I’m not sure what that says about the quality of the Memmy team or that of Reddit or both.

  • lenninscjay@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe it’s easier if all your resources aren’t slowed down by board meetings solely for the purpose of “how can we monetize this”

    That’s what happens when you put profit ahead of function. Putting the cart before the horse something something

    • trambe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Pretty much this. It’s crazy how bloated the app is with a 1000 ways to monetize the shit out of the user (reddit premium, reddit coins, shop, NFT???)

      Like holy shit it’s unreal how bad the main app is compared to a clean experience like Apollo and Memmy

    • ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is exactly it.

      It’s not about good or bad developers, it’s about priority.

      “We want to make a good app experience to attract users”

      Vs

      “We want to make an app that shows as many ads and pulls as much user info as possible”

    • Chobbes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s really depressing that you can’t just build good things that people need / like because it’s not always profitable to do so. Any time money gets into the conversation it becomes a nightmare. Every bit of a project just becomes this battle for the lowest bidder and lowest quality possible to achieve a minimum viable product in a way that leads to technical debt and an unsustainable code base.

      • Chobbes@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s kind of funny that people are talking about solving the alignment problem for AI when we haven’t even solved it between people and corporations.

      • Lzwzli@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Of course you can, as an individual hobby project, or a small team project.

        Founders are the most motivated, usually not by money initially. As the thing grows and needs more attention than a single founder can provide, convincing others to be just as invested is going to require some form of motivation and money being the proxy that can get us the most things we need to live our lives, usually ends up the most efficient incentive and motivator.

  • EeeDawg101@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s fairly obvious with what reddit did to alien blue when they bought it, that they don’t intend for the app to be user friendly or an app that people even like. They simply wanted to monetize it to hell and make it earn them the most $$$. That’s all it’s about with that company.

    In case you aren’t aware, Alien Blue was the Apollo back in the day. It was the OG best third party iOS app for Reddit. Reddit bought the app and totally shit on it by removing everything good about it.

    • bricks@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Bingo. The Reddit app wasn’t designed for UX; it was designed as an IAA engine for their ad network. I know we’re tired of the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” adage, but reading through the Reddit for Business page, you realize that’s what you are:

      https://www.redditforbusiness.com

      Having lived in that whole gross mobile attribution / AdMob / CPx world for a hot minute, I’m especially appreciative of platforms that don’t all immediately race to the bottom. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”. Good times.

      • melonpunk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Posted: June 23 https://www.redditforbusiness.com/blog/unlock-ad-targeting-potential

        Revamping the ad group creation flow and audience manager tools

        Starting this week, we are changing the way you build audiences by refreshing the ad group and audience manager creation flows. We’ve rebuilt these tools from the ground up to create a clean interface that outlines all of the targeting available to you within one flow.

        While all the 3rd party API and blackout shit was going down Reddit were busy talking up their rebuilt ad manager tools, not their lack of mod tools or support improvements for their unpaid staff holding up the foundations of the platform.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. They didn’t even build an app in this ten years, they bought a perfectly good one and utterly fucked it up on the way to not adding any features that some neckbeard in the basement could come up with by himself without access to the backend.

      It’s astounding how bad they are at developing things. Look at the redesigned desktop site, ffs. It’s like someone said “hey, we aren’t using up enough space with ads, let’s add some extra whitespace to flesh it out.”.

    • melonpunk@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s crazy how much they fucked that up. I stopped using Reddit on mobile for a while after. I tried the official app then discovered Apollo, which recaptured the Alien Blue experience.

  • Mr PoopyButthole@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    As someone who did some UX for a touchscreen product in Healthcare, it’s 100% just boring old capitalism making real work impossible.

    Any time immediate profit is put above the company “Mission Statement” (which is every time) it becomes impossible for designers to do a good job.

    I was working with a broken and 90’s looking UX/UI and made a modernized Material 3 style redesign that never even got full evaluation because it “wasn’t a priority”.

    They’d regularly recognize UX problems and ask for the best solution. I’d research, test, and design options, explaining how I got there, and then a non-designer from an unrelated department would say some nonsense and we’d scrap the whole thing.

    • U de Recife@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Thank you for bringing this forward. It’s simply too easy (an understatement, really) to impute malice, even incompetence, to the gritty mechanics behind complex systems.

