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I was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor to dozens of niche subreddits about various techy topics, chiefly because it was a great way to kill time while using the restroom, shopping with the wife, all manner of things that are notable in that I don't have a computer. After using Apollo for so long, the reddit app is downright torture and I refuse to use it. I still occasionally reddit on a computer since the mobile experience is abysmal both in app and browser, but I'd be shocked if I manage 5% of my previous rate of activity. On the one hand, thanks reddit, I got a ton of free time back. On the other hand, that time was previously spent generating value for your website, so not sure that was a good move for you. Edit: Also, and this is strictly second-hand info from the Apollo dev who obviously is far from an unbiased source, but I have to admit alongside the thing just being objectively worse to use, my views of the reddit corporate structure also soured significantly. I think what they did with the API changes was a boneheaded move to be sure, but the way they went about it was so uniquely shitty to the people who had built small businesses around theirs that it truly boggled the mind. The dev for Apollo posted quite a bit around the "negotiations" if one wants to be generous and call them that in the lead up to the API changes, and the CEO just blatantly lied about him numerous times, in obvious ways, trying to paint him as this entitled kid in such a way that as a millennial, I have to admit I am THOROUGHLY sick of. Reddit as a company simply jacked the price, with barely any notice, refused to negotiate on a single point throughout and made numerous bad-faith claims about the developers who were (understandably) caught off guard. Like if you just want to close the API, fine, close it. But then that would paint reddit as the obvious bad guy, so instead they went round the back way with this "api price change" that was so ludicrously expensive that no app could possibly cover it, and then reddit gets to PR speak the thing as "well we tried to work with developers" in a blatantly bullshit way without technically lying. It's gross and tiresome and frankly, insults the intelligence of every reddit user. I can't say for certain if this wasn't the case that I'd still be using it more, as the app and mobile experiences are truly shit even without that. But this certainly has cooled my fervor to try to find ways to use it. |
This is what I'd like to believe, but I fear it does not really make a difference. Reddit's audience has grown far beyond its initial tech roots and the quality outside a small subset of subreddits is... let's just call it devoid of content. It's barely a blip on the radar if the early adopter drop out, because they are by now a tiny subset of the population.
And I guess that's fine. Platforms have their lifecycle. And when a social media network is for-profit, the early adopters are often only important for the initial bootstrapping. Luckily there are nice places like LWN, HN, Lobste.rs and other more niche communities.