[duckfruit]

This makes me indescribably sad.

Apart from mourning the loss of a fantastic app by an awesome developer, to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps. Since the APIs for the likes of reddit, twitter (RIP tweetbot) and others were available for free or a reasonable fee it spawned a whole cottage industry of developers who made a living selling alternate front ends for these services. These apps invented many of the conventions and designs that eventually percolated to the official clients. Sometimes these innovations even became platform wide conventions (pull to refresh anyone?). The writing was on the wall for a while, but now the door is firmly closed on that era - and we will all be poorer for it.

[apozem]

My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.

[gtsteve]

I just don't think I'll use Reddit anymore. It was a nice place to catch up with my interests but the only way in which I used it was via Apollo. The one thing that made Reddit unique compared to all its competitors was its developer community and they have deliberately torpedoed it.

All good things have to end but this was avoidable.

[dwayne_dibley]

Where to next though? is there anywhere else like it?

[busymom0]

I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...

[alwayslikethis]

Not commenting on your app, but I think the real reason mobile clients are needed for Reddit is that they intentionally try to break the mobile web experience to force their app down your throat. In contrast, HN.. doesn't. The mobile website is pleasant to use, if you are okay with the rather small text buttons.

[busymom0]

That's a perfectly fair point. I personally think HN is one of the best designed sites out there. Being extremely minimal is one of the best designs. I hope that never changes.

I built HACK specifically to be able to be notified when people reply to me. That's one of my selling points.

[CoolestCat]

Hey I’ve never been on HN before but have seen good articles pop up on Reddit. A few minutes ago I searched for hacker news in the App Store, scrolled a bit, and downloaded HACK because it looked the most promising :)

And now I’m posting my first HN comment on this app to the dev hahah.

[busymom0]

Haha thanks! Glad you could find my app easily!

[HaZeust]

message me at (my username) at gmail dot com. I'm the creator of Touchbase (www.touchbase.id) that lets users share all their online platforms in 1 profile, and I want to speak on possibly integrating HACK as a platform that users can share their account of.

[pokerface_86]

commenting from HACK rn!! it reminds me of apollo in a good way :)

[zucked]

You’re on it, buddy :P

[KingMob]

Unfortunately, HN has nowhere near the diversity of communities and viewpoints as a place like reddit did.

[some_random]

Yeah it's a bizarre claim. I've described HN as a single, usually really good, subreddit before but it's absolutely not a replacement for the entire site.

[p-e-w]

Indeed. And it even has the same features (centralized, ultimately beholden to commercial interests) that destroyed Reddit!

But don't worry, that's not going to happen here. You don't need a decentralized non-profit community, trust me. It's going to work out this time. Really.

[peruvian]

Ironically Reddit also gives users way more control over their data than this place.

[_fat_santa]

I'm not sure if you're being entirely serious but I disagree. HN is special because while it's a popular (relatively speaking) social media site, it's also run by a company that isn't in the social media business. YC is not concerned with how to make HN revenue generating, they just want to push people to where the real money is made for them: their startup accelerator.

With that said it's in YC's best interest to keep users happy, only change what is requested and generally keep the status quo. Unfortunately for a company like Reddit that is a social media site and has to make money with their social media product, keeping users happy at all costs is not in their best interest (though that has yet to be seen).

[ff10]

Well, as it stands HN is like just another good subreddit.

[rakoo]

There's a list here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13x9sy7/now_that...

Note that all of these are still centralized, so still subjects to similar issues. Once again selfhosting is the best xay forward

[coded]

digg :)

[johnnyanmac]

"We're" not stuck unless your career is in social media, in which case yes, they will still be the most popular sites and the best way to reach people.

But for the rest of us, there's always a choice to foster a new community. Whether there is enough for that, and if a server is ready for that load, are big questions to answer though

[anlaw]

And that’s fine. We need less low effort rage bait, viral influencer influence on the economy.

The reach of contrived political philosophy, fiat economic hustle, and pop culture gabber can be constrained; the obsolescence of /. , MySpace, and the like did not destroy reality. Now we know the outcome of the social media experiment. Utter dumpster fire.

