’ve been an enthusiastic user for over 14 years. Now I’m planning to delete my content.
At one point recently, I got excited about applying for an engineering leadership position with you, but this debacle has made me realize your senior leadership is not who I want to be reporting to.
As such, and I'm not a lawyer and can't promise this is true, I suspect that reddit couldn't actually do takedowns on someone who's archiving their user-provided content. Any specific user whose content was archived without their consent could do so, however.
It also doesn't let you touch comments/posts that you cannot access - i.e, if you post on a subreddit, and it goes private, you won't be able to see, edit, or delete any of the comments on that subreddit unless it goes public again. They just won't appear in your history.
Put the two together, and it doesn't matter what kind of delete script you run: if you launch it on your /new page, it'll drop the last 1k comments, minus any comments made in subreddits that might still be private, and stop there. Older content, and content in subreddits that returned to being public after the fact, will still be around.
It was super convenient to be able to display a sub or /r/all on my phone's home pages, and I used it every day to keep up with current events or my favorite hobbies without needing to open any apps. For many years that's been a core part of how I use my phone, and I will sorely miss it :(
If Reddit someday added something as nice as BaconReader's widgets to their app I might give it a shot. But looking at the design they used for their iOS app, which apparently does have a widget, I don't have high hopes for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/kdycmj/introduci...).
Other than that, no plans to use Reddit on mobile anymore. One less bad habit, I guess.
Guess it’s all a moot point by now.
https://youtu.be/OwYw2i2icNg?t=430
The articles themselves would be nice to keep around, I haven't found enough RSS feeds to make my feed reader app populated enough. I will probably make a userscript to disable comments here, use Kagi search to minimize the amount of Reddit in my search queries, and overall use a solution like Screen Time to try to limit use of other sites I spend way too much time on.
I know a lot of users are going to Lemmy or Kbin, both of which are on the Fediverse.
Something that lets you check it once a day and not feel like you missed anything. etcetc
I think there were good things about Reddit but it is scary how deeply Reddit (and frankly, HN) have driven muscle memory and addictive doomscroll behavior. I'd love to see more people explore features which attempt to extract user value from these platforms but minimize addictive features.
Difficult, but a fun area to explore.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just another Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community:
https://sociables.com/community/Sociables/board/trending
This looks awesome dude way to go :D
I forgot the link was in this thread (didn't bookmark it). It was a real pain trying to find it via google or startpage (until I remembered what thread I was reading last night) I remembered "sociable" but searches for "sociable social media platform" and even "sociable site:news.ycombinator.com" yielded zilch.
Long story short I'd suggest working on your SEO just a little you're competing with "sociable.co". But design+concept are 10/10 as far as I'm concerned, god speed o7
https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning
Also +1 to https://tildes.net
The important thing: use multiple sites to hedge your habits against such issues.
It's still very quiet compared to what reddit was. Not yet enough users to support the niche communities which made reddit special (IMO), but I'm trying to contribute anyways, hopefully building it up a bit.
Losing reddit is sad, the feeling to me is a bit similar to when we lost supernova, then what.cd. An internet jewel that will never be the same again.
(Btw, I have Tildes invites for anyone who still sees this comment. Feel free to reply to ask for one).
Just Discworld and its hilarious inhabitants.
http://wefwef.app/
[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wHvqQwCYdJrQg4BKlGIVDLks...
Edit: For those interested, the patch just lets you use your own API key. But the dev is no longer supporting the app and there's no telling whether the bring-your-own-key strategy will work in the long term, considering Reddit's recent behavior.
Well, the server backend was recently opened:
https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend
I just downloaded the official app and logged in. In 3 minutes I deleted it.
Ignoring design issues, all of a sudden the official app grabbed ALL Reddit links and if I viewed Reddit in Safari there was an unremovable “Open in the app” banner above the Safari content that couldn’t be removed.
No way. Deleted.
The last year has just destroyed so much of the value I get out of the internet.
I would sell the app even if they reversed course. I wouldn’t trust they wouldn’t do it again. I wouldn’t trust they’d ruin me some other way.
If they had said “we’re doing this in 6 months” and then listened to the community, that’s different. But Spez burnt the bridge to the ground and poured toxic waste on it.
