There are many clients for Reddit but this one is my favourite as it's fast and snappy. It introduced experimental gestures which were highly intuitive which I've not seen anywhere else. Excellent focus on content, I'm going to miss it.
It's sad to see so many apps shutting down regardless of what Reddit decides to do post blackout. I suspect there's also an element of relief among these developers not having to spend so much of their time on this anymore.
i paid for sync moons ago and have used it exclusively to browse reddit, even going so far as to resign myself to android to use it (and also to use Materialistic) because of how much i favor the experience, configurability, and UX -- it is infinitely better than any app i have tried. admittedly i might be an outlier as i have no interest in browsing on desktop and very much prefer to reddit on mobile.
this is a sad day for me as it likely means my reddit usage will drop to almost zero.
My reddit usage dropped to zero a few years ago and I can't say I miss it. I occasionally slap a "reddit" at the end of a very specific google search term but even for that it's lately been subpar. Hacker News on the other hand I read every day.
Same. I still remember the day it came out, and raving about it for months. The offline feature was such a game changer as starving college kid with a 2 hour commute and no data - IDK how I even survived without it.
Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.
Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.
For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using.
With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads.
Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile.
Site: https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld)
Really love that you’re trying a unique business model! I suspect you’ll struggle to gain traction on anything that requires a credit card to interact with, even if the price is only $1, due to the very high barrier to entry for most of the world but I hope this works!
One idea I’d love to see somebody implement: weight content that a user spent longer typing + editing higher as a proxy for thoughtfulness. Unfortunately this specific client-side metric can realistically only work on a native-only service with device attestation and no API, so that the metric can be trusted, but would be cool to think about other solutions to surfacing higher quality content (like TikTok did), as well as solving the inevitable authenticity problem as more and more online content will be astroturfed by LLM’s.
So I actually think this model does weigh for better content, but I'd love your thoughts here since it seems like you're thinking about this as well.
Part of the reason why I want engagement to be paid only, is because when you factor in the "anything beyond [the $1 server fee taken from your subscription] gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month" aspect, you have to be more choosy with what you upvote.
Take a scenario where I subscribe for $10/mo. That means $9 gets split between everything I upvote. If the first thing I upvote in a month is an extremely engaging and insightful article that clearly had hours poured into it, as of that time the author of that article will be scheduled to get all $9 of my subscription pool at the end of the month. If I stumble upon a low effort meme that made me chuckle, will I upvote it knowing that it will reduce the amount of the pool that is going to the first article? If I do they'll each get $4.50 at the end of the month, but are the two of them equal? On reddit votes are free and require nothing, but now that there's an aspect of "voting on this takes a little away from my previous votes", there's another factor at play.
My hypothesis is that this will lead to more conscientious voting. No clue if it'll actually work, but again since you're thinking along the same lines I'd love your take.
The way you replace Reddit is by making its business model obsolete with a better model.
The problem with Reddit is that the interests of the users, mods, shareholders, and advertisers are not aligned. Their interests are being pitted against one another in order to generate profit through enshittification.
The way you make a better Reddit is by creating a cooperative model where the users, advertisers, and mods interests are aligned, and there isn't a profit motive for a shareholder group that takes precedence over the quality and governance of the site.
The web site and free app are ad-sponsored. Paid subscriptions first give you an ad-free experience, and secondly, give you and API key you can use in any 3rd party app. 3rd party apps make revenue from the subscriptions, giving them an incentive to create an ever-better user experience.
Mods earn a fee based on traffic and interactions with their subreddit. Not enough to call it a job, but enough for the community to show appreciation.
As a cooperative model, there are no investment shareholders, the site sells bonds to fund it that pay a deferred, fixed yield to get it started. Bondholders, have a vested interest in the success of the site, but have no say in its operation. Without shareholders demanding profits and growth, the interests of the users, the mods, the advertisers, the bondholders and the non-profit that administers the site are aligned.