It occurs to me people made a whole lot of small business work before handing sacks of cash to cloud SaaS

We need less adminisphere in all contexts so we can screw up again, let the wrong people helicopter us with banal AI bots, make lizard brain m sedate until it gets bored with AI bots. Then we’ll trot out a new copium for the masses and they can lean back again, super proud of their commitment to whatever hallucinated ideology they believe they’re serving.

All while waving off the ecological impact, because reality is just a big graph, mmmk

[cbzoiav]

If you work in social media, you can probably afford a subscription based enriched app that pays the API fees.

It's the normal users that suffer. Hopefully that suffering will hit Reddits usage/cash flows enough to make them u turn.

[johnnyanmac]

You certainly can redirect people to a website/app for a more tailored platform. But it's not the 2000's anymore where sites feature forums, comments sections, and other community features encouraging users to stay in their environment. At best, the ones that remain use middleware liks Disqus or Discord (and that is a whole other tangent that I could rant about all day) or simply encourage users to share on Reddit/TWitter.

They still can, but most sites these days are fine going where the people go, and linking to their custom stuff.

[unshavedyak]

Twitter pushed me onto Mastodon a while back and i imagine Reddit will do the same. Funny enough, i have exactly one of the clients mentioned in this discussion - Tweetbot - on Mastodon. Ie the app made by the same devs.

[ryanSrich]

I have no idea why, but I can only stand to use reddit in "old" mode. Even on mobile. It's completely 100% unusable in any other format. I've tried to use their app and standard mobile website, but I can't make heads or tails of the hierarchy of content.

[UberFly]

If you don't use old mode in a mobile browser, they block off 1/3 of your screen with "Are you sure you don't want to use the Reddit App?" Pretty sure I don't Reddit.

[Guereric]

Any tips on using old reddit on a phone? Constantly zooming in to press unfriendly-for-tap buttons make it a chore, compared to Apollo.

[lostlogin]

That’s the way.

The alternative is the god awful updated site or their app. I hope you like adverts.

[ta8903]

There could be a userscript for a better reddit UI if someone cared but looks like nobody does. There's also Reddit Enhancement Suite but I don't think you can use it on mobile.

[chaxor]

Wasn't there something called `teddit` that was written in nim that did a better job of removing all the js crap that makes reddit terrible? I would imagine everyone will just move to that if possible. Although perhaps that may also be affected by their idiotic API charge junk.

[coded]

Yep https://teddit.net/ although it’s quite slow. There are other alternatives out there too.

[TechBro8615]

I wish the Twitter client were half as good as Apollo. I really miss the ability to navigate the stack by swiping as intuitively as I can with Apollo. In Twitter the best I can hope for is a stack of depth two.

[websap]

Decentralization doesn't seem like a bad idea now?

Only if there was a way to host websites where no central authority ever owned the data and the people who ran relays got paid in some form of cryptographically secure crypto currency. Frontend clients that made requests would need to pay in the same token to avoid abuse.

[waif]

If the web collectively swings back in the other direction, to the fediverse or some other evolution, there will be a revival of small indie clients, and a revival of a better web in general. Twitter is in freefall and Reddit is on the verge of it, so it might not be a long wait.

[TechBro8615]

The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product. And if that's true, then Apollo is the exception to the rule. Reddit has a team with dozens of engineers, while Apollo has one developer with some part time help. So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?

What the pro-centralization argument misses is that centralized apps also have incentive to monetize their app, and monetization features can harm quality. But in the case of Reddit I'm not sure it's only monetization which has ruined the first-party user experience. The engineering quality is just bad.

[ludocode]

>So why is Apollo so much better than the official app?

It's because of misaligned incentives.

Third-party clients are good because their only focus is to provide the best user experience to the website content. The user is the customer, and pleasing the customer is what makes money.

First-party clients have all sorts of competing goals: showing ads, data mining, maximizing engagement, soliciting upsells (Reddit badges) and other dark patterns. Many of these conflict with providing good UX (especially ads.) The user is not the customer, advertisers are, so when the customer gets what he wants, the user gets the shaft.

