cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1032247
Finally tried the official Reddit app. It’s as bad as they say.
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.
Through vigilance and a strong community that looks out for itself. Just like IRL
Yeah and that works really well!
/s
It generally does, people just have to constantly be reminded.
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.
“So we decided to opt for 95%”
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.
Can we stop posting Reddit’s ads here please
Hot shingles in your area download for free X
Check out the asphalt on that hot shingle.
Come in and check out our Gluten-Free Roofs!
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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True, but modern advertisement is almost always intended to deceive. Shitty mobile game ads that don’t even show the actual game’s content, advertisements for complete scams to get rich quick, etc. It’s all some ploy to get people to go download some app so it can collect your data to sell to advertisers or effectively steal your money by misleading you.
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
Wtf?? What phone is that so I can avoid it
any redmi it seems
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
Did you ever find out how is babby formed?
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.
I disagree and submit this as a counterpoint
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…can you burn a Luigi board?
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Jfc, apologies for the multipost. Anyways…
…can you burn a Luigi board?You wanna summon luigi?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone should file a bug report, some content accidentally got displayed instead of more ads…
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.
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.
Imagine seeing those on a atheism sub
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.
Seriously, I’ve used the app for a while before finding out about Sync back when I used Android, then Apollo on iOS. I almost never browsed on mobile before then, it’s absolutely terrible. I guess “normal” everyday users don’t care, because they don’t necessarily know they have alternatives, however. Guess this is what spez is banking on.
I used the official before switching to infinity. I didn’t mind the official app that much in the beginning. I hated the ads disgusted as posts and how the just got more and more post like as time went on. But I did like the app a lot better then the web site and I never really used Reddit on Mt computer.
Then I switched to Infinity, Loved it and could really see how bad the official app really was. So I just use infinity for some time.
Then I got tiered of opening reddit links from the web when searching for stuff, as it took me to the web site and the constant nagging about downloading the app, and making browsing on the website close to impossible. So I downloaded the official app again and use it to open posts from the web.
So I had the official one and Infinity together for a few days, it wasn’t fun to use the official app but it was a lot more of a pain to use the website.
Then I found out you could make infinity open reddit links, and I never used the official app again.
But even the “normal” users will notice the overall quality going to shit when all the people who were engaged are leaving.
Oh for sure. I’m sure they already noticed it. But I think a lot of users who are not so tech savvy will be rebutted by the whole “instance” and “federation” things. It’s not super intuitive for most people how it works yet
I assume some internet billionaire will eventually make another centralized platform for the Reddit crowd, and people will flock there. People will never learn from their past mistakes.
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.