A Virginia law was signed into effect on May 12th that required commercial entities that distributed "material harmful to minors" to verify the age of the users or be exposed to civil penalties. That law goes into effect in 3 hours.
Additionally one of the API changes which also goes is into effect is that they won't serve NSFW content on the paid API. So even if you pay you only get half of Reddit.
Any NSFW stuff (due to laws, investments, advertisers, anything) had nothing to do with the API decision. They may have done them at the same time, but it wasn’t needed.
IANAL but I'll put down $100 that this law has nothing to do with reddit's API changes. First person to prove me wrong gets it. I'd like a quote from spez that says, paraphrased "If Virginia didn't pass the law we wouldn't have started charging for the API".
> Huffman has argued the changes are a business decision to force AI companies training on Reddit’s data to pony up, but they’re also wiping out some beloved Reddit apps, and thousands of subreddits have gone dark for days in protest.
…
They want to charge for what they believe the data is worth.
Not for usage, but value.
Counter argument: it’s not their data to charge for. And if they want to claim it is their data then they should be held accountable for the content therein.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t recoup costs for access to said data. You do after all pay taxes and get access to local libraries and archives. But they shouldn’t be extorting third-party developers.
They built a platform so that we could create communities and manage them how we want to.
We posted information. We created content. We exchanged ideas, had discussions, and we all helped each other.
I’m fine with them recouping their costs. I’m fine with them even making a bit off of it. However,
> I'll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
…
> For reference, I pay Imgur (a site similar to Reddit in user base and media) $166 for the same 50 million API calls.
My understanding is that Christian is grandfathered into an older plan on Imgur. Having said that, the Mega plan is $10,000 per month for 150,000,000 requests. If we use this pricing, 50,000,000 api calls is $3,333.34 (vs Reddit’s $12,000)
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
https://rapidapi.com/imgur/api/imgur-9/pricing
While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th.
The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th.
---
I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."
I do agree with you here - Virginia's mature content law probably had something to do with NSFW content in the API. The API pricing was just poor decision making occurring at the same time. (Apologies if my previous comment was a little unkind).
Two months before starting to charge $0.24 per 1,000 requests is nothing but unreasonable.
I wish Reddit had just plainly said, “We don’t want third party clients anymore.” This whole thing would’ve been cleaner. Still bad, but I don’t think it would’ve been nearly as ugly.
If they had presented the ridiculously high cost of API access to users it would have been more overtly user hostile. By targeting the app developers the surface area of who they were directly screwing was smaller (though they are of course actually screwing all the users of those apps anyway).
This also explains why reddit made all sorts of illogical arguments to make the app developers seem like the bad guys, to try to deflect blame away from them and to the app developers.
They were just super incompetent at doing that effectively, so it was incredibly transparent.
It would have been a much more logical change for everyone involved.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said 95% of iOS app users use the official app.
> You go to the App Store, you type in Reddit, you get two options, right? There’s Apollo. You go to one, it’s my business, and you look at our ads, use our products. That’s 95 percent of our iOS users. The rest go to Apollo[…]
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...
Rate-limit unauthenticated requests per API key and authenticated requests per account. Problem solved. Turn $0.12/month users into $5.99/month users, and don't worry that the 3rd-party apps aren't showing ads - because Premium users don't get ads anyway.
I see why it’s useful. But I couldn’t find a way to turn it off so it was messing with my normal workflow.
An iOS developer for JIRA taught me this when I submitted feedback that the JIRA app suddenly stopped intercepting links (probably because I had inadvertently long-pressed to open a link in safari, not knowing I was setting a preference by doing so)
I tried twice already to use Dystopia, but I can’t really force myself. Probably just for the best to give up on Reddit.
I picture the hordes of zombies in The Walking Dead, unknowingly led by a select few ghastly humans wearing zombie masks.
So if you’re constantly popping in and checking things throughout the day, that extra time and effort really adds up. By killing these user friendly apps that a large portion of power users and mods preferred, it’s Reddit showing all of these dedicated unpaid contributors that their time and effort don’t matter to the company. Steve spit directly in all of our faces repeatedly over the past month and now most of us are actively rooting against the success of an IPO. I hope he continues to be the 3rd most successful Reddit cofounder, and his name never gets mentioned in a positive light within YC/HN.
most of the "power users" on the reddit (and I'd guess every other website) are good old fashioned desktop users
The Reddit app is designed to keep you scrolling down your feed past advertisements.