The best things in this world aren't for profit, the hug of a child, a national park, a sunset and the stars at night. If you want a Reddit-like experience to stay pure, it needs to upset the apple cart and be a tech entity of a completely different model in order to avoid enshittification.
This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators.
Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one.
Also thank you for the kind words about the design - it's been a fun labor of love.
High risk high reward! I do have nsfw tags and logic baked into the site, but it is risky if the site is perceived as being for nsfw content. Having it is fine, it being the main use case though means I wouldn’t be able to use Stripe as a payment provider.
I would ditch user logins and user comments. Let OPs post a wallet or something and otherwise remain anon.
Avoid the hypernormalizing of commentary and costly moderation by forcing scrollers to comment elsewhere; cut and paste a link is not hard. Not every social media product needs the normalized set of features.
Social by default is exhausting. It’s the biggest downside to the internet and society these days. Yes we’re social creatures but we also evolved over centuries of social interaction being difficult to come by given slow travel across fast distances. We did not evolve around 24/7 consumption of human inane and repetitive first world gibberish.
Yea my bad there - fwiw I added a hot patch to the frontend to accept hackernews as a valid "email" since I couldn't update the parent comment. It should work now, but j+hn@jjcm.org was the email used.
And I only brought prod down for 15s or so when I missed a bracket in the production server frontend package I was editing in vim! I call that a success.
Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?
Not only that but who (and how) is all of this hardware getting paid for? Running a large web service is not cheap and nobody wants to front those costs for practically no gain.
>How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?
Make sure the community has proper and sane moderators/admins and stamp that down before it flairs up. Because it's the internet, it will always flare up if unchecked.
But I get it, that involves trust in judgement, and the internet attracts some very zealous personalities that don't have that. You'd need someone with a proven record to champion that cause. I'm not sure who that is.
Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard.
Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)
I'd be interested. If there was something that was even 1% as large as r/games I'd be fine weaning off. Hopefully a community that isn't hellbent on bashing anything that isn't a console game.
Most of my tech subs are covered pretty well here, but not media.
It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.
The problem with Reddit as a business is that they have the least profitable users of any social platform. So one would have to build a backend, incentive the app makers to switch, get advertisers and do it all more cost efficiently than Reddit does it.
The business model can't be "become a giant social network that makes billions and employs tens of thousands of people."
If the whole thing is lean, with minimal costs, no account reps, and essentially non-profit, it's a lot easier.
Of course, that means it goes one of two ways:
1. Never gets traction, dies after a bunch of work
2. Takes off and the people controlling it (rightfully) want to be compensated for their hard work, so they start adding advertising and focusing on monetization, which requires hiring more people, which requires a more mature business model, which heads towards IPO.
Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation.
Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!
It's an interesting idea. If it were going to work in just a few weeks, I think you'd need a replacement that is API-compatible with Reddit, so clients can just change their URI and have everything just work. I can't think of anything too difficult there.
The hard part would probably be the anti-spam and other anti-abuse stuff that lives entirely server side. Maybe all it is IS the API endpoint, at least to start, so only the mobile clients can access? Doesn't solve abuse but mitigates it.
It's important that it's not an alternative, or else we'll be in this situation again a few years from now. https://join-lemmy.org will allow us to create a network of sites (or instances) that are still able speak to one another.
The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have moderation, to develop and maintain features etc.
The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.
>The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money.
Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023.
You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.
And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.
The comments I've seen have included Lemmy (caveat: apparently some concerns about the devs, default instance and policies) or kbin both of which are ActivityPub capable.
I doubt the API would be complicated, the issue will be in all of the little QoL/scaling features: moderator settings, automoderation bots, hosting photos and videos in a scalable way. I imagine behind the scenes bot/spam detection is an entire engineering team.
I meant go the other way -- the apps band together and all decide to support some alternative backend, instead of the official reddit. Ultimately it's the users that make a site valuable, and the clients seem to have a lot more goodwill than reddit itself right now.
Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done!
It's definitely a gamble building your business on top of another, much larger company's product.
It's called platform risk, and while every company has it to some degree, if your business is solely dependent on a third party especially one that doesn't have (much) skin in the game (your game, not theirs), that risk becomes existential for your business.
I've seen it before where a company builds something cool, only to be shut down by the larger company who for whatever reason doesn't like what the smaller company is doing.
Seconding the redact shoutout, although the UI could use a lot of work, it's certainly much easier than looking for an extension for the bunch of supported services or having to use an outdated script in tampermonkey.
The nice thing about redact specific to the reddit module is the edit before deletion, that way reddit can't keep monetizing your comments/posts. Useful for people who posted personal content as well, who thought their selfies or artwork or whatever got deleted with account deletion but remained up.
> Honestly just kind of done with mass market social media in general at this point
I've been saying, the current leaders are too big to fail or get disrupted by competition, but if there's a silver lining it's that in lieu of a better Reddit happening we may realize it's a good time to start being less online.
It has failed to remain good/worthwhile. But what I meant is that it's too big to go away and get replaced by something else completely. It has so many users staying there out of habit/inertia, it will take a decade for them to dwindle away.
> There is NO NEED to use never ending reddit to load as many comments / submissions. This script uses the actual Reddit API endpoints to edit and delete instead of automating clicks on delete and edit buttons. ahem, reddit overwrite
My plan was to run it on June 30th since it claimed to use the API. I guess since it’s in-browser it could still be using the API and masquerading as the website.
I love my 3rd party Reddit app, but when their business model is either 1) don’t show Reddit’s ads and instead show their own ads, or 2) charge a fee to remove all ads (including Reddit’s) - it does feel like it was just a matter of time before this happened.
Reddit should have said Reddit premium users can use 3rd party clients / unlimited API calls. Messaging something like: If you want no-ads you have to pay Reddit (not someone else), but if you feel their client is better feel free to use it. The landscape for 3rd party clients would probably still dry up (who wants to pay 2x subscription fees), but it would have been better PR.
I suspect it's too late to stop much of the madness. Reddit took $1.4 billion in VC money, and like mobsters, VCs like to get paid back without much regard to how it happens. Even if the Reddit workers unionized, I suspect that Reddit's execs would happily fire every union member rather than significantly jeopardize their IPO. After all, Twitter shows how you can fire the great bulk of your staff, treat the remainder horribly, and still have a content site limp along for quite a while without immediately dying.
Ran into a user who shared a screenshot of the mobile app (for unrelated reasons to the topic at hand). They admitted the mobile app 'sucked' yet didn't care.
Apathy is real, and most users have it. Reddit will be fine.
Power users are the most affected here, and power users bring the most value to Reddit.
Mods specifically have always been Reddit’s golden goose. Free content moderation by volunteers is Reddit’s only advantage over other social media platforms. FB pays absurd numbers of humans to do what power users do for Reddit for free.
Unions can influence them only while they're in CBA negotiations unless they negotiate a seat at the table, as in your example, which is not something that is at all common in the US.
Reddit made a huge mistake taking VC money and trying to become billionaires. They could have maintained a smaller footprint and created essentially a lifestyle business like Craigslist and served the world.
Taking VC money and trying to extract more money from its users is going to change the site irrevocably.
And the biggest problem I have with Reddit is that the investors and employees are going to become rich off the backs of the moderators who are the ones that create the culture and the content for free. They get zilch except a thank you from the millionaires. And the mods are so dumb they don’t seem to realize this.
Sadly Craigslist is a shadow of it's former self. OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace have far more listings in my experience (major metro in US, shopping for electronics and furniture).
I mean, first it's a huge mistake, then the employees are rich? I think if they became rich, they haven't made a mistake. And the mods were volunteers to begin with. If they are fed up with Reddit, they'll just serve the world elsewhere.
