cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1032247
Finally tried the official Reddit app. It’s as bad as they say.
Holy fuck, 90% of the screen is dedicated to ads
We found that we can push ads to up to 92% of visible area before the user starts convulsing in violent seizures.
“So we decided to opt for 95%”
Holy shit I remember that quote from Ready Player One and never thought I would be seeing the same scenario in such a short time period.
The only post visible between ads is one that’s been reposted thousands of times… This perfectly captures the steaming pile of shit that is the official app (and the reddit experience in general).
The official app is a horrible user experience, but the bigger issue is that most of the content is fake. Between commercial shills, political activists, social-media marketing groups hired to “increase engagement”, and various other bad actors, the site is no longer useful or differentiated. The only places that seem unaffected are smaller private subs.
I don’t know how the fediverse will prevent the same thing happening. The bad actors are just going to follow the eyeballs. They don’t care which platform is used to host their actions. There was already an instance of a group of new kbin accounts being used to mass upvote topics to appear in the hot feed here.
Through vigilance and a strong community that looks out for itself. Just like IRL
Yeah and that works really well!
/s
It generally does, people just have to constantly be reminded.
Definitely agree that it’s a matter of time. You forgot one thing in your list of primary content producers on reddit; bots…
So much of the front page’s content is just produced by repost/karma farming bots, especially in the biggest subreddits.
Seriously, why the fuck has advertising become so incredibly insidious and pervasive in recent years? I can’t go anywhere on the internet and not see ads or a warning to turn off my ad blocker or message telling me to subscribe to view the content. Worse, I can’t even be out in public in the city without having another fucking ad shoved in my face. I was recently walking downtown at 1 am or so waiting on an uber and really enjoying the cool night air, not on my phone or anything, just enjoying the moment, and I saw an insanely bright billboard advertising something.
I feel like ads are just starting to really wear on me. I’m sick of consuming and being told to consume and being manipulated in the death throes of capitalism.
Edit:spelling
Website subscriptions and all types of subscriptions and paywalls are just death by a thousand cuts as well. It’s all ads and paywalls now.
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True, but modern advertisement is almost always intended to deceive. Shitty mobile game ads that don’t even show the actual game’s content, advertisements for complete scams to get rich quick, etc. It’s all some ploy to get people to go download some app so it can collect your data to sell to advertisers or effectively steal your money by misleading you.
Once you get used to an ad-free Reddit experience, it’s truly jarring how many ads the official Reddit app has. Same with Youtube. I have Adblock for Youtube on my computer and when I use the Youtube app on my TV I’m astounded by the number of ads being greedily shoved down my face.
I really can’t do ads. I use Blokada on my android phone and that killed all the ads from reddit regardless of which app I used, but the actual reddit app was just terrible in and of itself. There were so many better choices.
I don’t think this is something new… Lots of webpages had tons of ads in the 90s and 2000’s.
Yahoo 2002: Yahoo 2002
Or this one from the wall street journal in 2000: WSJ 2000
Compare those to today: Yahoo Today
I don’t think it’s any worse today really.
It is worse, though. No Yahoo games 😭 I played that flash pool game to death.
Its awful on Reddit too, they let anyone and everyone run ads. the “he gets us” ads have like 600 paid reddit awards too.
Meanwhile my phone literally has ads in its system video player and file explorer
Wtf?? What phone is that so I can avoid it
any redmi it seems
Sounds awful. I am pretty sick of just not being able to spend a single moment without being advertised to.
yeah it sucks like imagine going to the file explorer to see a document and you get some ads like that’s next level bs lmao
If only more people used ad blockers. Browsers should download with ad blocker extensions automatically installed imo
Can we stop posting Reddit’s ads here please
Hot shingles in your area download for free X
Check out the asphalt on that hot shingle.
Come in and check out our Gluten-Free Roofs!
I usually find the app and the web site are usually essentially the same on most platforms, plus most apps are designed for data farming, so to me, most apps are moot in function, and nothing but a security hole. You’re going to have to do better than just not interrupting me as I come in to announce your app to get me to use it.
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Downloaded today to see after Boost went down. Immediately uninstalled as it made my phone burning hot. Came to Lemmy very quickly.
I had the Reddit app installed alongside boost. I deleted the official app last month and said that when boost dies, there goes my 10 year association with reddit.
Here I am. I really hope Lemmy becomes something special because this far, it is filling that doom scrolling void that reddit filled for me
Boost was the sole way of using reddit. Now if I REALLY need to find something on reddit, I’ll do that on old reddit, on my PC. Will save a lot of time by not being on that shit app.
He gets us.
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There’s zero chance I’m installing that app. Reddit is officially a cash grab that doesn’t deserve one letter of my content.
Prior to the whole API debacle, I loved Reddit and used it daily.
BTW, I still won’t use Sony products to this day because they put rootkits on their audio CDs to prevent piracy.
Don’t forget that when Sony got called on it, they released a “patch” to “fix” people’s PCs. Except the “patch” was an installer for an even worse rootkit.
This was all before Sony further proved they don’t value they customers by hosting an insecure network that, once hacked, revealed they stored all user information (including payment details and passwords iirc) in plaintext. Yeah, I’ve missed out on some fun games but I don’t give Sony a dime.
Glad I’m not the only one who remembers and blacklisted the entire company. It was such an egregious violation of privacy, people’s hardware and all the other stuff you’ve mentioned.
I only brought it up because I’m not a typical person that forgets after a month and goes back to the company. I’m done, done. That triple-down they did was enough for me to call it quits.
For me it was Sony’s constant use of proprietary media. MemoryStick my ass!
This comment gets funnier if you read “MemoryStick” as a verb
I’ve been buying Sony headphones because they sound great for the price but they ALWAYS fail at the same plastic left ear hinge within 1 year or usually less. No more.
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I used the official before switching to infinity. I didn’t mind the official app that much in the beginning. I hated the ads disgusted as posts and how the just got more and more post like as time went on. But I did like the app a lot better then the web site and I never really used Reddit on Mt computer.
Then I switched to Infinity, Loved it and could really see how bad the official app really was. So I just use infinity for some time.
Then I got tiered of opening reddit links from the web when searching for stuff, as it took me to the web site and the constant nagging about downloading the app, and making browsing on the website close to impossible. So I downloaded the official app again and use it to open posts from the web.
So I had the official one and Infinity together for a few days, it wasn’t fun to use the official app but it was a lot more of a pain to use the website.
Then I found out you could make infinity open reddit links, and I never used the official app again.
But even the “normal” users will notice the overall quality going to shit when all the people who were engaged are leaving.
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I assume some internet billionaire will eventually make another centralized platform for the Reddit crowd, and people will flock there. People will never learn from their past mistakes.
JFC. That’s like a 3/5th screen advertisement with enough room for 1 fucking post. Might as well only show ads at that point.
It was this bad a few months ago when I used it as well. I saw almost nothing but gambling ads.
The worst part to me is the people still on Reddit complaining about the blackout because “you can scroll past the ads”, which completely misses the point
Ive seen a post in programming dev instance that those posts we were seeign, shilling for reddit was proven to be astroturfed using LLM to generate the pro reddit reply
And all it did was make Reddit even worse. If that was spez’s best attempt at user retention, then no wonder the Reddit experience keeps going down the drain.
Magnificent