First-party clients for ad-supported websites fundamentally can't be good. That's just not incentivized by the business model.

[alwayslikethis]

Furthermore, having third party apps in directly against the business model, which seeks total control of the user's attention to deliver ads and optimize for profits. They are hoping to bump their valuations up before the IPO by this.

[dsab]

Great analysis of first party vs third party clients, it open eyes

[ethbr0]

> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.

I wouldn't phrase it like that.

I'd say 'The anti-federation reality has always been that centralized entities have the authority to more quickly evolve their product.'

Whereas federated models have always had a terrible time upgrading standards in a timely manner, even when upgrades are obviously needed.

However, products typically exist in distinct phrases -- rapid growth/evolution is eventually followed by stability/maturity.

Once the product switches to that latter mode, the evolutionary speed benefits of centralization dull.

Obvious example: AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ's initial popularity... before multi-client Trillian et al. became preferable... because the limited intersection feature set it supported already covered everything everyone wanted to do via IMs.

Reddit reached feature completion and maturity a while ago, which made it ripe for disruption via a decentralized clone.

However, they're just realizing the emperor has no clothes and their only remaining moat is their existing users, and users are a fickle moat.

[poink]

> The anti-federation argument has always been that centralized entities have the resources to make a better product.

This seems like half the argument. The other half of the argument is that you could build a federated system of similar efficiency where everybody notifies/queries a central hub decided by convention.

The important-ish distinction is that you don't need as many resources (for polling) if you can generate enough trust that ~everyone is willing to push to you.

(I don't want to get up my own ass here, so to my mind the only thing that matters about "having enough resources to make a better product" is that you have all the content, presumably by crawling the entire network on shorter intervals than anyone else.)

[jtode]

I left facebook towards the end of 2016, for exactly the reason you might think. I used Twitter for a while before and after that as a kind of methadone, and even stipulating that I was not looking for connection to friends and family, the interactions I had on Twitter in 2017 were, by and large, incredibly low-quality, and I was only interacting with people who ideologically agreed with me, the trolls never reached me, or if they did they were in stealth mode and ineffective.

In retrospect, some of the accounts might have been intended to make the left look extra ridiculous, not sure, but I don't really believe that's true, I've seen people chase enough bad ideas en masse now that I think these were well-meaning people who believed that by participating in this infernal attention mill, they were doing things that would change the world for the better.

Reddit has likewise never been even mediocre at what it's purporting to be, these are all just what happens when people approach the internet, which is one thing, as though it was a super cool television, which is a whole other thing. The illusion of participation and having a voice is really what people are buying with all their attention, because actually having a voice on the actual internet means knowing html at a minimum. Not actually a tall order for anyone who has a couple days and a willingness to do a bit of mental labour, but why bother when you can just post on whichever corporate daemon you favour.

The weirdest thing of all to me, I don't even know how I found this place but it's got some of the best interactions I've had since Usenet died, and I didn't know know what ycombinator was or why it wasn't called hackernews.net or whatever. To learn just this week that the platform is just a service operated by the people behind quite a lot of this VC fuckery, I'm still integrating it, but it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts.

Anyways didn't come to talk about that, came to say, been using Mastodon the last month or so, and I am also having pretty high quality interactions there. Nothing remotely like the idiocy I encountered daily in my Twitter feed. Occasionally a thing that I don't care for, like, I really don't need all the furry porn, holy crap are there ever a lot of very dedicated people servicing the furry market and I'm gonna be looking into that cause I know how to make tails move. But that filters out easy.

I'm on the main instance and I'm looking around at others while I decide whether to just self-host, but I enjoy the scroll with the accounts and hashtags I follow, the quality ranges from boring to amazing, very little annoying, trollish, spammy, Mindset-infected trash comes through my feed, and like I said, the only heavy filtering I've done is the porn.

Best part: I loved Facebook when I first joined and when I started to get discontented was when the default feed stopped being "what you follow in the order they post," and that has never been around since, except notably on reddit I suppose. Nothing wrong with having an algo feed available for discovery, and Mastodon has that, but your feed is just what you follow in the order they post as a default. So you scroll down till you realize you've seen it already, and you know you've seen it all for now and you move on. There is no machine trying to hold your attention, there is just what you asked for. What a concept.

