That's why no one with half a brain downloads the official Reddit app.

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1163 points –

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1032247

Finally tried the official Reddit app. It's as bad as they say.

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The only post visible between ads is one that's been reposted thousands of times... This perfectly captures the steaming pile of shit that is the official app (and the reddit experience in general).

The official app is a horrible user experience, but the bigger issue is that most of the content is fake. Between commercial shills, political activists, social-media marketing groups hired to “increase engagement”, and various other bad actors, the site is no longer useful or differentiated. The only places that seem unaffected are smaller private subs.

I don’t know how the fediverse will prevent the same thing happening. The bad actors are just going to follow the eyeballs. They don’t care which platform is used to host their actions. There was already an instance of a group of new kbin accounts being used to mass upvote topics to appear in the hot feed here.

Definitely agree that it's a matter of time. You forgot one thing in your list of primary content producers on reddit; bots..

So much of the front page's content is just produced by repost/karma farming bots, especially in the biggest subreddits.

Holy fuck, 90% of the screen is dedicated to ads

We found that we can push ads to up to 92% of visible area before the user starts convulsing in violent seizures.

Holy shit I remember that quote from Ready Player One and never thought I would be seeing the same scenario in such a short time period.

one post. ONE SINGLE POST on the entire screen...

And it's a question that's been asked every single week for 10 years.

Also it's kind of crazy to me the amount of traffic it gets every. Single. Time. I know they have a bot issue, but do people just like that they know they have a popular opinion and just want to see rhe up votes or is it just one of those "watch the same movie 15 times for the comfort of it" type things. Either way I find it wild.

Everyone who didn’t get their word in last time is desperate to farm upvotes ‘make themselves visible’ this time instead.

I felt visceral contempt when I saw that thread. It's a rerun thread being answered with the wisdom of adults who are still using reddit. No fucking thanks.

most of Reddit on the popular subs are just re-runs these days

It's quite insane how awful AskReddit is. Same uninteresting questions with flat answers.

“Sex havers of Reddit, how is sex? Send bobs and vagene”- ask Reddit in a nutshell.

To be fair I was a horny teenager at one point but that’s what yahoo answers was for

Wouldn't surprise me if a vast majority of the posts on that sub come from bots.

This video is the greatest thing that Yahoo Answers has ever produced.

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A decade or more ago, we called it AssCredit on IRC.

"Hey reddit what is the best spare tire iron?"

--- Redditor with 1 month old account who's only posted about IPayShills tire irons.

"The only brand of spare tire iron you should consider is IPayShills tire iron, it changed my life! It makes coffee, calls AAA for you and everything. I would never leave home without it."

--- Redditor with 1 month old account who's only posted about IPayShills tire irons.

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Seriously, why the fuck has advertising become so incredibly insidious and pervasive in recent years? I can't go anywhere on the internet and not see ads or a warning to turn off my ad blocker or message telling me to subscribe to view the content. Worse, I can't even be out in public in the city without having another fucking ad shoved in my face. I was recently walking downtown at 1 am or so waiting on an uber and really enjoying the cool night air, not on my phone or anything, just enjoying the moment, and I saw an insanely bright billboard advertising something.

I feel like ads are just starting to really wear on me. I'm sick of consuming and being told to consume and being manipulated in the death throes of capitalism.

Edit:spelling

I don't think this is something new... Lots of webpages had tons of ads in the 90s and 2000's.

Yahoo 2002: Yahoo 2002

Or this one from the wall street journal in 2000: WSJ 2000

Compare those to today: Yahoo Today

WSJ Today

I don't think it's any worse today really.

It is worse, though. No Yahoo games 😭 I played that flash pool game to death.

Once you get used to an ad-free Reddit experience, it's truly jarring how many ads the official Reddit app has. Same with Youtube. I have Adblock for Youtube on my computer and when I use the Youtube app on my TV I'm astounded by the number of ads being greedily shoved down my face.

I really can't do ads. I use Blokada on my android phone and that killed all the ads from reddit regardless of which app I used, but the actual reddit app was just terrible in and of itself. There were so many better choices.

Website subscriptions and all types of subscriptions and paywalls are just death by a thousand cuts as well. It's all ads and paywalls now.