Apollo and its compatriots were used by actual users; they may not have made up a huge percentage, but they made it what it is.
The people who paid for a third-party app to make using and working with Reddit easier and more convenient are the power users.
I don't know if you're a regular Reddit user, but if you are have you looked through /r/popular in the past? Recently? What's bubbling to the 'top' of Reddit right now is significantly lower quality content than what used to be there. A lot of that is likely due to so many mods effectively going on strike, but do you think that's going to improve when Reddit's employees remove all those mods, reopen subs and appoint whoever wants to request moderator status as the new mods? Hint: it's not going to be all sunshine and flowers.
I like what one of the mods of IIRC /r/canning posted within the last week or so when Reddit started getting serious with threatening messages - he noted that the mods of that subreddit are there because they have specific subject matter knowledge and canning things wrong kills people. If that subreddit is forced open with mods appointed by Reddit employees and dangerous advice becomes a regular thing, does Reddit have any liability? Can an attorney make enough of a case that they do to drag them into court?
I feel you did great!
Until today I had not really mentally processed that Reddit as we knew it was going away. Until a hour or two ago I started get Rate Limits on Reddit Sync. At first I thought it was some kind of bug. Then noticed the date.
Like others mentioned, it will take some getting used to not having it. I've already noticed since the blackouts that "site:reddit.com" is less effective than it was even a month or two ago: some of the key subreddits I used have gone and stayed dark. I wish the owners of Reddit the best in turning their website into TikTok. But if I have need for mindless entertainment, I'll probably just use TikTok directly. The small communities of likeminded people are not as easy to replace, and will be missed.
And even if I wanted to keep using Reddit, a lot of brain drain has already happened, so it’s so much less useful already, and it really feels like one of my favorite tools is suddenly obsolete.
I remember when I accidentally became a moderator of /r/science because they asked for variety of domain expertise and I’m a geographer and c’mon… nobody’s a geographer. It was a fun experience. Then became an educational one. Then frustrating. Then thankless. Then I stopped.
I’m happy for the lessons. I’m sad it died years ago.
“Study Proves Republicans are Dumb”
It’s one of the laws of the internet: as the size of a community grows, the quality approaches a stadium full of drunk sweaty sports fans.
I get it!
The opposite has occurred and it wasn't very pretty to look at.
/r/drama banned people who posted in /r/teenagers and brought to surface a whole bundle of pedos
Granted, I don't think anything will change, but complacency is the moment reddit truly dies.
Fast forward 15 years, I now have a PhD largely due to the path that community helped set me on. You could follow a very similar journey of maturity for me through my Reddit history (and that’s the main reason I haven’t flushed my posts, even if I was an idiot at 14 that was my personal journey). The Reddit I joined changed a lot — we had characters like Bozarking and there was a strong libertarian element in contrast to today’s left leanings. I remember the Digg exodus changing Reddit fundamentally but not necessarily for the worse. The big subs declined by the niche ones blossomed and taught me much about my hobbies.
While I don’t expect to fully leave (Google will lead me there or I might have a question where I am not sure what other site has a pertinent community to ask), my use will decline 99% or more. I have long been aware a lot of Reddit has sucked but there was still a lot of value to be had. It’s also been apparent for years that Reddit, the company, has zero clue what users actually want (hint: it’s not 3 separate chat implementations, nfts, and profile pictures), however this open hostility towards the users and mods who volunteer their time (mods have had their problems but generally they are good, after all, you only notice the bad mods).
I won’t miss most of the absent scrolling I do on Reddit, but it also has been a bit like my childhood friend passing away. I am not sure what my online future will look like, but it will be strange without Reddit being there.
It was also a default one, IIRC, and when I joined had far more activity than /r/funny. Pretty sure a lot of people were very upset when it stopped being a default.
I was teaching myself to code when I first encountered Reddit, and I followed the language hype on proggit as if it were gospel - I learned Common Lisp because proggit was giddy that Reddit was written in it at the time, and I subsequently learned about macros, and functional programming, and that Erik Naggum wants you to get off his damn lawn and stop asking dumb questions in comp.lang.lisp, then it was the Ruby hype, then Erlang, then Haskell etc.
