cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1032247
Finally tried the official Reddit app. It’s as bad as they say.
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
Once you get used to an ad-free Reddit experience, it’s truly jarring how many ads the official Reddit app has. Same with Youtube. I have Adblock for Youtube on my computer and when I use the Youtube app on my TV I’m astounded by the number of ads being greedily shoved down my face.
I really can’t do ads. I use Blokada on my android phone and that killed all the ads from reddit regardless of which app I used, but the actual reddit app was just terrible in and of itself. There were so many better choices.
I don’t think this is something new… Lots of webpages had tons of ads in the 90s and 2000’s.
Yahoo 2002: Yahoo 2002
Or this one from the wall street journal in 2000: WSJ 2000
Compare those to today: Yahoo Today
I don’t think it’s any worse today really.
It is worse, though. No Yahoo games 😭 I played that flash pool game to death.
Website subscriptions and all types of subscriptions and paywalls are just death by a thousand cuts as well. It’s all ads and paywalls now.
Its awful on Reddit too, they let anyone and everyone run ads. the “he gets us” ads have like 600 paid reddit awards too.
I was using Reddit mobile to follow some interests that don’t have any communities on Lemmy yet and noticed the obscene number of awards on that ad. How in the world did that happen?
I’m really enjoying seeing the Lemmy communities I follow grow noticeably in just the past few days and hope people stick with it.
If only more people used ad blockers. Browsers should download with ad blocker extensions automatically installed imo
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True, but modern advertisement is almost always intended to deceive. Shitty mobile game ads that don’t even show the actual game’s content, advertisements for complete scams to get rich quick, etc. It’s all some ploy to get people to go download some app so it can collect your data to sell to advertisers or effectively steal your money by misleading you.
Meanwhile my phone literally has ads in its system video player and file explorer
Sounds awful. I am pretty sick of just not being able to spend a single moment without being advertised to.
yeah it sucks like imagine going to the file explorer to see a document and you get some ads like that’s next level bs lmao
Wtf?? What phone is that so I can avoid it
any redmi it seems
I have half a brain yet did download the app to see how shitty it really is. Rip RIF.
Rif is still working for me logged out. I’ve heard it doesn’t work logged in, but I haven’t tried it recently.
I mostly used slide before and that doesn’t seem to work at all now.
Reddit offline also seems to still work for me.
Reddit “shut down” API access by disabling the ability to authenticate users. Everything else on the API is still fully functional. Of course, without being logged in it’s a read only API.
RIF is never going to pay $0.24 per 1,000 API requests. Which means Reddit isn’t going to allow those API requests to continue for long. They will shut it down even when you’re logged out.
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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
People go with the default “name brand” unless they have reason to think otherwise.
You search “Reddit” on the App Store, naturally most people are going to pick “Reddit” by “Reddit”. Not Apollo, or boost, or BaconReader, or RIF, or any other (absolutely amazing) third party app, unless they have some reason to think that it’s better than the official app. Which they don’t, unless someone told them otherwise, because they are conditioned to the cluttered ad-ridden garbage interface of new Reddit, and most people don’t need mod tools or accessibility features.
I’ve reclaimed many a PC for folks like you described. So clogged with bloatware, trackers, adware, etc., that the machines could hardly run. Just excruciatingly slow experiences for their owners. Most folks don’t know anything about machines or software. Microsoft’s dominance illustrates the point.
Folks go ignorantly (no offense) where they’re told. They just don’t know better and get prayed upon as a result.
Every one of them knows things I don’t. It’s just that computers are a black box to them.
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.
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
Yeah and that works really well!
/s
It generally does, people just have to constantly be reminded.
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The NHL is basically unavailable to those people. Everywhere you look is a betting ad, and the official channels and radio stations give you the betting lines for games constantly.
Remember to leave a review and uninstall.
I went to do that and saw that there already was a 2 star review from 6 years ago lol. Changed that to 1. 1
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.
It makes you feel that something is wrong with your device.
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%”
Holy shit I remember that quote from Ready Player One and never thought I would be seeing the same scenario in such a short time period.
Downloaded today to see after Boost went down. Immediately uninstalled as it made my phone burning hot. Came to Lemmy very quickly.
I had the Reddit app installed alongside boost. I deleted the official app last month and said that when boost dies, there goes my 10 year association with reddit.
Here I am. I really hope Lemmy becomes something special because this far, it is filling that doom scrolling void that reddit filled for me
Boost was the sole way of using reddit. Now if I REALLY need to find something on reddit, I’ll do that on old reddit, on my PC. Will save a lot of time by not being on that shit app.
one post. ONE SINGLE POST on the entire screen…
I felt visceral contempt when I saw that thread. It’s a rerun thread being answered with the wisdom of adults who are still using reddit. No fucking thanks.
most of Reddit on the popular subs are just re-runs these days
And it’s a question that’s been asked every single week for 10 years.
Also it’s kind of crazy to me the amount of traffic it gets every. Single. Time. I know they have a bot issue, but do people just like that they know they have a popular opinion and just want to see rhe up votes or is it just one of those “watch the same movie 15 times for the comfort of it” type things. Either way I find it wild.
Everyone who didn’t get their word in last time is desperate to
farm upvotes‘make themselves visible’ this time instead.
bots reposting bots replying to bots up voting bots
and an ad
It really is, just dropped reddit for this. Not about to go back to using the official app.
