What does Lemmy do better than Reddit?

austinngo@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 181 points –

Just found this space, I'm trying to play around with this platform. Can anyone help to explain?

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Two things that come to mind:

  • Lemmy's protocol is open, so anybody can make 3rd party apps to work with it. Third party Reddit apps used to be popular when Reddit had an open API, but Reddit destroyed that on purpose.

  • Because Lemmy isn't run by a singular company, you don't get the same restrictions. Reddit admins had a whole host of rules on what a sub could or could not contain. Many of which were heavy focused on making Reddit more advertiser friendly.

The funniest part of killing 3rd party apps is they cut off a widely used method if collecting more commenting data from the average user. I guess they figured audience style interaction on the official app is worth more.

The official app purportedly has a shit ton of interaction tracking. I can't find the link anymore, but somebody on HN even claimed what they wanted to track was so invasive that he walked out of a job interview for Reddit.

What I can say for sure is that the new Reddit "shreddit" website is absolutely fucking full of tracking. I reverse engineered it for reasons, and every interaction with UI elements was reported back before the actual interaction was allowed to take place.

They definitely gain more value out of user data from interaction tracking than they do from their comments.

Tracking clicks on links with JS is pretty normal. I always implemented that with Google analytics for my e-commerce sites.

It helps you track things like downloads of files, email links, exit links, etc.

As a former web dev, I know it's normal industry standard stuff, but it's really hard to give Reddit the benefit of the doubt here.

Their tracking is completely ingrained in the webcomponent-based SPA itself, beyond what's reasonable for anonymized analytics. Disabling cookies even broke loading content, despite being logged out.

What did you used to program in?

In a professional capacity, it was React with TypeScript for front-end, Node for backend with Nginx to serve static assets. At the end of the day, it wasn't really for me. I enjoy web dev for hobby projects, but working with it day after day ruined my intrinsic desire to keep doing it.

Oooooh this is relevant to my interests!! After 20yrs doing web dev I crashed out of two jobs in 6 months completely hating coding. Can't even bring myself to look at code nowadays.

What did you go into after quitting web dev?

What about old.reddit; would that have tracking? If not it would explain why the new Reddit UI seems so slow on browser

And for point one, I use Voyager, which was heavily inspired by Apollo for Reddit, so Voyager makes this place feel more like home.

You can also use Voyager on Android! If you squint real hard, you can pretend Apollo finally released on a non-Apple device.

Interesting, for point 2, I thought having restriction in subreddit make it harder to advertise?