Its awful on Reddit too, they let anyone and everyone run ads. the "he gets us" ads have like 600 paid reddit awards too.

I was using Reddit mobile to follow some interests that don't have any communities on Lemmy yet and noticed the obscene number of awards on that ad. How in the world did that happen?

I'm really enjoying seeing the Lemmy communities I follow grow noticeably in just the past few days and hope people stick with it.

If only more people used ad blockers. Browsers should download with ad blocker extensions automatically installed imo

Meanwhile my phone literally has ads in its system video player and file explorer

Sounds awful. I am pretty sick of just not being able to spend a single moment without being advertised to.

yeah it sucks like imagine going to the file explorer to see a document and you get some ads like that's next level bs lmao

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I'd legitimately never seen what the Reddit app looks like as I always used RIF but good grief it's actually somehow worse than I'd been led to believe.

It's worse then you think. That "popular" screen is what's popular to all of Reddit determined by their algorithm, not what's popular in the subreddits you have subscribed to. There's no way to avoid the firehose of whatever they want to feed you, you can only go to a specific subreddit in the app instead.

It's basically unusable for me in this state.

There’s zero chance I’m installing that app. Reddit is officially a cash grab that doesn’t deserve one letter of my content.

Prior to the whole API debacle, I loved Reddit and used it daily.

BTW, I still won’t use Sony products to this day because they put rootkits on their audio CDs to prevent piracy.

Don't forget that when Sony got called on it, they released a "patch" to "fix" people's PCs. Except the "patch" was an installer for an even worse rootkit.

This was all before Sony further proved they don't value they customers by hosting an insecure network that, once hacked, revealed they stored all user information (including payment details and passwords iirc) in plaintext. Yeah, I've missed out on some fun games but I don't give Sony a dime.

Glad I’m not the only one who remembers and blacklisted the entire company. It was such an egregious violation of privacy, people’s hardware and all the other stuff you’ve mentioned.

I only brought it up because I’m not a typical person that forgets after a month and goes back to the company. I’m done, done. That triple-down they did was enough for me to call it quits.

For me it was Sony's constant use of proprietary media. MemoryStick my ass!

This comment gets funnier if you read "MemoryStick" as a verb

I've been buying Sony headphones because they sound great for the price but they ALWAYS fail at the same plastic left ear hinge within 1 year or usually less. No more.

Never used the app, never plan to, but I can't even handle the main site now. Have (diagnosed) PTSD due to religious trauma, and those fucking unblockable "He Gets Us" ads are intolerable.

I can’t think of a worse place to advertise religious ideology than reddit.

A church is probably a worse place.

You want to advertise to people who aren't your customers.

As a former user of Baconreader for 11 years, and old.reddit + RES for about the same, this was what did it for me.

I refuse to be served hegetSus ads.

Yeah, it's honestly quite upsetting. I've heard similar complaints from alcoholics who are trying to quit drinking being unable to block or hide ads for alcohol. Reddit's approach to advertising is terrible as it is, but this sort of thing is just downright irresponsible and not ok at all.

Someone should file a bug report, some content accidentally got displayed instead of more ads...

I did. And now I'm here :D Got my half brain back

And this is my first comment on Lemmy and I'm loving this place.

Most people don't have time to fritter on new tech, alt clients, etc. Honestly they're not stupid and I resent the implication--Reddit's just predatory. If we want an alternative to flourish, we gotta stop treating it like its a "smart people club" and being elitist about it

People go with the default “name brand” unless they have reason to think otherwise.

You search “Reddit” on the App Store, naturally most people are going to pick “Reddit” by “Reddit”. Not Apollo, or boost, or BaconReader, or RIF, or any other (absolutely amazing) third party app, unless they have some reason to think that it’s better than the official app. Which they don’t, unless someone told them otherwise, because they are conditioned to the cluttered ad-ridden garbage interface of new Reddit, and most people don’t need mod tools or accessibility features.

I've reclaimed many a PC for folks like you described. So clogged with bloatware, trackers, adware, etc., that the machines could hardly run. Just excruciatingly slow experiences for their owners. Most folks don't know anything about machines or software. Microsoft's dominance illustrates the point.

Folks go ignorantly (no offense) where they're told. They just don't know better and get prayed upon as a result.

Every one of them knows things I don't. It's just that computers are a black box to them.

