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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Technology
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TLDR: not worth reading the article, it's just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you'll see the "this content has been removed by" (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in "hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now". It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests ~~lasts~~ (edit: lasted) for "weeks" - not the more truthful "months", not "permanent changes", but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.
I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as "news".
The author asked multiple devs about these things - they all had the same reply: Can't talk about it because NDA.
That's not the stated objective of the article, which was "Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment."
No, it doesn't. You don't call it an "APIcalypse" if you're shilling for Reddit. You don't pull out the most critical quote right at the top if you want to shill for Reddit. ("I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership... cares about developers anymore.") You don't mention Lemmy, or Threads, or Tildes if you're shilling for Reddit.
You admit that you're biased; good, thank you. This article isn't.
It is possible that both are true.
I'm still protesting. Haven't been back since. Probably will protest until the sun is cold and black.
I've been back to Reddit a couple times... to make sure the automatically blanked content stays blanked 😶
Very rarely there may be something that you need. Even so, it is becoming increasingly rare to find that knowledge. Spez decided that he owns it now, though some of us here happen to disagree:-).
Nor do you need a mobile app to use Reddit in any case:-). Anyway I think I am with you - we almost hear more about how Reddit is doing here in the Fediverse than we did back when we were on Reddit:-).
Meh. I mean it's not surprising. A lot of people including open source enthusiasts stuck with reddit despite everything.
Valid, but from a truth-in-reporting standpoint, those protests went on for MONTHS and MONTHS. Which I suppose could technically be reported as "weeks", but they could also be reported as "femtoseconds" and yet... seems to lose accuracy that way? :-P
And like, I understand that the title of the article means that it is focusing narrowly on third-party apps not the state of Reddit as a whole, but (1) the scope still includes anything that it does choose to say, e.g. how long those protests lasted, and (2) it does not mention anywhere how e.g. third-party apps compare to the official Reddit app, or what their market share is with respect to one another, which seems the two most relevant questions of all?!
Continuing on, a third question could be: do people like those apps? From the comments even in the article, it seems not... but without usage stats, even an app used by a single person counts the same as e.g. the former Apollo.
i.e., How DOES the third-party app market look nowadays, after the protests? After reading this article, I still have no idea whatsoever... All I know is that there is a list of apps, which sounds like a singular detail devoid of any context that Reddit would very much like us to know, rather than anything that I would actually care about knowing in order to get a better picture of the situation as a whole.
But that's just my two cents.:-)
There's quite a few mentions of Lemmy/Kbin in the comments, so at least word is spreading.
I mean, only like 3 comments out of ~116 total, but yeah, they were solid mentions I agree.
It’s always good to keep one’s shill detector up on Ars vis-a-vis Reddit given the ownership situation. I’ve so far not seen anything that rises to that level, including here, because of the audience. If you’re on Ars and don’t know what Reddit is, this story isn’t going to be of interest and thus is not going to push you to try using Reddit.
That said, this story only seems relevant to the minuscule-if-at-all-extant sliver of Ars readers who know what Reddit is and haven’t been using it only because they’ve been waiting to hear what paid apps look like eight months after the whole fiasco started. That’s not a demographic I’ve ever seen represented in the comments.
I mean, I remember it being weeks myself.
But it's not as if things went back to the way they were either. There were definitely effects due to those weeks.
Some subs did not protest at all. Some users even went into subs dedicated to discussing the topic like Reddit Alternatives and anti-protested, and still others went so far as to brigade many small, entirely unrelated niche subs, taking over polls asking the actual MEMBERS of those subs what they wanted to do, making any discussion of the situation held hostage by a toxic barrage of venomous filth, often by accounts that seemed to have been created for just that purpose in mind due to their highly suspicious age. In my own sub, we had to record comments by hand b/c we felt that we could not trust automated polling as a result.:-(
Some subs shut down for merely a day or two (as mine did). A few more shut down for a little longer - measured in days to weeks.
But several subs, including some of the top ones on the entire site, shut down for MONTHS. And some even shut down permanently, only to have their decisions overturned by Reddit who sent in scabs to open them back up, months later.
So... it was a spectrum ofc, and perhaps the subs you were interested in were primarily affected for a couple weeks. But on the whole, the long tail of the protests lasted much longer than a mere few days, or even weeks, and the likes of John Olivier pic spam lasted for months.:-)
It's probably because I generally saw the sub shutdowns as a result of the protest, and not as an ongoing protest. Reddit clearly wasn't in any talks with the mods at that point and vica versa.
Honestly i'll just go with it being months. I'm basically just arguing semantics at this point.
I only ever really browsed Reddit with Apollo and I monitored the situation somewhat. I feel like the subs that could migrate easier (more techy, more text than pictures) stayed closed the longest or permanently. The ones that can’t really (like those more picture streamy ones as the sfw porn network) were open again fastest from what I remember.
So depending on interest it could have felt way shorter or longer.
I am still missing some of the subs I liked, but I don’t expect some of them to actually pop up here.