All very interesting stuff to delve into, but yeah, I thought I'd never get a job programming if I was struggling with Haskell's type system, look at all the regular workaday coders on Reddit who're loving it! (I know, I know.)
That said, I really benefited from the Erlang hype period, the ideas in Erlang/OTP were very interesting indeed, even if I didn't quite understand what a finite state machine was, and what it was useful for, when trying to grok gen_fsm. But the actor model, the deliberate choice to treat failure as normal and build accordingly, that stuck with me all these years. Hell, I even ended up printing off Joe Armstrong's thesis to read on the bus to work.
Reddit was a great replacement for forums, especially for technical topics, IMO. But their "reopen the sub or else landed gentry" approach directly hurts tech communities, because the mods of a technical sub are often domain experts in the technology it's focused on, and a lot will disengage and move on.
At least, I know two of my fellow mods in a small technical sub have disengaged dramatically because of Reddit's approach, and they will be a massive loss to the sub.
But then, small tech subreddits aren't exactly a massive money-making market niche, so yeah. It is sad though.
Reddit is infuriatingly sticky. Every time I land on a post from 10+ years ago (like this one [0] for example), I go to the author's profile page. Almost inevitably, they've written a comment within the last week. This is a remarkable property for a social website to have, and it's not one that I see exhibited in other places, like StackOverflow or ancient vBulletin forums.
I'd like to think that this is finally Reddit's "Digg moment," but I am just not convinced. The boycott was over in 48 hours and everything is back to normal, but people are just complaining more. Heck, the commenter I linked to from 11 years ago also commented two hours ago, unsurprisingly, complaining about the API changes.
As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/rx9u9/til_gr...
I’m not going to claim that Reddit was a bastion of intellectualism back in the day, but the mean effort put into comments on the main subs has deteriorated over time and today might very well mark a discontinuity in that
It really was a lifestyle app. The account had comments on all the games I played as a teenager, fitness and university subreddits, random hobbies I picked up for a few months, basically every single one of my interests for the past decade. I had a NSFW burner that received frequent use. I have to say, you're pretty accurate about how I was basically active and commenting once or more a week for the majority of my conscious life. I started using the RiF app on a god awful 2010 phone when I created my account, and have used Sync since probably 2016.
I blanked then wiped all of my comments and then deleted my account two weeks ago. To be truthful, Reddit had a much different feel already, but nothing can stay constant for that long. It was already frustrating me that (my perceived) quality of discussion on the site has steadily become dumber and any mainstream news or political sub is astroturfed to hell (presumably by the Russians). I started seeing the emoji or "lol who cares" in response to perfectly normal comments. The East Palestine derailment frenzy was what made me realize that the website is definitely attacked by coordinated actors. I spent the last few months on the site browsing /r/neoliberal not because I necessarily agreed with the tenets of the ideology, but because it was one of the few reasonable political subs left, and /r/CredibleDefence for broadly pro-West but reasonable takes on the war.
I slowly realized that I was reading empty content. Much of my time on the site was seeing a clearly stupid, if not false comment, and realizing that the effort I would put in debunking or arguing was going to reach two or three eyeballs. Essentially, much of Reddit is the one eyed preaching to the blind. I frequently typed up long comments (much like this one) for an hour or so, and returned to maybe 4-5 upvotes, since the post had already peaked in popularity. I had a few long posts in /r/summonerschool , a League of Legends advice subreddit that were probably 10x the detail of any other comment advice and took me an hour to watch their gameplay and give specific comments.
In short, I felt I was trying to suck shit water from an Olympic sized pool through a lifestraw and hoping it would clean it up. The 3rd party app ban was a huge fucking slap to my face. Call me arrogant, but I believe I contributed more than my fair share to the running of Reddit by creating high quality discourse on the website. And in return? I get slapped with a shit UI and advertisements up my ass through the official app. And spez's response showed a complete lack of any attention to the website, to any concerns to the community that is most of the value proposition of their site. Their claims to be looking for profit now are transparent as fuck when you remember all their failed, clearly unmonetizable crap they've put dev hours and low interest money on in the past few years (NFTs, the other crypto crap, whatever RPAN was supposed to be). Coast by on institutional inertia while you piss away money, let the website decline in quality, and then aggressively try to monetize from the most loyal users (the decade long user who uses a third party app)? No thanks.