The ad is too small. They need to make it much bigger to maximize profit

I have half a brain yet did download the app to see how shitty it really is. Rip RIF.

Rif is still working for me logged out. I've heard it doesn't work logged in, but I haven't tried it recently.

I mostly used slide before and that doesn't seem to work at all now.

Reddit offline also seems to still work for me.

Reddit "shut down" API access by disabling the ability to authenticate users. Everything else on the API is still fully functional. Of course, without being logged in it's a read only API.

RIF is never going to pay $0.24 per 1,000 API requests. Which means Reddit isn't going to allow those API requests to continue for long. They will shut it down even when you're logged out.

The worst part to me is the people still on Reddit complaining about the blackout because "you can scroll past the ads", which completely misses the point

Ive seen a post in programming dev instance that those posts we were seeign, shilling for reddit was proven to be astroturfed using LLM to generate the pro reddit reply

And all it did was make Reddit even worse. If that was spez’s best attempt at user retention, then no wonder the Reddit experience keeps going down the drain.

Yeah it’s especially egregious unless you browse in compact mode. Ads are much less noticeable

The ads are real bad if you don’t pay to not see them, and trending is dumb, but the most egregious thing is that you can’t sort your Home feed. It is stuck to “best” and the algorithm is terrible.

It used to have the ability to sort, but they removed it at some point, I’m not sure when because I had been using Apollo for years.

I took a look at the last iteration of Alien Blue (which can still be downloaded if you had it at some point but you can’t log into it anymore) and that 2014 app is still better.

It just makes me sad.

Remember to leave a review and uninstall.

I went to do that and saw that there already was a 2 star review from 6 years ago lol. Changed that to 1. 1

No no no. No. Never used the official app, but man.. this is sad as hell. Just pulling up the screenshot made me scared my laptop was about to be bricked.

It literally looks like a pop-up ad straight out of 1999. If I saw this shit on a computer back then I'd be like "ope, that's a virus."

I thought this was rhe YouTube app at first glace. Damn, as a boost user I wasn't aware how bad it is.

I tried it about 4 times, thinking I was missing something. How on earth could something so bad, possibly be popular? But I realised I'd just got used to RIF. The official app is absolutely dire.

It makes you feel that something is wrong with your device.

Charge your damn phone

Hey, cut him a break - do you know how much power Reddit's app consumes digging through all the information on your phone, watching where you pause in your doomscrolling, sending all that back to Reddit HQ, and darkpatterning you so you get more ads in front of your eyeballs?

Downloaded today to see after Boost went down. Immediately uninstalled as it made my phone burning hot. Came to Lemmy very quickly.

I had the Reddit app installed alongside boost. I deleted the official app last month and said that when boost dies, there goes my 10 year association with reddit.

Here I am. I really hope Lemmy becomes something special because this far, it is filling that doom scrolling void that reddit filled for me

Boost was the sole way of using reddit. Now if I REALLY need to find something on reddit, I'll do that on old reddit, on my PC. Will save a lot of time by not being on that shit app.

It really is, just dropped reddit for this. Not about to go back to using the official app.

Their app is truly awful, and on mobile, they always try to shunt you off your browser and onto it.

You can use Revanced Manager to patch the officel Reddit app to remove all ads and trackers from it. Such a scummy platform

You know, I didn't start using reddit apps for awhile, and I was a late reddit comer in general. So the official app was my first and only experience, I used it for years.

Yes it is just like that.

Not to mention they stupidly made it so Chat auto-notifies you by default now, so if you forgot you joined any of those you'll get your phone lighting up out of nowhere like a reply all if someone says literally anything in one of those.

I haven’t been on that app for years but ouch, does it look bad

Tbh I only downloaded the official app because I didn't know there were 3rd party apps at all I only learned about the 3rd party apps when the protests started

You went from discovering 3rd party reddit apps to posting on lemmy?

Yea I guess that just goes to show just how fast reddit became shitty it's seems like all the good memes left with the 3rd party apps Edit: spelling corrections

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I'm so glad I've never even touched it to begin with, and I'm not inclined too after the migration. I live here now.

That's why I used third-party app all the time, never used their official Reddit app from day one to the day I came to Lemmy

Same, it took me a minute to understand what I was looking at. If that is what the official r3dd!t app looks like, I'm glad I jumped ship the day baconreader went offline.