      In most cases, every single actor is willing a different outcome, but the system kinda has a life and goals of its own. And so those apparently nonsensical behaviors emerge.

      We can call them stupid, but they’re stupid by their own accord…

    • Stelus42@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Oh my god, I have rarely been more frustrated reading a comment. Thanks for the insight, this definitely explains a lot lol.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      piggybacking off of this: please for the love of god anyone who reads this, if you intent to start a company make it a co-operative instead.

      You will still make money, it just won’t go to hell when it grows large enough.

  • calvin@lemmy.todayyoutomorrow.me
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    1 year ago

    It’s not surprising as the motivations are quite different. Reddit wants their app to be a shitty Facebook clone while Memmy/Lemmy focus on the user experience.

    • Sheltac@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Also memmy devs aren’t bogged down by the 10 layers of corporate bullshit your average dev has to deal with.

      Source: am part of corporate bullshit.

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The motivation is $$$. Reddit’s board and CEO want to get rich. Lemmy wants to nerd out and create a community.

    • Lzwzli@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Let’s also acknowledge that nobody should work for free so if you truly support Memmy/Lemmy, put your money when your mouth is.

  • DuckGuy@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    I remember when the official Reddit app released. As an avid RIF user then, I thought it was garbage. Now we’re almost 10 years later and guest what? It got worse. It’s quite an achievement, really.

  • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Different goals. The Reddit app is trying to be good at whatever junk the Reddit owners want to shove in your face and to harvest information from you. That goal doesn’t typically align with a good user experience in the end.

  • gkd@lemmy.mlM
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    1 year ago

    In case Reddit is wondering, no, we don’t want to help you.

  • Gru@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reddit don’t want to build a good app. They want to harvest data.

    • Polydextrous@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They literally said so. Their goal wasn’t to collaborate with the third party apps to maybe take what they did well and compensate them, they wanted to kill them and drive traffic to their ads and data scrapers.

      • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Fuck you, don’t give reddit the accolade of being honest.

        They literally said they weren’t trying to kill third party apps. They literally said they wouldn’t do what Twitter did. They literally said any pricing would be based in reality.

        Yes, this was all a lie and we now know they just wanted to kill all apps, but don’t let them look even 5% less shitty by pretending they were honest about their intentions.

        • Polydextrous@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I meant they said they wanted to drive traffic to their official site to sell ads and scrape data. Maybe they just said it to the Apollo dev and he leaked it? I don’t remember, but I do remember reading them saying the quiet part out loud.

          • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            No, all they said in terms of their goals was that they needed to make a profit.

            Anything else, you better have a really good source, because then the Apollo dev contradicts your story

  • whoami@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One is focused on Quality-of-Life and features, the other is a vehicle for shoving as much telemetry, ads and tracking down the user’s throat as is humanly possible.

    Reddit could’ve most likely made a killing off of allowing third-party apps to operate as normal for users that had Reddit Gold, for instance. It would have been a mostly-acceptable middle ground in my view. Except they decided to instead double down on presenting wholly unreasonable licensing terms to third-party app developers.

    The intent as far as I can tell was never to allow third-party apps on the ecosystem - it was to extinguish the third-party app ecosystem under the pretense of there being an alternative. The forced first-party app is critical for them to milk out as much money as they can from advertisers etc ahead of the IPO.

    • Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I would have paid for reddit gold if it came with 3rd party app usage.

      Instead I deleted my account and wiped as much as possible before I left.

      • ilickfrogs@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Literally in the exact same boat. Even tried preaching that idea all over reddit with no success. Now I’m here and prefer it. Fuck reddit and fuck spez

  • IrBill@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m very much a tight wad and have only ever bought one app, Apollo. I came to iPhone because of a work phone, from RiF on Android, and became dependent on Apollo pretty quickly. Now on Memmy, and every gap or feature I’ve noticed or started to miss, the dev has implemented or addressed so quickly. Kind of insane. The app is free for now, but I went ahead and did the buy a coffee thing on his GitHub, I know he’s got to be drinking a pot a day. The kind of work he is putting in, and the community helping him along the way is special to watch. Hoping for nothing but success.

  • Otakat@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    The Reddit app has the additional development overhead of trying to cram as much spyware nonsense into the app as possible without anyone noticing. That would take a surprising amount of work tbh.