So yeah, I blew up my account. To be honest, I am having some withdrawal symptoms and am trying hard not to relapse, but I see it as the only moral route to proceed. The internet is broadly really quite bad. Twitter is tolerable but has similar ethical issues and quality depends very much on topic. I am getting into Substack, but that is ultimately a newsletter publisher and not a discussion forum. Any non-reddit result on Google is unusable. Maybe the internet will agree on a replacement. Maybe it keeps on spiralling down the enshittification drain. For now, HackerNews occupies the space on my phone's home screen that ...
1. Deleted users aren't going to pop up as much
2. It's going to be highly dependent on your search history. I'm sure more technically minded people will be around more often than results found on news subs or some more specific hobbies.
3. Commenting last week doesn't mean they are a regular commenter. Many of those people IME comment much less frequently later on. Maybe from a daily commenter to a weekly or monthly one. They are around, but not as active.
>As offensive as Steve Huffman has been throughout this saga, he doesn't seem to be wrong. Reddit could shoot a third party app on Fifth Avenue and people would still use it...
On a macro level, sure. I think anyone hoping for a sudden implosion was dreaming. But many are talking long term, a death by a million papercuts. There will be no one reason reddit dies.
Also, sample of one: I did in fact leave years ago. Still lurked w/o an account, but these actions caused me to try and replace nearly every community I have.
The main hole atm is a steady stream of gaming discussions. So i unfortunately may spend some 15 minutes browsing some niche gaming subs for certain news.
I recognise that journey!
for tech/science discussions: slashdot > HN for entertainment: rss > reddit > ? (help)
It's a damn fucking shame.
I refuse to use the official app, and the new site crashes safari in the iOS beta, so Reddit is now dead to me. I’ve dropped by a couple of times but since the changes and blackout all of the good subs I follow are empty/dead. They lost me as a user.
1) Reading assistance for people with sight impairment. Reddit has granted a pass for some apps on this basis though.
2) Moderation and Modmail. For people on the move, or, for example, where you're in front of a business PC or laptop all day, with Web restrictions or personal use policies. The mobile apps were extremely useful for moderation.
I did use the Boost app, but have moved to the official Reddit one for mod work; it's buggy and prone to erroring when trying to complete an action so you have to keep repeating things to make them 'stick'.
This is why the mods are up in arms because it's hard work at the best of times.
But with two major caveats. This is only for non-profit apps, which excludes almost all of them. For Android there is only RedReader now and for iOS there are Luna and Dystopia left.
And still without any NSFW content.
And to be honest, I think old.reddit is also on its way out. It's inevitable. So we're going to experience this shit storm all over again.
I support the protests so I'm trying to use reddit less for news and stuff. But for certain needs I'd scour forums for, since those forums no longer exist, I kind of need to check reddit for some stuff. Things related to my health and such.
It helps for readers now, and archaeologists later!
It was not the only website of its kind, but it was the fastest for news updates and also had some content on other sites like it didn't (such as slashdot, which had the tech and science stuff but not much else). I would repost stuff to FB and managed to garner a decent amount of clout that way. It went along like that for some years but eventually reddit 'hit mainstream' and the content I reposted didn't get the same traction. At that time I remember thinking reddit wasn't "underground" anymore. I recall that thought occurring in 2012.
But that still didn't stop me from using it, except for a couple breaks it was my primary source of info and discussion and debate for many years, even to this day.
However I'm at a point though where I feel like I need to divorce myself from social media entirely (perhaps even HN). The 'debates' / discussions / etc feel as though they have run their course for me. It's like groundhog day where I feel like I've had the same interactions 1000 times over to the extent where I don't feel like it's worth the effort.
But at the same time living without social media makes my world feel much smaller. I only talk to a handful of people, my friend group has dwindled significantly, and adding new folks has become really difficult, even with sparse usage. I feel like I was so dependent on social media for so long to keep in touch with people that, now living without it, I have practically no social connections.
This has been exacerbated by my decision to live a sober life, free of any and all mind altering substances. Going out to a bar or music night loses most of its appeal without alcohol involved. Likewise for gaming without smoking. Between all this and no social media, my life has become really... Well, boring I guess. spend my days reading books, and going to the gym. It's more boring than it sounds. No social media also means no gigs and that's a bummer, may have to start looking for steady employment.
