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
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Memmy - An iOS client for Lemmy
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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
AMA Request: the kind of person who would buy a reddit NFT
Question 1: what is your damage?
I bought and flipped like 20 almost. Nice tidy profit!
Damage = ~$2200
Why turn down free money?
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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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.".
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.
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.
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...
Oh my god, I have rarely been more frustrated reading a comment. Thanks for the insight, this definitely explains a lot lol.
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.
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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.
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.
Also, Memmy had a great template from Apollo.
The motivation is $$$. Reddit's board and CEO want to get rich. Lemmy wants to nerd out and create a community.
Let's also acknowledge that nobody should work for free so if you truly support Memmy/Lemmy, put your money when your mouth is.
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It’s worse than that. Reddit BOUGHT Alien Blue, which was basically Apollo before Apollo, and was easily the inspiration for Apollo’s “Compact” view.
They HAD a product that was basically already almost Apollo and turned it into whatever the fuck it is now.
Which is possibly why Alien Blue’s API key still seems to work, and you can still browse Reddit with it if it’s on your phone.
It takes real talent to fuck up that badly.
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.
In case Reddit is wondering, no, we don’t want to help you.
In fact, we want to destroy you now.
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.
Reddit don't want to build a good app. They want to harvest data.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
Incentives are real
It's almost as though reddit's goal wasn't making a good app.
Where is the Android client???
I’ve been extremely impressed with how fast the team moved on this. Not only is Memmy a great app for me, but it helps make the fediverse easy to use for newcomers. Way to go y’all!
Thank you to the team and the community feedback that has really made this beautiful app.
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.
It doesn't say much...
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It reminds us that Reddit never gave a toss.
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It reminds you that, through the Reddit lens, your value is about zero.
Noted. Probably not a fault of Memmy, but it takes a couple minutes to load this and every thing else.
Edit; I set this down because it was still showing spinning wheels. Looks like it came through!
Memmy is not in fdroid, right?
Good point!
Memmy > * > Reddit app
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