cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1032247
Finally tried the official Reddit app. It's as bad as they say.
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.
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.
Through vigilance and a strong community that looks out for itself. Just like IRL
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%"
Can we stop posting Reddit's ads here please
It's quite insane how awful AskReddit is. Same uninteresting questions with flat answers.
“Sex havers of Reddit, how is sex? Send bobs and vagene”- ask Reddit in a nutshell.
To be fair I was a horny teenager at one point but that’s what yahoo answers was for
Wouldn't surprise me if a vast majority of the posts on that sub come from bots.
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
I'd legitimately never seen what the Reddit app looks like as I always used RIF but good grief it's actually somehow worse than I'd been led to believe.
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
It's worse then you think. That "popular" screen is what's popular to all of Reddit determined by their algorithm, not what's popular in the subreddits you have subscribed to. There's no way to avoid the firehose of whatever they want to feed you, you can only go to a specific subreddit in the app instead.
It's basically unusable for me in this state.
Most people don't have time to fritter on new tech, alt clients, etc. Honestly they're not stupid and I resent the implication--Reddit's just predatory. If we want an alternative to flourish, we gotta stop treating it like its a "smart people club" and being elitist about it
Someone should file a bug report, some content accidentally got displayed instead of more 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
Never used the app, never plan to, but I can't even handle the main site now. Have (diagnosed) PTSD due to religious trauma, and those fucking unblockable "He Gets Us" ads are intolerable.
I can’t think of a worse place to advertise religious ideology than reddit.
I have half a brain yet did download the app to see how shitty it really is. Rip RIF.
The ad is too small. They need to make it much bigger to maximize profit
"Please plug in an external monitor to display all ads properly."
I did. And now I'm here :D Got my half brain back
And this is my first comment on Lemmy and I'm loving this place.
Yeah it’s especially egregious unless you browse in compact mode. Ads are much less noticeable
No no no. No. Never used the official app, but man.. this is sad as hell. Just pulling up the screenshot made me scared my laptop was about to be bricked.
The ads are real bad if you don’t pay to not see them, and trending is dumb, but the most egregious thing is that you can’t sort your Home feed. It is stuck to “best” and the algorithm is terrible.
It used to have the ability to sort, but they removed it at some point, I’m not sure when because I had been using Apollo for years.
I took a look at the last iteration of Alien Blue (which can still be downloaded if you had it at some point but you can’t log into it anymore) and that 2014 app is still better.
It just makes me sad.
I tried it about 4 times, thinking I was missing something. How on earth could something so bad, possibly be popular? But I realised I'd just got used to RIF. The official app is absolutely dire.
I thought this was rhe YouTube app at first glace. Damn, as a boost user I wasn't aware how bad it is.
I thought this was an advertisement and i tried to block you.......
It makes you feel that something is wrong with your device.
Charge your damn phone
Hey, cut him a break - do you know how much power Reddit's app consumes digging through all the information on your phone, watching where you pause in your doomscrolling, sending all that back to Reddit HQ, and darkpatterning you so you get more ads in front of your eyeballs?
I'm so glad I've never even touched it to begin with, and I'm not inclined too after the migration. I live here now.
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