[CapstanRoller]

>it kinda feels like I wandered into the country club after getting lost in the woods and nobody's asked who I'm here with or why I'm not fetching them a bowl of nuts

The tech genius hobos, burnouts, and weirdos come here to rub elbows with the Patagucci vest crowd. The guy who manages this place ("dang") seems to tolerate us unwashed types, as long as we don't post polemics. You're not necessarily in the wrong place, but I can see how you might feel outnumbered.

[bardfinn]

It really would be bad if Reddit collapsed.

Facebook is a former juggernaut of manipulating midwesterners and grandparents by driving them to bigoted echo chambers and serving them Republican targeted adverts. Now it is a wasteland of corporate pages and zombie meme groups, extremist recruitment groups for SE Asian political parties, coordination for death squads on the African continent, etc. it is impossible to host a town square or public commons discussion there.

Twitter is owned by a “libertarian” Republican techbro bigot who was financed by private Saudi equity after conversations with Thiel and a bunch of other alt-Right figures. It is swiftly become 4chan.

There are no longer Google+ forums; all the other message boards save for slashdot are unmoderated post apocalyptic horror shows roamed by Mad Max gangs (or fifteen year old gamers imagining they’re in Mad Max). Even Tumblr has at-scale difficulties countering & preventing hatred & harassment. They have no volunteer mods.

Reddit cleaned up starting in 2019. It’s home to many communities which are exactly as diverse, vibrant, and rewarding as they make themselves to be.

Reddit isn’t going to go under. It cannot. It has to persevere.

[jtode]

And you figure the best way to ensure that is to bring a bunch of VC capital in eh?

[TechBro8615]

This comment reads as a bit unhinged, but I upvoted it for the description of Facebook which made me chuckle.

[johnnyanmac]

two big points

1. "better is subjective" and what reddit's native app is trying to do is "better" for reddit's bottom line. 2. more importantly, there is a case of "good enough". As I'm sure we've seen over the history of the internet, the "better product" doesn't always win. this is 1000x truer for social media. Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives. it lets you scroll, look at pretty pictures, and maybe up/down vote quickly. Anything else to that user is fluff. You can skimp out on a lot of features, even core ones, if those 3 parts are good enough.

[onion2k]

Reddit's app is "good enough" for those who use reddit casually it that they don't look for/at alternatives.

The problem with that, if it's true, is that those people are less likely to be the content creators and more likely to be people who come to read what the 'serious' Reddit users post. Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.

Ultimately, Reddit's main work is to serve a small core group of people who post new content, and that content is what draws the rest of the users. They'll need those users to be happy in the first party app. That might be the case already. If it isn't, Reddit are taking a huge risk.

[thomasz]

Reddit largely leeches anyways. I’m not exactly sure why (I suspect the sorting algorithm and the quick turnover of content), but its community is shockingly unproductive in terms of content creation. The only thing it does somewhat well is aggregation. So no, I don’t think they have much to fear in that regard.

They are risking the relationship to their army of unpaid cops though. These people are absolutely crucial for maintaining the gentrification of that space. Without them, all the hard work to slowly change the tone towards an ad-friendly and ideologically compliant tune is going to be lost. It is not unlikely, but by no means guaranteed that they can recruit another batch of people wohnst willing to do this for free after ruining the relationship with those who got invested during a time when the company was masquerading itself as a community.

[johnnyanmac]

Not surprising at all. Reddit's culture is vehemently against original creation and deftly afraid of any hint of self-promotion. The users claim to be tired of all the same reposts but shun 99% of attempts for people to share originality.

It's a natural consequence.

[johnnyanmac]

>Losing the hardcore group of creators will kill Reddit because then there'll be nothing for the casual readers to read.

I agree. I guess the gamble here (that historically, usually pays off) is that the casual userbase size is good enough to keep the power users around, who ultimately want visibility. That's the hardest part of the modern internet and why social media survive well past what would be downfalls for any other product.

