Technology
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There may be some impact, come July, when the third party apps stop working. However, I have to imagine that the vast majority of mobile users use the official app. Quality may take a hit, with the loss of some mods and mod tools, but Reddit will be just fine. Sadly, Reddit rates too highly on content, users, and resultant utility (for many communities) for most users to completely abandon it.
But who provides the content? Power users. Reddit follows the same curve as most social media where only like 1-5% of the users actually post the content, and the rest are consumers. When the content creators are gone, it's just a platform with no content.
The only people who will stick to submitting content are the poor content reposters or various spammers, which the mods have been doing free labor to filter out. Heck, even the bots using the API will die too, so all you'll have is the TOS-breaking bots posting content.
This will not end well when third party apps are gone. I didn't realize it myself, but most of my time is reading Reddit when I'm bored in bed, or on the train, on my phone. I've been a redditor for 17 years, and my time now has mostly shifted from my desktop to the "RIF" Android app, and without that, I'm simply not using Reddit, and have already uninstalled.
Yeah I find myself missing reddit when I'm bored too, I don't miss the 'community' at all. I much prefer here for that
Honestly this will probably be a good exercise for me to reduce my screen time, try to be more present, and try to be content with just being
Like circa 2007/8, Reddit was a community, and it was pretty great. I was friends with a big group of
r/Chicagopeople, and we organized several awesome meetups. I still talk to some of them, and 2 of them even got married!But then AMAs got Reddit national attention when celebrities started participating, things really blew up. Everyone came for
r/AMA, but they stayed forr/funnyandr/pics. Comment counts went from 20 to 100 top per post, to 100s or 1000s for all posts. Comment quality went from multi-paragraph, forum-like, insightful discussions that followed "Reddiquette", to one line joke comments and downvotes for disagreements (whereas downvotes prior were only used to bury inaccurate/hostile comments instead). And then Reddit slowly turned into a boredom filler instead of a community site, where you just scroll to pass the time.Yeah I joined in... 2013? When AMAs were already a thing, and like you said became a place for the same jokes and downvotes for innocuous comments. That's why I lurked for several years before commenting at all - and even then I got made fun of (and downvotes) for not getting a 'magnets, how do they even work?' meme
There were a few niche subreddits that I visited a lot and had actual good discussions / got to know people, but yeah it was otherwise just another place to consume content when bored
The real influx of users is going to happen once proper ios / android apps arrive that can meet / exceed the bar that Apollo has set.
I wonder if there are metrics anywhere about percentage of mobile users using the official app vs 3rd party apps. I'd be interested to see the breakdown.
Right, I expect most people will grumble but then just use the official app. You're completely right that the network effects make it difficult for people to move to a different platform, and that outweighs the inconvenience of using the official app.