[joecot]

> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart

It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps.

They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.

And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.

[phire]

It seems like the plan was always to kill the 3rd party apps, but not until their own app was feature competitive with the 3rd party ones.

But they ran into time limitations. They plan to IPO later this year and they want the 3rd party apps to be dead before then.

[x0x0]

I can't see that.

If a 1.5 person app (Apollo) is handily beating Reddit's app... what on earth is the holdup? Either the eng team is wildly incompetent, or this is by executive choice.

Reddit's inability to deliver on mod tools despite a decade's worth of promises makes me think it's 40/60 wildly incompetent and needing firing vs exec choice.

[suid]

I had proposed this reply to someone else's similar question.

I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:

* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.

* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.

* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.

The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.

[EatingWithForks]

I think a big chunk of this is prioritization of resources in a way Apollo doesn't have to worry about. I highly doubt reddit has like utterly mediocre/shit devs. I think it's more likely that works are being prioritized in a way that shafts mods (who don't pay money) towards the goals of the reddit company to ipo (more ads and engagement with their first-party platforms). We had stupid shit like reddit coin and reddit gold and random other small features that are primarily to make money on the first party platform. Apollo's spec is much smaller in comparison, in which the users of Apollo are effectively paying for a smoother integration with whatever Reddit already built.

[solveit]

Yeah, but you'd think reddit could pay for 1.5 engineers to get that smoother integration themselves.

[plagiarist]

By paying for developers who can write good code and allowing them to write user-focused code instead of user-tracking code?

[plagiarist]

Imagine if you could simply write app code without needing to spend hours of time in meetings, writing analytics for every button tap, or writing dozens of explanations to managers why the app doesn't behave exactly like the web version.

[WTFruit]

It’s even worse than that, because both apps didn’t start at the same time, or from the same point. The Reddit official app started out as Alien Blue, which by all accounts was a very popular and well-made 3rd-party app itself. Reddit bought it, and then made it significantly worse, and THEN Apollo came out.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not unheard of. Back when I worked in a place that forced me to use Slack, I deshittified my experience via Ripcord, which could handle 90% of Slack at < 5% of overhead, while being much more ergonomic, and also doing 80% of Discord at the same time. And that client too was, AFAIR, a one-person project.

[renewiltord]

It’s a bit of a silly question, right? How come the Pirate Bay with fewer developers can offer me all Disney films but Disney with so many more can only release some from the vault. The motivations are different, so they’re probably working on things that make Reddit make money.

Fine, I'll spell it out: The hard part of making a client is making a client that can retain the money-making portion of an application. It is trivial to charge a small amount for client functionality when the predominant cost is on someone else. The reason you need a lot of engineers building the Reddit client is that they have to deliver the ads, make sure the ads are viewed, and correctly reported as having been viewed. The whole thing.

If you don't have to worry about making money, you can make a front-end to anything quite easily. This is why most HN commenters frequently make the "what's so hard about the Uber app" mistake. The hard part isn't the app chrome. The hard part is making it make money.

[dale_glass]

That's a silly comparison.

Apollo is a better client. The comparison is Apollo vs the Reddit app, not Apollo vs Reddit as a whole.

[avgDev]

That is an EXTREMELY silly comparison, like it doesn't make any sense at all.

We are talking about clients here.

[adrr]

Is it beating the reddit app? What percentage of users use Apollo?

[OldManRyan]

I think you are reading "beating" as higher user count. I read it as better features and user experience. But even in terms of user count, enough people are using third-party clients like Apollo that reddit deemed it worthy to kill them.

[adrr]

did some back of the napkin math with what the apollo developer has said publicly. each user makes 10,000 api calls a month and there are 2 billion calls per month which means 200,000 MAU. Reddit has an MAU around 500m users.

[maaanu]

I mean since apollo users are a subset of reddit user your comparison seem pretty mundane.

[lenocinor]

The article says the average Apollo user makes 345 API calls a month. Using your number of 2 billion calls per month, that’s more like 5.8 million MAU. Still around 1 percent of Reddit’s MAU.

