• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    a refresh could be exactly what Reddit needs to lighten the mood after a tumultuous time

    No, what they need is to undo the API change so third party apps can work again. Maybe charge them something, but that something should be low enough that they can be ad supported.

    That’s the elephant in the room, and no branding refresh will make it go away.

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      To be honest, even if they undo that, the damage is done. Trust is lost. And to be honest, after hearing what Spez said about the vulnerable people who post on his site, I wouldn’t want to touch the site even if I liked the official app.

      • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I’m never going back again. It was fun when it was supported by donations and user-focused, but it’s essentially indistinguishable from Facebook at this point. I’m just glad this alternative exists.

    • bloopernova@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      They don’t have the talented programmers needed to make API changes happen.

      reddit is an old school internet site. In that it was originally hacked together by very motivated people. But once the novelty wore off, and the tech debt started piling up, the motivated people either left or got promoted. It should have been trivial to add things like headline editing, but that never happened because their code and DB is a huge huge mess.

      Overshadowed by the API fuckup was something that really spoke to how badly off they are. They deleted old private messages! Their schema or infrastructure is so utterly fucked up that they couldn’t roll back whatever made that happen. People lost years of communication, just gone. No backups, no “go to this new page to download an archive of your messages”, nothing.

      It should have been easy to incorporate rate limiting into the API. It should have been easy to serve ads to 3rd party clients. It should have been a no brainer to charge heavy/advanced API users a nominal monthly fee. Mod tools should have been implemented over a motherfucking decade ago!

      Utter incompetence. Completely clueless. Fucking useless.

      It really angers me because they had it handed to them on a plate. But instead they fucked around and found out.