Like many of us I’ve been using Reddit for a very long time (over 10 years) and am saddened by how much worse it’s got since the beginning. I also think they’ve greatly enshittified their default clients to push people to worse clients and hate that - they could have just given people a reason to want to use the new clients.
But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.
Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances
If reddit shouldn't be expected to work for free, neither should the users be expected to create content for reddit for free nor should the moderators be expected to moderate that content for free.
For starters they could display media like videos in ways that aren’t possible (or much harder) to do on the Web, that alone could be huge for the core user base that just wants to look at pictures and videos. Presumably some users would prefer the app because you’re always signed in. You could configure it to send you push notifications for replies or something. They could probably figure out a better way to render deeply nested comment threads too - basically make the experience smoother without pageloads or visual clutter, which some users might like.
Any sort of game or seasonal “interesting” thing like /r/place could very well be mobile-only
At the very least, they can get the default mobile version to a good state, remove all the artificial blockers and nags they’ve put in place, set it to maintenance mode from a product perspective, then only add UX improvements and new features to the mobile apps. The problem is they don’t even seem to make UX improvements most of the time… just UX annoyances
But I have an unpopular opinion: it’s totally ok, and I mean morally ok, for Reddit to charge for API access to this extent. 3rd party app usage incurs direct operational costs on Reddit, requires them to support an API with clients outside their control (and further, if a client uses the API inefficiently, Reddit has a lot more overhead in working to reduce that), and prevents supporting those efforts through advertising monetization. The actual API cost is not wholly unreasonable. Reddit shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
That is not to excuse all the other terrible dark patterns they’ve implemented. This wouldn’t even really be a problem at all if they had incentivized their own clients by making them better, what with all the funding and employees they have, and the ability to make backend changes to accommodate client changes. They’ve been using entirely “stick” tactics to encourage their crap clients instead of “carrot”. Even for people like me who don’t want to use the app at all, if they hadn’t made the default mobile web client (which I still use) so annoying and restrictive, probably Apollo would have much fewer users.
Basically, this is only a problem because they have given users no reason to use their official clients besides artificial annoyances