EDIT: Oops, that’s per day! Your math is right, please ignore.

[Fanmade]

I know several developers, myself included, who are significantly more productive in their personal projects than in their main jobs. This discrepancy can be attributed largely to unnecessary bureaucracy. I have a lot of examples to illustrate this point. In one instance, we found ourselves in a meeting with nearly 30 people, spending close to an hour discussing how long it would take to implement a particular topic. In a typical project, this implementation would have been completed within half a day, employing TDD and incorporating feedback cycles, no shortcuts or hasty work. However, due to the need to navigate through a chaotic development process, involving for examples over 20 microservices managed by a three-person team, this task is projected to span multiple two-week sprints.

Another example: Over a year ago, I decided to explore programming with Python. At work, we encountered the problem of our web-based software requiring users to download PDFs to read them. As a personal project, I set out to build a Python application that would generate individual image files for each page of the PDFs, providing both a preview image and a higher resolution version. I dedicated a few evenings and two Saturdays to the project, and after approximately two weeks, it was successfully completed. Additionally, I created a simple GUI using Vue.js, enabling file uploads and displaying the resulting images. An experienced Python developer could likely achieve the same task in just one or two hours, with an additional two hours for the frontend.

Months later, the company decided to embark on a similar project but with additional extended OCR (Optical Character Recognition), incorporating machine learning to extract structured data from the PDFs. Initially, the prototype aimed solely at uploading the PDFs, with the machine learning aspects simulated. Months were spent discussing, conceptualizing, refining, and revising before the implementation phase commenced. Over a year later (though I have since left the company, I remain in contact with current employees), the first prototype was completed. Users can upload PDFs, and the system generates images from individual pages. The frontend simulates a progress bar, as the microservices run in the background without a built-in monitoring system. One of the more experienced developers foresaw this issue from the start, but management hindered his efforts until he eventually resigned. To date, the machine learning component remains unimplemented.

My last example for now: I recall a situation where the best developer I know was hired by a large corporation as external support. Within a few weeks, he was assigned an easy standard task that any competent developer could handle with ease. Believing it to be a sample project for the standard onboarding process, he promptly and efficiently completed it in less than a week. When he delivered the finished result, his clients were astonished. They had planned this to be his sole project for the next six months and had expected it to take a significant amount of time.

In summary, it is not uncommon for companies to invest months of work and millions of dollars into projects that a reasonably skilled developer could accomplish in a day. Never underestimate the incompetence of some organizations.

[dylan604]

Isn't this always the way. Crowd source development and ideas to see what gains popularity, and then build those features into your thing or buy the 3rd party thing to rebrand as your thing. That's like startup culture 101

[theturtletalks]

Another thing that probably irked Reddit was that Apollo, RedditIsFun, and the other popular clients were monetizing their apps by including their own ads, charging a one-time or monthly fee. I'm surprised that wasn't against their API terms.

[shagie]

It's not. It's similar to how Imgur does it.

Imgur serves advertisements when you go to their page. But you don't get them through the API.

https://api.imgur.com/#commercial

> Your application is commercial if you're making any money with it (which includes in-app advertising), if you plan on making any money with it, or if it belongs to a commercial organization.

Calling an API and monetizing the front end it is fine. The money that Imgur loses from ads is made up in the API call monetization.

The Reddit APIs don't prohibit serving advertisements or any other form of monetization of the use of the APIs and mention it as something that your app would need to do.

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/data-api-terms

    You will disclose in your App through a privacy policy how you collect, use, store, and disclose data collected from your App Users and other visitors, including, where applicable, that third parties (e.g., advertisers) may serve content or advertisements and collect information directly from your App Users and other visitors that may include the use of cookies. In addition, by using the Data APIs, Reddit may use submitted information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Note that sending data to 3rd parties from a front end (e.g., advertisers) is something that is allowed provided that it is properly disclosed to the App Users or other visitors and that it may serve content or advertisements from the application.

[DropInIn]

Seems more that they were upset/afraid about how it made the corporation appear inept (and correctly so).

