Reddit’s only free iOS app icons are ugly now

lonewalk@lemm.ee to Reddit@lemmy.world – 286 points –
Reddit’s only free iOS app icons are ugly now
theverge.com
56

fuck spez, viva la fediverse

actually though how do you justify charging for your normal bloody unaltered logo lmfao

i see why they suddenly decided to destroy third party apps 💀

Along with everything else wrong with this: your icon is literally your brand, and you want your branding to be flawless + everywhere.

This would be like Nike putting an ugly pixelated version of their logo on cheaper sneakers to encourage you to buy more expensive ones; whatever pocket change they made from upgraders would be dwarfed by the damage it would do to their trademark.

This. This is what most baffling. Why hide your main icon, your BRAND, behind a paywall? It is simply idiotic. They are really desperate for cash.

OUR APP ICON WILL LOOK SHITTY UNLESS YOU PAY US MORE! HAHAHA!

I seriously don't understand how they think this will increase sales.

Teenagers and poor students love paying for things, right? Right?

The only thing I can come up with is when reddit was shitting the bed most egregiously, all of the news outlets were showing the app icon in images/thumbnails. Perhaps they wanted to distance a bit from the bad publicity?

Not that having a Doge button is any kind of brand recognition. I'd argue it's juvenile for such a "grown up company", or whatever Spez said about adult business, hehe.

it's like they want people to leave

Can’t have the plebs communicating and organizing freely on the likes of twit or redd!

All comms must be filtered through the fair and totally unbiased lens of corporate news media. Those millionaire anchors and billionaire C-suites are on our side, after all.

Imagine charging for a fucking app Icon.

God mobile markets are such absolute shit.

Reddit is shit, I've deleted all of my accounts. I'm not defending them at all. However, didn't third party apps literally do the same thing? Where you could buy different themed icons?

Yeah but it usually was a „support the dev“ thing.

For example, Apollo (RIP) had an okay icon to begin with, you could choose from a few free ones and if you really liked the app or a specific icon, you could buy it.

They didn’t intentionally make their standard icon shitty to bully you into paying for a decent one

Does just spez just sit around all day thinking up ways to piss off the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time?

But let’s be honest. The people still frequenting Reddit clearly don’t care about the shitshow that place has turned into and aren’t likely to be turned off by a new app icon.

It seems most of the idiots that like to suck spez dick all like it as a tiktok alternative so they can feel superior to tiktok viewers.

A doge themed icon? That idiot really is slurping up Musk sauce and emulating everything he did with Twitter.

A decade old meme is perfect for this

Like when Twitter replaced their logo for their April fool's (which was a couple days late because probably the genius in charge had the idea at the last minute and the remaining h1-b hostages couldn't push it in time)

I. I just don’t understand why they’re even doing this… they’re shooting themselves in the foot over and over, except they’re on a boat and every time it makes extra holes and the ship sinks faster. Everyone else is jumping ship and the ones staying either don’t know they’re sinking or don’t know where to go, or they’re bots.

What blows my mind is I think they would have been moderately successful if they just said you need to have Premium to be able to use third party apps. I used Reddit for HOURS a day. Honestly it was bad. I wouldn’t have liked it but I probably could have justified to myself paying a small fee per month to be able to continue using Apollo if they had played their cards right. Instead I haven’t been back since before the blackout. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I should thank spez for cutting my addiction cold turkey.

Louis Rossmann had a perspective that I'm starting to come around to.

Spez is just pissed. That's it. He's mad that he got shown up, and is actively punishing people for it. There's no logic or business behind it.

Actually, I subscribe to the theory that Spez & Musk don't care about losing money, because they are being paid under the table more than they're losing by far right dark money to destroy Twitter & Reddit. Both sites were pretty left leaning before the crap hit the fan, and the right are trying purge all liberals from them. I know it seems pretty "tin foil hat"-ish, but it also makes perfect sense when you look at how they've done everything they can to run the sites into the ground.

Startup/ IPO valuations are, nowadays, based on profit per user, rather than daily active users. (Or, at least, skewed much more towards the former).

So, they (comparatively) DGAF if they get rid of 90% of their users if the 10% they do keep click on a shit ton of ads, or buy useless shit, or whatever.

Related: enshittification

What’s new: “changes to improve your overall experience “. Haha. Sure.

“changes to improve” increase profit margins

“your overall experience” sadism

I can't believe that they chose such an ugly icon

For what reason, most people doesn't even know that they could change the icon, free or not

Unless they put a welcome tutorial like "hate the icon design? Now you can pay to restore it to normal!"

Wtf, who's coming up with these changes. I'm legit impressed with how many bad PR moves they can make back to back

It’s like they are taking advice out of Musk’s playbook on how to blow away money.

Spez has said in interviews he likes how Musk runs Twitter and wants to emulate that.

I was angry about everything happening with Reddit but honestly I care less and less. It's like watching Twitter self destruct at this point.

I got the new icon, and I thought it was going to be tied into some promotion or something. You know, "We're going 8 bit for a month!" But then nothing ever came - no promotion, no explanation.

It's because they're bringing back r/place

Oh. Oh yeah. That makes sense.

What the...? It's such a nonsense business move. The app store now shows this pixel icon when you search for the Reddit app. At first glance, it looks as if it was some shitty clone or something, not the original client.

Doge? Seriously?? This whole Spez following Elon's footsteps is almost as cringe as Elon himself.

How does he get to charge for the original icon? How the fuck does that even happen?

This is simply stupid. Their most important brand element, behind a paywall.

I love pixelated stuff and this is still absolutely baffling to me

Now this, really some people needs more fire to abandond that hell hole

To be fair, it’s not the only free one that works. Narwhal still works, as do a couple others