The 3rd party apps are closing at the end of this month, which means there’ll be somewhere around a week or so of people realising just how bad the official app is, plus decreased quality content as the actually-motivated people who post things continue their gradual migration away from reddit and driving redditors to seek other places to gather.
Meanwhile all of the repost bots can post and comment on each other’s threads keeping the Reddit server humming away.
Good riddance.
It’s kinda funny in a dystopian way.
A lonely guy playing a creepy hentai game gets some sexual gratification from his time spent interacting with a piece of software and is at least somewhat self-aware. He knows it’s just software, even if he ‘married’ his bodypillow.
Meanwhile there are increasing numbers of people unaware they’re regularly interacting with bots online, not realising one of the reasons social media is making them sadder is because they’ve atttempting to fulfill their need for social interaction with a facsimile thereof.
It’s not unlike Idiocracy, where they give the plants Brawndo instead of water, then wonder why the plants are dying. Vast swathes of the world are feeding their social needs with social media brawndo.
At some point, it will just be repost bots having conversations in the comments of posts “created” by other repost bots.
Meanwhile all of the repost bots can post and comment on each other’s threads keeping the Reddit server humming away.
How are they going to do that when the API changes hit? The API changes affect all third party interactions with Reddit unless you scrape their HTML or do some type of browser automation. I’m going to assume that 99% of developers are using the REST API since there was no reason to do otherwise. That means mobile apps, bots, third party tools and probably even some browser extensions are all going to go dark.
I just wish more people knew to come here. I even snuck this alternative into a presentation at a Fortune 150…
People will come, it’s just a matter of time and having the patience to cultivate organic communities rather than trying to simply will them into existence all at once a la GooglePlus (or whatever their attempt at a social network was called)
I have only used the official app and can I just say, the experience has gotten noticeably worse in the past 6 weeks or so.
I have to wait 3 seconds to load a post. Collapsing a comment is laggy, takes like 0.5 seconds at least. Scrolling itself is laggy.
It sure doesn’t seem like a lot when I write seconds but it’s absolutely TERRIBLE when you use it more than a minute. I only have official app for chat and instant messages because Infinity didn’t send me any notifications :(
I’ll use old reddit on mobile with an extension that helps with mobile usage, along with official reddit for the aforementioned functions as usual.
It’ll take about a week for the ‘find out’ phase to wrap up, then we’re onto the lesser known ‘baby please come back I can change’ phase.
