[SllX]

Nah. Reddit’s client is the official Reddit client, but Apollo is the de facto one for people who want to actually use Reddit.

Also Apollo now has a Safari extension which will automatically redirect Reddit links to Apollo. Previously this was a manual process after the page already loaded after telling Reddit for the umpteen-billionth time you want Safari, not the official Reddit client.

[jamil7]

This. I think I would actually give up on reddit without apollo, the official app and website are user-hostile. I wonder if they will tighten the API up and eventually kill third-party clients.

[toomuchtodo]

If Apollo is the interface, what is Reddit besides a JSON document store and object storage for media? Once Apollo is big enough (network effects, critical mass, whatevs), it could spin off of Reddit as the backend (Cloudflare R2 for objects, workers and KV for comments). You can even backfill from the numerous Reddit archives (Internet Archive, Pushshift, etc) out there.

(Apollo user with an interest in a distributed web platform)

[SllX]

> If Apollo is the interface, what is Reddit besides a JSON document store and object storage for media?

A community, or if you prefer, a community of communities. That part is essential.

[toomuchtodo]

Yeah, agree. I'm arguing for disintermediation of the community from the corporate entity attempting to squeeze as much value out of the community as possible (and in the process, being a hot potato from one company to the next). Communities deserve better (Stackoverflow and Wikipedia come to mind), and the technology primitives are stupid simple. Perhaps I've been reading too much Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow lately!

[SllX]

Philosophically? Sure. But with how the masses act and behave and take interest in, getting the critical mass of non-technical people you would need to make it work is a massive hurdle.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit will skate by with inertia for years to come no matter how suicidally they behave because they have mass appeal. Losing one audience doesn’t matter because they have millions of other audiences. You start up a social network that interests mainly technical people and the journalists that report on them, well it’s just not going to thrive because after the honeymoon period is over, the network just starts to look stale and slowly die off. E.g. Google+.

[toomuchtodo]

I concede these are all good points and I genuinely appreciate the discourse. Speaking only for myself, I see the challenges as:

1. Preserve the content and culture of these platforms for users and future historians (in the case of Reddit, Pushshift and the Internet Archive). UGC ("user generated content") belongs to users first and foremost.

2. Continue to find opportunities to reduce the moats of incumbents and the friction of standing up alternatives. If a site disappears, there should be little impact to anyone other than employees and shareholders.

3. Be ready to jump in and scale up when incumbents misstep (Signal and Telegram seeing huge membership jumps during Facebook's extended outage earlier this week, Digg's redesign helping Reddit's growth, etc).

[true_religion]

When it was just text, Reddit was cheap enough to run that it was kind of questionable why they needed so much VC funding.

[bee_rider]

I wonder if Lemmy instances are similar enough that the app could just be pointed toward them.

[JoshGlazebrook]

I have no issue with the official Reddit app and I can use Reddit just fine.

[true_religion]

They should just hire the guy. I wouldn’t mind Apollo with ads from Reddit official.

[SllX]

Well Twitter on iOS started life as Tweetie which was an absolutely fantastic client on both iPhones and Macintoshes. I wouldn’t call it that now, even if some of the original Tweetie code is in there. Apollo with ads doesn’t seem like it is in Reddit’s business plan and after some time I think Apollo would go the way Tweetie did.

Edit: Something from the dredges of my memory just came back up and reminded me of something. The official Reddit client did start life as a 3rd party client: Alien Blue. [1]

So the real risk is Apollo becoming the next Alien Blue. Personally I would rather it stay independent.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/10/16/reddit-buys-unoff...

[armadsen]

The official Reddit iOS app is already the result of Reddit buying an existing, excellent third-party app (Alien Blue), which they proceeded to ruin.