Anyway to stay on topic, I don't know what a world looks like without these things that have taken up so much of my life in the last 15+ years. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time. I want to develop other hobbies but thus far the motivation I previously leveraged from caffeinated beverages has dried up as well. So I guess I can just wait and see, and try to remain optimistic.
Reports of Reddit’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
I built a Reddit API[1] alternative as a form of protest, they responded by blocking my personal Reddit account. Very sad what Reddit has become.
1 - https://api.reddiw.com
Are you interested in hosting an instance of it?
Apps like RedReader will be impossible to modify and use in a libre manner without a replacement API implementation like this.
Something like https://teddit.net/ ?
Do you have the ability to edit or access your old comments? Is it a shadowban, read-only, or a full block?
After all the news, I gave it another whirl for the past month and it’s very nice. After previously using the official app, it was a breath of fresh air to see a native video player, native share sheets, and so much more. Super nice, useful details like image counts on galleries. Such a shame that Reddit’s huge team is actively working in the opposite direction.
Amazing work, Christian. Really unfortunate that Reddit has gone in this direction and truly shameful and disgusting how they’ve handled it.
Assorted highlights:
- Share post / comment as image. When sharing comment as image, you could specify how many parent comments to include in the image as well. Super useful. - The theme change shortcut (more common now, but I think apollo was one of the first apps I noticed it in) - you could change subreddit with one tap. Narwhal doesn’t have this and it’s so annoying. - unreal in-app media playback (including YouTube) - customizable swipe gestures - great comment editor - content filters - ability to hide subreddits in just a couple of taps - saved item categories
I’m done with Reddit on mobile devices. I’m actually quite happy to have a good reason to stop using Reddit, but I’m sad that such a well-designed app has just disappeared.
Who recreates all subreddits? Re-establishes all the mods? Re-subscribes all the users? And all the while on a brand-new implementation that has to immediately scale to millions of users flawlessly.
That's a lot of work.
If it wasn't a subscription service (that had to front load a lot of its costs), it also involves getting advertisers for people who are demonstrably hostile to advertisements on board.
This requires hiring more than a few people and investing a bit into the infrastructure needed. It isn't just "hey, gonna spin up a server that is API compatible with reddit and switch everyone over."
https://web.archive.org/web/20051124035428/http://reddit.com... (edit: upon reflection, I am nostalgic for the time when that the top link there was to "The Truth About Web 2.0" at paulgraham.com shared by a user named AaronSw)
If you were to try to build something today that competed with Reddit and wasn't just a "here's a bunch of links - vote on what you like (without even comments)", it would take quite a bit more investment.
If you were to build reddit c. 2005 you wouldn't even need a device local app.
And most active according to whom? People keep saying Reddit is committing suicide. Do y'all truly believe that most of Reddit useful content was created on mobile? In Apollo? The app that forced you to pay if you wanted to submit content to Reddit?
Get real.
Reddit doesn’t produce content of their own. If content creators and moderators took away their effort, Reddit would die.
Thats a good question. Are there any stats to show that Apollo users were significant in terms of content creation? Or that any small subset of users are significant (besides mods)?
And "all agreeing" on the internet is a herculean task to begin with. Some want federation, some want centralization. Some want memes and others want serious discussion. Some don't even want to leave reddit period.
These days where 50% or reddit traffic is on Mobile? Yes.
>In Apollo?
No.
https://legiscan.com/VA/text/SB1515/2023
Pornhub blocks access in Virginia over new age verification law - https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/pornhub-blocks-acces...
Part of the challenge with this one is it does that "civil right of action" where it's not the state suing the entity but private citizens. That makes it more difficult for the company to defend against it.
Though this gets into a "how much effort are you going to put into it" and "how much control do you have over the ways the content is distributed?"
This also is about liability for the backend service - not the ISPs or other providers (3rd party apps are in a gray zone as to if it is Reddit or the 3rd party app that would be liable for showing such content... and my crystal ball says it would probably end up being that Reddit would be solely liable).
That's a weird connection to make. Reddit isn't be-all-end-all of open source (given that it or most of the major apps were never open source anyway)