I'm not going to say Reddit is too big to fail, but I don't think reddit's death will be by a thousand paper cuts. it will heal with new mods as fast as the old ones leave. Whether it whither and rots away over the years with that new modbase is the big question mark.

[pradn]

Oh wow, "pull to refresh" was invented by one of these indie clients? Do you remember which one?

[waif]

And wasn't it the Twitterrific client that came up with the phrase "tweet", and they also introduced the blue bird icon.

Then musk took over, and he banned them from using the API and forced them to close down. What a stand up guy.

[UberFly]

Tweetie - iPhone Twitter app in like 2008

[moffkalast]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loren_Brichter

[cmcaleer]

Tweetie for iOS

[newaccount74]

Mastodon clients are a fun UI playground, lots of indie apps (at least on iOS).

Unfortunately Mastodon feels a bit empty, there's not many people on it yet.

[Joeri]

It depends on what sort of community you follow. The ML and tech podcasting communities have largely moved over. The politics, journalism and celebrity part of twitter hasn’t moved over. The corollary to that is that much of the vitriol and random toxicity also hasn’t moved over. I have a more vibrant and more interesting mastodon feed than I ever had on twitter. And my twitter feed now is a wasteland, stripped of the good content but still filled with all of the bad content. Twitter is dead man walking as far as I’m concerned.

[monocularvision]

The problem I experience with Mastodon is it seems like a total echo chamber. Very little interesting conversation most of the time. I still find good links to content there though.

[brewdad]

Historically, before the "mass migration" most Mastodon servers were built around a specific community and their shared values of what was appropriate to post. Sure it was federated but many early users tended to stick to "their" server exclusively.

It's no surprise that can end up feeling like an echo chamber. It's getting better than it was when I first started using it about six months ago but some of the posts people catch heat for seem a bit too over the top.

One of my favorite examples was a user who posted a photo of their dinner. It was nothing crazy just like rice, veggies, and chicken. They were immediately accosted for not posting a trigger warning since some people have eating disorders. That's the type of community I have no patience for.

[thal3s]

> I have a more vibrant and more interesting mastodon feed than I ever had on twitter.

Exactly! I can comment on a post and have real engagement with someone which hasn't happened in years on Twitter.

[7jjjjjjj]

Mastodon doesn't have algorithmic recommendations, so you have to follow people fairly liberally to get a good amount of content in your feed.

[phs318u]

This exactly. Furthermore, Mastodon rewards those that want to actively participate in communities. It does not reward lurkers who want to passively (doom)scroll.

[gedy]

That's... kind of dumb? What's wrong with lurking if you don't have much to say on a topic, but want to observe?

[seanw444]

Makes sense if the goal is to get content flowing. Doesn't make sense if you want the quality of content to be good.

[cutemonster]

How does that work?

If Alice posted once the last months, and Bob 20 times, and they both post another post, then ... maybe Mastodon will promote Bob's post and demote Alice's because Bob has been more active? (I would have preferred the opposite, hmm)

[amatecha]

I mean, according to the joinmastodon.org API stats[0] there are nearly 7 million users and wavering around 9-10k instances (servers).

[0] https://api.joinmastodon.org/statistics

[CodesInChaos]

IMO that era already ended when we transitioned from ICQ, AIM, MSN & co to Whatapp, Signal and the google messenger du jour.

[Dalewyn]

>to me it signals the end of a golden era of small indie client only apps.

To me it signals you're a fairly new entrant to the intertubez.

Third party frontends for a given backend have existed since time immemorial, with or without sanctioned access to the backend's innards.

Alternatives to Explorer and Program Manager for a Windows shell are one of the older examples, more contextually relevant and newer examples would be programs like Pidgin and Trillian which served as third party clients for AIM, MSN, YIM, ICQ, etc.

None of this in any general sense is going away, though specific examples might.

[piloto_ciego]

It’s only happening this way if we let it.

We can build a Reddit replacement… we just have to want to

[throwaway1777]

Funny, everyone was pissed at the Apollo developer before Reddit announced these changes. Now the anger has completely shifted.