Not content with seeing Elmo destroy Twitter, Reddit's management have one-upped them, and killed Apollo, the good mobile app (there was Alien Blue, but Reddit bought it and screwed it up; it's trash now).
- Christian's post and pastebin backup because this will probably be deleted soon; Wayback machine won't capture long Reddit posts.
Many subreddits were going to protest by going dark on June 12-14, some ongoing, but now while that's probably still happening, it's irrelevant.
When a site tells you they don't want you using it, except by their captured clients, you should stop using it. All they want is to control you and put ads in your eyeballs, until you explode.
That happened for me years ago with Twitter. It happened before that with MySpace; I know it sounds like a joke now, but if you liked music and web design, MySpace was a fantastic place to meet people. And before that, there was LiveJournal; now owned by Russian criminals. Reddit came out of Digg being fed into a woodchipper just because Kevin Rose wanted a little bit of money. I dunno what keeps a billion people trapped in Facebook, but they've never had open clients, those people like being property.
Don't use closed networks owned by someone else.
Use fediverse and IRC, and be prepared to jump servers if you don't like hosting your instances. There's a Reddit/Digg-like Lemmy built on ActivityPub, so you can subscribe to things from Mastodon, etc.; I've started reading that and will probably start posting to it some. There's dozens of fedi/mastodon/pixelfed clients; hopefully someone makes one as nice as Apollo for Lemmy.
Update: Lemmy.ml is overloaded, there's instructions on how to pick other instances and join groups. It's happening!
Social Media Deathwatch II - Mark writes:
…
The enshittification of Reddit is now complete.
Christian Selig, developer of the best Reddit client, Apollo, is shutting it down after he failed to comply with Reddit’s mafia-style multi-million dollar shakedown effort. Instead of paying the protection money, he is closing Apollo down.
Remember all those cool tips about adding
redditto the end of your search term to find real results? That’s probably not going to be reliable much longer, because I think this is the first—and last—step to Reddit becoming an unmoderated cess pool of spam, devoid of helpful humans contributing good content.This is a cycle that any venture capital-backed firm seems unable to fight against. The interest of community and users is sacrificed at the altar of money; those high priests seemingly unable to see that it is the community being sacrificed that generates the potential to make money in the first place.
I’ve enjoyed Reddit. Maybe we need to reboot Usenet?