Mildly Infuriating

who the fuck designed this?

I’m one of the few that never used the third party apps for Reddit during my time there. Only the official app. And even I could tell you that app was miserable. No exaggeration, every third post is a massive ad. Once you’ve scrolled far enough your entire feed becomes ads. You have to close out/refresh to make it go back to normal.

Wefwef is a glitchy web app that doesn’t let me scroll or post comments sometimes made and maintained by some dude in his basement, and it’s still preferable to the official app of a company seeking a multimillion dollar IPO

I remember, I was on holiday 4 or 5 years ago. I was sitting at the bar having my morning coffee and browsing reddit and I was getting annoyed that if I went to get a drink from the bar when I came back and turned the screen back on it would reset my position in the comments.

So, I asked around and was recommended RIF. Not only did it keep comment position, but it was just all round in every single way better.

No, I couldn't go back to the official app.

Legit thought Lemmy was serving me an advert for a moment there...!

But yeah, the official R*ddit app is Garbo, they even bought Alien Blue years ago and have just failed to keep pace with Apollo, RIF or BaconReader. This API move is just a monopolisation of their content stream, hugely anti-competition.

Even if they sorted out their app, rolled back API to free, I'd never go back. Fuck Spez.

Imagine signing up to Reddit to discuss your gambling problems and then on the first sign on you get hit with this 💀💀

Yep since the first party app's primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it's packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

• Ads
• Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
• Obtrusive Ads
• Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
• Ads masquerading as real submissions
• Paid promotions

Third party apps don't have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.

Thank you for your sacrifice. If I ever had a hint of an inclination to disregard the common wisdom and try reddit's official app, now it's permanently gone.

What would fit perfectly now is Snapchat-like short vertical videos on repeat. Do it Reddit

At first I thought that was someone posting on lemmy… freaked me out, and I started looking for how to ban the content. 😂😂

The only thing I miss about the official app is seeing those ads promoting Christianity and promptly reporting them as hate speech.

My god, I now realize that when I was on reddit it was just super depressing posts about horrible events, on lemmy its actually ppl having fun

Sometimes I get a glimpse of what experiencing the Internet without an ad blocker looks like today and it kinda blows me away.

It's simple, really.

• if you have Reddit app installed, uninstall it first
• download revanced manager and install the apk. https://revanced.app/
• find Reddit app's apk in apkmirror.com and download it
• open revanced manager and select Patcher -> "select an application" -> storage and select the downloaded Reddit apk.
• make sure "disable ads" is in the list of selected patches
• run the patcher, wait until it completed
• don't install the resulting apk right away yet. Instead, open the "..." menu on the top right of the screen and backup the patched apk
• close the revanced manager app and open your file manager. Locate the patched apk you just backed up in the download folder, then install it.

Note that I haven't actually tested this with actual Reddit app.

Edit: oops, replied to a wrong thread

If you really need to access Reddit, I've been using libreddit.nl which you can install as an app like wefwef and it's ad-free :) but long live lemmy

We don't go to Ravenholm

Don't post that junk on here! ;)

Plug in your phone!

Apollo for lemmy when?

Wow it looks awful. I miss RIF

Man I hate the official reddit app so much. Random ads look like real posts.

I have not gone there. I will not go there. Thank you for the post. It feels like an expose into a part of society that I will never cross paths with.

I couldn't even get pass the login screen since I only lurked and never made an account (despite spending over a decade browsing reddit). I remember they used to let you use the app without logging in.

Holy wow, I had actually forgotten how shitty the site had become. I was always ready to open it and quickly scroll a couple times to get past the initial garbage, to hopefully find something worthwhile. That ask reddit post is peak "help the AI write an article" trash.

But did you get your cash price?

I just saw the ad at first and froze up, thinking "shit Lemmy, already???"

That’s exactly why they want you to use it.

The most sleazy thing it does is that if you want to download or share an image with your friends in, say, a text chain, it brands that image with Reddit crap.

They go completely out of their way to make the app unusable.

Dude, scrolling by this on connect and panicked that the ads were already hitting Lemmy!