Killing third party apps. Fuck that. I didn’t even use a third party app, but that just showed me, clear as day, that they’re not concerned with their users, just money. They benefitted from third party apps, then just stuck a big middle finger to their developers and users.
Not sure how many knew about "Compact Mode", but when that quit so did I. Was once as simple as appending ".compact" to the end of a Reddit URL to switch to a nice, simplified interface without ads.
@partial_accumen had the same idea. i.reddit.com was too good of an experience for Reddit to keep around, despite hardly being maintained for almost a decade.
It underlines fundamental leadership problems within their communities. Good moderators don’t tend to align with corporate interests — preferring a sterile and saccharine approach to discourse breeds shitty mods and shitty users.
Independent and authentic is everything Reddit is not.
Reddit is Fun no longer worked, that was my initial reason for leaving. Then I started to see that reddit was becoming more of a corporate thing that regulated what we could see and couldn't see. I know it was like that before but now it just seems to be more...sanitized in a way if that makes sense.
I'd been dissatisfied with Reddit for a while due to things like hive mind mentality and jokes repeated ad nauseum. I always enjoyed more when people were just posting their honest opinions or analysis of current events from a perspective that I don't have. There wasn't really anywhere else to go as an active "forum based" aggregator, so when the ground swell of people leaving due to the API fiasco came along and enough of a crowd started setting up shop on a different platform I jumped at the opportunity to ditch that place.
The one that I absolutely hated the most was in any politics related thread at all invariably people would bring up how Herbert Comacho Mt Dew or whatever his name is was such a great politician. Like, shut up, I'm trying to read about the power vacuum in Iraq; your nonsense has nothing to do with that.
For sure, no shade intended toward the movie itself. But when you get the same string of posts that really only serves to interrupt from the actual topic of the thread, it just grated on me probably a little too much after some time.
The way the API changes were done showed a disconnect between public best interests as a public commons and corporate interests to monetize. It implied that I was being targeted individually for monetization. I feel that anyone collecting individual data about any human and selling that data is a new form of slavery through an ownership of a part of that person with the intent to manipulate. The manipulation of information through the nondeterministic targeting of search results is a coup of a pillar of democracy and all governments of the world. The free press must apply to all information on the internet. With the monopoly of only 2 relevant web crawlers providing results directly or indirectly, there is no freedom of information in digital form. This would be no different than every news paper stand being owned by two companies a hundred years ago. Targeting the individual directly is what the API move was designed to handle. So, to me, it was an attempt to enslave my digital autonomous person. When faced with such a subtle attempt to subterfuge one's autonomy, I feel like the choice was obvious.
Everything I say here is scraped, but only the server host knows my dwell time, sensors, and various fingerprinting mechanisms. Ideally I would self host, but lack the skill and resources. This place is still hosted in a datacenter, but I'm using the API through a 3rd party, so it is even more obscure. I used reddit through an app with a scraped interface before, when that quit working, I quit using the site. Reddit proved it can only get worse, not better.
The reasoning behind the API changes, the CEO's entitlement, the ever-more-annoying interface changes (I hate the "More Posts You May Like", the algorithm is pathetically shitty).
I refuse to install apps to navigate websites. If your site is decent, it should work in a browser. If not, I'll just go elsewhere.