When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”
Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.
To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—
If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.
Just bad business all around
Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.
The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
Spot fucking on.
Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.
Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)
I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.
I also quit whisk when it became samsung food. Does CopyMeThat let you have shared lists with other people?
I get your point and you’re not wrong, technically . Technically that is what Reddit is trying to do but you need to remember that this is Reddit. They fucking suuuuuck at everything.
I remember years ago a disaffected ex employee wrote something about what it’s like to work the and in just remember thinking to myself: “Imagine going in to work and they call an important meeting, all hands, to discuss “brigading” and then, without an ounce of irony they proceed to sternly discuss this important topic.”
Just imagine those little snot nosed shots puffed up with so much self importance discussing how these “brigades” are destroying their “bastion of free speech”.
I thought I was going to pule in my own mouth again just typing this.
The comparison is even more apt when you remember that the official Reddit app also used to be the most popular and great 3rd-party app called AlienBlue, which was purchased from 1 guy and rebranded a decade ago.
It’s pretty clear that the reason why the official Reddit app isn’t good is because a good experience for their users isn’t their goal.
The fact that the app is still so bad after so much time has gone by indicates that it is the desired product that the company wants to offer. And after realizing that they were still losing users to better competitors, their solution was to destroy the ability to compete in the first place rather than improve the product.
They like the app as-is, with all of the terrible performance and UX that goes along with it. The reason behind that is because they’re getting user engagement metrics and other telemetry data, more control over ad delivery and the content users see (including astroturfed sponsored Reddit content), and more monetization.
Third party apps, like Apollo and AlienBlue before it, cared about providing a good user experience. It just happens that users typically prefer experiences that aren’t trying to capitalize their every interaction, and companies take that personally.
Alien Blue wasn’t rebranded. They bought it, called it the official app (with the name Alien Blue) for a little while, then launched their own app and stopped supporting AB.
Oh I see; I knew they stopped supporting it after a while but I thought the official app was a descendent of that codebase
Yeah I paid for alien blue pro or whatever it was called. Then they killed the app and gave me a year of Reddit premium (my memory is shit, idk the proper name). After a month or so I switched to Apollo, Reddit’s app was just so shit. I left when Apollo died and now only use dystopia (an app designed for blind users) for the infrequent times I visit Reddit. No adds. It’s almost read only. But it’s ideal for visiting niche subs that aren’t on lemmy without giving Reddit clicks/seeing ads.
a good experience for their users isn’t their goal
They are in tension with the more pressing goal of extracting revenue. But how do you extract revenue from a site that’s mostly just “user content” + “ads” in an era when ad revenue is plummeting?
Maybe if they increase the prices on Reddit Gold?
This is one of those things where, I totally feel for all the big tech employees who’ve been laid off, and it is ultimately the fault of the companies, but like, that’s just too much.
And so many unpaid moderators… Which is an acceptable trade when the site isn’t cashing in on your work.
The API was a fair trade. When they killed it and decided to make LLM money, that was it for me. It wouldn’t matter if they paid me for my contributions (which they aren’t, they want redditors to pay for their exit with stock), the API and free access was the social contract. Its gone. Reddit can fuck off at this point.
Seriously. Reddit is a glorified link sharing service with comments looking for a 6+ billion valuation. Christian and a couple backend devs could recreate it all in a weekend.
Reddit is hopeful that AI training is their golden ticket but in all reality they’ll only ever have one large buyer. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc, don’t want something that Gemini already bought.
With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned. I mean, look at how much trouble Google got in with an objectively racist Gemini that forced them to turn off human image generation.
Depends on the sub. The news, technology, and politics subs are 99% link sharing. The subs around DIY stuff, health, etc are often people sharing personal experience and advice. The latter is likely the most valuable thing for AI to crawl.
With all that out of the way, I don’t see very many companies lining up to license a far left-leaning dataset that had all non-echo chamber discussion banned.
Maybe this isn’t what you are saying, but Reddit (at least in the past, on smaller more expert subreddits) is no more an echo chamber than any other politically charged community space online, it’s just in other communities the rightwing people who control the levers of power usually don’t let leftists have any kind of voice or power in the first place.
