9 mo. ago • 92%

Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment 7 months after the APIcalypse

arstechnica.com Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment 7 months after the APIcalypse

Apollo dev: "I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership... cares about developers anymore."

29 comments

Man I miss Apollo :(

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- The Voyager app is essentially Apollo. It’s missing some things, but it’s close.
  
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  avelon is a good Apollo like app as well
  
  8
  
  Voyager is very good too but it's missing that "swipe forward" gesture, didn't realize how much I used it til it was gone:(
  
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  Memmy too
  
  1
- I'd have said I miss Infinity, but I am using a fork of it called Eternity to browse lemmy. I miss Reddit tho :(
  
  11
  
  I only miss the small community things and communitys for specific things such as single tv shows etc.
  
  9
- I miss Fenix
  
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- I’ve sideloaded it, but my guess is after the IPO they’ll cut off the public API support. They clearly don’t want 3rd party apps.
  
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I just don't browse reddit on mobile anymore because, aside from the official app being a fucking dumpster fire, I won't use it on principal.

RiF used to be my jam, these days I just use Connect to browse Lemmy if I want a similar mobile experience.

40
- I actually really like the mobile website now, but I deleted my account and I don't go there unless I absolutely must.
  
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  I'll still browse old.reddit.com on a computer partly just because of r/sysadmin but yeah, Lemmy is my preferred platform these days (maybe throw in a dash of Kbin)
  
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Meh. I've already moved on.

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- ...to Lemmy.
  
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The essential part at the end:

“ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit's API FAQ page and said the company couldn't comment further because it's in a quiet period and doesn't "comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements." ”

We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become. Hence, all the special exception for leftover third-party apps to not abandon a leaking ship.

More telling is their silence. Who doesn't want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.

38
- Reddit never expected the new api pricing to be a fountain or money. This was never about LLMs or the lack of ad revenue.
  
  If it was just about LLMs they could have made one price for api users that were primarily harvesting data and a different price for api users that contributed significant content or moderation. Which would make good business sense to do so as content contributors are what bring the eyeballs (and therefore the value) to the platform.
  
  It wasn’t about ad revenue either, by all estimates the revenue from a third-party app user would have been many times more than the opportunity cost from the ad revenue they were missing out on from 3rd party app users. If they wanted to profit from the api pricing, they only needed to give the community more time to transition business models. They didn’t even need to give everyone more time, just a dozen or so major third party apps.
  
  This was always about killing off the third party apps. The ones they let survive had low user counts to begin with and went even lower.
  
  I don’t know their real motivations here but so far there’s only two possibilities that i can think of.
  
  A) Reddit’s leadership and board of directors are beyond incompetent
  
  B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.
  
  15
  
  B) They collect significantly more data from the first party app than they were able to from the third party apps, and they’re selling that data for a significant sum of money beyond just their own ad ecosystem.
  
  My money is on this being the reason...the official reddit app is ridiculously invasive.
  
  11
I didn't even notice it happened so many months ago. I already got used to Lemmy. Less niche content but it's slowly growing.

22
- Same tbh. I'll miss my hyperspecific and fandom based subreddits but I have Tumblr for that
  
  12
Reading this on Boost for Lemmy, which I'm glad exists, since Boost was my Reddit app of choice.

20
- Same here, but with sync. Allows me to keep my doom scrolling addiction going.
  
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Oh... is Reddit still around?

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- It's gotten really crappy
  
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  Always had been.
  
  2
- No, as far as I’m concerned. It’s dead and buried, and I don’t care how the corpse decomposes from now on.
  
  1
This is the best summary I could come up with:

Last year, Reddit sparked massive controversy when it dramatically changed the prices and rules associated with accessing its API.

The changes were so drastic and polarizing that they led to an epic protest from Reddit users and moderators that saw thousands of subreddits going private and engaging in other forms of inconvenience for weeks.

"Unfortunately, due to Reddit now charging for access to their API, Narwhal has been forced to add a subscription in order to use the app.

I asked again for this story, and Harrison said he couldn't provide full details but noted, "Reddit was willing to work with me so that I could transition the app to subscriptions in a reasonable timeframe, especially considering it's not my full-time job."

Keeping both apps open means people who bought Infinity for Reddit+ before July 1 are able to easily continue using it (after paying a subscription fee), Ning explained.

(Infinity for Reddit is still listed as a free install on Google's Play Store, but users are required to buy a subscription in the app.)

The original article contains 693 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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