It was about maximizing the value of the IPO by ensuring investors would be minimally aware of the failures of the app and new Reddit, by ensuring as few 3rd party products exist as comparatives to the first party offerings.

It could be argued to be part of a conspiracy to defraud investors by ensuring they were incapable of being fully informed....

[mdekkers]

Never seen an ad in Apollo

[theturtletalks]

Apollo has a 1-time fee to post and a monthly fee for notifications and other features.

[tommit]

But they have done neither. They did not build the most popular 3PA features into their native app, nor did they offer to buy them out.

[willis936]

Being blinded by hubris and taking a hard left off a cliff on a potentially profitable venture are not things I would consider "smart".

Saying it was "smart but handled poorly" is an excuse. It was a series of dumb moves because they did not see the actions they needed to take and in what order and on what timeframe to not capsize.

[joecot]

Correct. In general it's a good capitalist scheme. Start with a mostly open platform, court third parties into making tools that make it significantly better, get your user base. Then kill the third parties to consolidate power.

It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt. Instead of cranking the pricing, they needed to do what Facebook and Google did -- slowly degrade the integration system until it was unusable, start restricting features, add features incompatible with third parties, etc, until the third parties all give up and the API dies a seemingly natural death. reddit just doesn't have the foresight or planning to pull off most plans, including nefarious ones.

But it didn't work for Gmail. Despite Google's best efforts, email still exists outside Google. If we want to avoid playing this Fark->Digg->Reddit game again, we need an open standard that doesn't rely on a single company, like email.

[importantbrian]

I don't think it's so much about consolidating power as it is that this is the natural choice for companies that primarily monetize through ads. I've always felt that it would be better for these platform companies to instead try to monetize the app ecosystem. Start by charging for the API with a generous free tier instead of going down the ad supported route.

[lightbritefight]

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Microsoft used it like a scalpel and a hammer for decades.

[marcosdumay]

> If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.

If the reddit app was any good, the 3rd party ones wouldn't even exist. All their problems are because their users prefer to pay a 3rd party than to use the recommended, official app they keep pushing into them.

Instead of all this confusion, if they just made their app work on the high-latency that is common on mobile networks, they would get much better results. (No need to even make their video work.)

[hooverd]

I think the problem is that third apps get in the way of ads. Reddits users and content and "community" get in the way of ads too.

[skrtskrt]

Ding ding ding

The real reddit app doesn’t even have an option to block a particular ad account so when they serve you evangelical right wing ads all day you just have to swallow it.

[nikole9696]

The inability to block ads I personally find offensive is the #1 reason I'll use a browser with ad block over a native app. Reddit and Tumblr are my two biggest offenders that do not let me properly block particular ads - notably gambling and religion, but also those scam mobile games and other scammy nonsense. I get that they need to pay the bills, but I should have some level of control over what I see.

[joecot]

Which is the real reason that reddit is killing both the third party apps and the mobile site. Same reason that Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok make the mobile site as painful as possible. If you're using a website in a browser, the user has control. If you're using their app, the company has control.

[graphe]

Twitter and TikTok are pretty pleasant to use for me. Just AdBlock and move on.

[SantalBlush]

>The inability to block ads I personally find offensive is the #1 reason I'll use a browser with ad block over a native app.

This is the main reason why apps exist in the first place. They remove the user agency that browsers provide.

[slivanes]

I wonder why Reddit didn't buy the app?

[joecot]

Because it hasn't worked before. They bought Alien Blue, made it the official app, failed to iterate on it, and eventually gave up on it. Now they've made a new reddit app, which is also not good. No reddit official app is going to look good compared to the the third party ones, partly because their profit making attempts are at odds with good user experience, and if they buy the third party ones they've already shown they can't improve them. So they want the comparison to go away so reddit stops being embarrassed by third parties.

[wvenable]

> made it the official app

They did not. They bought it and killed it. Their home-grown application is built from scratch.

[dayedh]

I’m still incredibly bitter about this. The Alien Blue iPad app was fantastic, nothing that has been released since can hold a candle to it.

[bigmattystyles]

Surprised growth is measured in terms of app installs versus active users by VCs. It’s probably both I suppose.