They did buy a superior client. Alien Blue it was called. Then internal politics killed it. Even today Alien Blue would still be a better experience, without any updates in the last five years.

This is what always got to me that I don’t think people focus on enough. It’s such an anti-consumer pattern. Instead of improving the official reddit app, or buying out a third party one, they simply shot the competition in the knees.

If you want everyone on the official app, be competitive and invest into making it not suck donkey balls. Obviously that’s far too much work.

There are a hundred different ways they could have reached a compromise on third party app support if it was just about API limits. They killed it because they want to gather mobile app telemetry like everyone else does these days.

All that costs time, money and resources whereas flatput lying and fucking people over is cheap. You calculate how much you’ll lose, see that it’s enormously bad qualitatively but you won’t lose too many visitors because most people don’t give a fuck so you go with it.

That’s the thing. I get that people using the service on a third party client and not seeing ads is hurting their bottom line as they use bandwidth and not make money. But just banning them outright is a shit move. Ideally they would’ve made it part of Reddit Premium to make that a bit more worthwhile.

RwF

you couldn’t just buy a superior client like RiF and bolt your name on it?

They did that to AlienBlue, and then they ruined it. Turns out good UI is incompatible with social media engagement metrics

You know, I realize that some people run a dictatorship and only want absolute obedience, I totally get that, that’s totally a gettable thing for me, that’s not weird at all.