For a second I thought there was a promoted post on Lemmy and I got equal parts angry and confused.

It was this bad a few months ago when I used it as well. I saw almost nothing but gambling ads.

I usually find the app and the web site are usually essentially the same on most platforms, plus most apps are designed for data farming, so to me, most apps are moot in function, and nothing but a security hole. You're going to have to do better than just not interrupting me as I come in to announce your app to get me to use it.

Wow they oops forgot their forum is an empty box without its users' input. Way to chase any sane user away

I'm gonna be honest with ya'll, even before all this 3rd party app stuff I never understood why anyone would use an app to view a fucking website. It's like thinking "yes, let me seek and purposely download spyware on my phone to have a worse user experience and see the same thing I can see in my browser without ads"

The beauty of these 3rd party apps is that they had features that made it look and behave much better that any official app that objects ads, forces certain “promoted content”, etc. I loved using Apollo and haven’t visited Reddit since the 30th. Currently using Memmy on iOS. Not a huge fan of mobile sites as they don’t seem to ever function as well, though wefwef seems to be amazingly close.

Some companies makes their apps a lot better than their website and you often get more and better features from a mobile users point of view. But I also prefer the browser because I don't want to fill my phone with apps I use only once a week or less and I can use adblocker. But it is pretty nice to be able to jump between apps instead of jumping between tabs. I have a lot of tabs open instead of downloading their app and also stuff I want to remember or pages I use often. I try to clean it up but I always have an infinity icon instead of a number for my tabs 😂 I tried using bookmarks but it is easier to find the right page as a tab (big thumbnail)

I'm of a similar mindset. In theory there could be some advantages to users for some kinds of apps but companies tend to need to develop and maintain a good mobile version of the site anyway.

And some of the advantages might not be wanting features like notifications or location data. Neither are probably great for reddit, at least how a lot of people use it.

I've sideloaded a patched version of Apollo on my phone and it's been a nicer experience (though it has limitations obviously). I am certain it will get revoked eventually. But it's the best option for me right now. There is a way to patch Android APKs. Not sure if I should share since it technically involves a form of piracy. But if you google it, it's definitely doable.

Better to cut the cord entirely and contribute to building a new community elsewhere.

Wow, that's awful. I just use Firefox mobile + Adblock, which isn't very nice to reddit, but at least allows a somewhat decent experience - except for missing features like /r/Subreddit/comments, for which you have to go in Desktop mode.

JFC. That's like a 3/5th screen advertisement with enough room for 1 fucking post. Might as well only show ads at that point.

I've been dodging and dodging and dodging from using that shitty app for months. When I try posting to other subreddits whenever I have had it installed, none of my posts would go through. I'm always left to post links, for some reason, but not text based posts. That's how broken it is and they've never fixed it because they don't care.

You won't have ads if you pay the subscription or install a system level as blocker

In my experience reddits ads are served from reddit itself, so even my pihole does not block it.

yeah pretty sure this is correct, cant even block that shit with dns ad blocker

...though if they do what YouTube is trying out, a system level blocker will eventually end up getting you locked out of the site.

Or get revanced and install their version so you can browse ad-free because the old content there is invaluable. BTW, if you do that, use the old account you got locked out of. It's unlocked now. Don't go giving them the benefit of a new sign up.

Way to pick the busiest screen. Popular? Who uses that option anyway... has that Trending panel at the top making it look like a circus. App defaults to Home, which is much cleaner. Nice you picked the absolute worst screen possible.

Is this bait? I don't really get ads on the reddit app, but then again I patched it with Revanced manager.

Bruh, you seriously calling this bait because you don't get ads even though you used a no ads patch?

Wait, so you patched it without having any idea what the patches actually changed?

I don’t get it. If you don’t like it pay for premium. Or you can also use one of the third party clients that still works. So many options.

“Many” options is not true. There’s a small number of apps that are left.

There’s three apps on iOS that are still working, as for android I’m not quite sure. I know there’s boost and relay.

That’s misleading, same as when Spez tried to claim that 90% of apps wouldn’t be affected. There’s a pretty big difference between a registered homebrew app and the popular apps with millions of users. These remaining apps were never that popular beforehand.