I used Reddit Is Fun for over a decade. It made Reddit usable on mobile for me. The UI for the mobile site and the official app make poor use of screen real-estate, IMO, and are designed to force you to continue scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. They're attention vampires.
RIF and other third-party apps had much cleaner UIs, that made it easier to find the content I was actually interested in, hide content that I didn't care to see, and interact with comments in a way that made sense for me. It was also easier to customize my notifications so that I would only be alerted by things I cared to be distracted by.
Without the third-party apps, I've reduced my Reddit usage tremendously. I used to spend probably a few hours a day just reading through Reddit, but now that I can't do that from my phone in a way that works for my use-case, I just simply don't use Reddit as much anymore. I only ever access it from my laptop now, and I only ever use my laptop while I'm on the toilet.
My Reddit use has been reduced to literal shitposting. Fuck Spez.
I feel like the VC/investor money that's kept huge swaths of the internet afloat for the last 20 years is finally starting to run dry. All these huge platforms who have been in "burn mode" since they were founded never figured out how to become profitable earlier on, and are now scrambling to keep themselves sustainable.
It's hard to feel sorry for them, even in the midst of their downfall. They've all had plenty of time to prepare for the day the their corporate sugar daddies leave them, and instead sought short-term profits over long-term sustainability.
I do feel bad for the communities, though. We've basically seen the Walmart-ification of the internet, where a few big corporate entities moved into the neighborhood and basically took over the landscape with their presence, effectively strong-arming smaller competition out of existence. So it'll be good to see more homegrown communities sprout back up in their place again.
Maybe we can see something like this happen with actual Walmarts soon, too. :)
they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on.
That's pretty damning. If they can't even demo it while simulating a real world use-case, then that tells me how little faith they really have in their product.