You could say that it's shame that things like Reddit don't last, I mean in the form of not serving the interest of investors. It could be such a good place. But to me it seems like this is the conscious decision of the powers to be. And so, no mistakes at all.
Many moons ago, I distributed a mobile app that was effectively just a UI client into a SaaS API. The first step in the setup was to login to your account in a web browser, obtain an API key, and paste it into my app. This was the key used to authenticate and authorize all requests to the third party API.
Why can't the same flow be used here? Just require users to obtain their own Reddit API key, and let the app be a thin client that doesn't ship with any keys owned by the devs themselves. I'd be happy to pay-for-my-own API usage.
Getting a Reddit API key seems to be a more complex process than the usual, with the first step being submitting a service ticket [0]. I imagine that this would also help Reddit prevent people from doing what you're suggesting, if it were to become popular.
It's sad to see all these good Reddit clients disappear.
I hope someone will be able to make them usable again. I've already seen some people start work on an implementation of the Reddit API to interface with Lemmy (though obviously porting the federated nature of the fediverse into Reddit is very difficult) but other workarounds would still be welcome.
I suppose you will be able to plug in the API keys for the official Reddit app into these alternative clients until the API breaks but long term a better solution is needed.
I don't think we have ever seen such a reversal, the closest might be Microsoft's attitude towards open source, but that is apples and oranges.
Facebook used to be more open. You could connect to Facebook Messenger using any Jabber/XMPP. They never reversed course, if anything they made it harder to use Messenger without the application.
I wonder why these app developers are announcing that they're shutting down their apps before the upcoming blackout. If the apps have already shut down, what exactly is the blackout supposed to achieve?
I don't think the developers really thought Reddit would change their mind over a 48 hour blackout, but doing this now kind of removes the main reason for it. The mods are probably risking getting their subreddits taken away from them by Reddit by doing this, the app devs could at least wait until after to announce even if they already made the decision.
Sync had an awesome redesign of their app recently but ruined it by embedding ads into it. Some of the ads are even animated when reading the comments. As a result, I don't feel bad for the developer of Sync - they had it coming really.
Not only adverts - animated adverts. They are serving data from a free API and looking to piggy back off it. Not only is my assessment not "poor", it is too kind to the developers.
I truly don't understand the narrative from the past few days.
These third parties lived by serving their own ads instead of reddit's. They paid $0 to reddit yet made a very good living themselves (at least for the top ones like apollo and sync).
And yet the narrative is now that they provided tremendous value to reddit by providing them with exposure (lol!) and that their users were creating most of reddit's content (which is most certainly false) and that reddit are monsters who duped them.
Let's be real here. Those developers had a good run, they made a living of of reddit's content for a decade. Bravo. That was nice. But they all knew it was going to end one day ("Is it fair for Apollo to not pay reddit?" was a common question on the apollo sub, so even the USERS knew it wasn't a fully bidirectional relationship).
The problem isn't that they're expecting third party clients to pay for API usage.
The problem is that their prices are completely outlandish and multiple orders of magnitude more than they would've made of the same users had they used the official app.
On top of that, the transition period for third party apps to somehow implement a way to make these ridiculous sums of money is 30 days. That's just impossible.
This completely writes off the difficulty of and time required to build a great mobile app. If it was simple and easy Reddit would have just made their own instead of buying out an existing one.
It's irrelevant to the topic, but I actively dislike Reddit and would be happy for it to die. I use old school forums more than anything else online. Reddit killed those.
Would it be better if they ONLY had the paid version of the app instead of offering both paid and ad-supported versions? To me, it seems ideal to give users that choice. To me the $3 or whatever was worth it to support a good app (even if the dev sometimes goes AWOL)
It's sad to see so many apps shutting down regardless of what Reddit decides to do post blackout. I suspect there's also an element of relief among these developers not having to spend so much of their time on this anymore.