https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/18/23799266/reddit-app-icons-ugly
The best icons are behind a Reddit Premium paywall.
tl;dr: They locked the original icon behind Reddit Premium.
Imagine having to pay to edit an icon in your home screen
This post was made by the Android gang
These new ideas are exactly why they had to kill 3rd party apps. If they hadn’t, this sort of change would just push more people to adopt them.
But that’s so much harder to do than simply taking away the options. Surely that’ll make them like Reddit more, right?
Technically you can use Shortcuts to set whatever icon you want but it takes some effort to set up. And I don’t think it can use transparency so it’d have to take up the whole square (or out more effort into making the background of the icon match your background). And it’ll take a second longer to load the app as it goes through Shortcuts first
Shortcuts do not behave exactly like the default app icon when it comes to animations, notification icons, and so on, and they create a redundant duplicate icon. It's not as big of an issue now that there is an app drawer on iOS, but it's still less than ideal.
There's still no justification as to why an user shouldn't be able to control how things appear on their screen - a developer doesn't get to choose what I see or not see.
Laughing. My. Mother. Fucking. Ass. Off.
All they had to do was say, “ok, third party apps can stay for premium users only” and I’d probably have Reddit premium now. Instead I deleted my ten plus year old account along with all my posts that weren’t mod announcements (so only two didn’t get deleted).
Instead I’ve fucked right on off to Kbin and Lemmy and all is well. Fuck Reddit and MOTHERFUCK Steve Huffman the stupid pig boy.
Same. I used to pay for premium even though I was an Apollo user. I paid because I liked Reddit and thought it brought me value.
Now I’m only keeping my account to ensure my posts and comments stay dead as best as I can.
Seriously, what the fuck are they thinking here? It’s like branding 101 to not mess with it unless you’re looking at rebranding
They're thinking if they don't make every last cent today their IPO will be a catastrophe and this will all be for nothing.
This is basically like a old wooden ship trying to outrun a hurricane by jettisoning everything on board that can be lost. Right now, they are not thinking long term in the slightest. It's solely about stopping that valuation from dropping, and they'll do anything at all.
The fact the original and classic icons are locked behind a paywall is fucking comical, how idiotic do you need to be to LOCK your ORIGINAL icon? lol
Yes.
They are most likely running out of runway with investors refusing to keep lighting more money on fire. And since their burn rate is still more than their revenue, they are pulling out all the stops looking for any new revenue stream.
When you’re that desperate, no idea is a bad idea, and there’s no time to think anything through fully, so they are going to just keep rolling out half-assed new “features” in attempt generate more revenue. It’s sad, but it blows my mind that they’ve never been able to generate more than $350m/year with one of the largest sites on the internet (for comparison, Twitter maxed out with 20x more revenue or $7b/year), so I don’t think there’s any chance spez & co are going to figure it out in time.
Well it doesn't help when you continually invest in bullshit. If spez had just focused on maintaining the site this whole time instead of throwing money at all kinds of new features and other crap no one asked for, effectively burning cash to morph reddit into a Facebook knockof, how much better off could he have been at this point?
I don’t think a whole lot better off. I don’t think Reddit has a user base that is easily monetized.
I say this with all seriousness: This, and the API pricing fiasco (not the price change itself but the gratuitously insulting and dishonest way it was handled), and firing Victoria which still strikes me as a sad thing, and "fighting back" by removing moderators who were doing a "protest" instead of just shrugging and ignoring it all, and removing reddit coins even from the tiny fraction of people who were actually paying for them, are all totally nonsensical and self-defeating actions from a strict business perspective. Anyone who runs so much as a corner pizza shop and has to interact with the real world could see how counter to reddit's interests they are. So, why did they do it?
I genuinely think that the motivation stems on an individual personal level from the psychology of "Well you're disobeying me, so I'll punish you." The users are being disobedient on my platform? Fuck them, I'll show them what I think of them, and unless they get in line, I'll do it even worse. Your icon's pixellated now. How do you like that?
I'm sure it works on a personal level, for some definition of "works." On a corporate level though, I think the results so far pretty much speak for themselves.
Don’t forget: they also deleted all messages pre-2023 with no notice.
Spez has said that he admires Musk’s playbook with Twitter and aimed to model after it. Considering Twitter’s outlook, I would say I admired the stones on a man trying to launching the IPO like this, but if he had any real stones, he wouldn’t have pressed these viciously unpopular moves that will reduce engagement and destroy the site over time.
I think the messages thing was more a limitation of the old platform. I looked into it once to see if I could replicate Reddit chats outside of the app/website and it all went through a 3rd party who didn’t expose any api, had terrible latency and throughput issues and constantly broke.
The new system will be just as bad, just now Reddit will control it.
There is no set of raw data that cannot be laundered into a new system.
They removed the messages because they wanted to.
You might be missing quite a few points in general but I think, I can see where you are coming from..
Yet, there is, at least for me, a big difference in:
Apollo: oh we have some fun icons, people love them, maybe they would pay a little to unlock more and have fun with them, or even better, enjoy the premium subscription and have even more useful stuff
Reddit: well, other apps were selling shit like this and people loved it and payed money for it, we want that money, let’s block what we already have and see what will happen..
— yup, this sounds about right in my imagination
They locked the original icon behind Reddit Premium.
Glad I'm on Android where I can just change the app icon for any app to anything I want at any time. As shitty as Reddit is for using this feature, the real shittiness is on Apple for allowing it to be a thing in the first place.
You can change any app icon on iOS as well, but it is a bit hacky and not as good as on Android.
Reddit promised to make their app better when they killed all the third party ones.
That's what they meant. Holy shit.
Every chance they get they do something to tell us “PLEASE HATE US MORE”
I haven’t looked at reddit in a couple of weeks. I’m done with them.
I would have loved attending the meeting where they decided which were the most ugly icons possible.
It's impressive how little self-respect they must have to block their own branding behind a paywall. I don't even get how it could be a good business strategy, I feel like it would very badly affect the perception of quality for a new adopter.
I'm starting to believe that somebody could be bribing some Reddit managers to start destroying it from the inside.
They can't just make so many negative decisions in so little time.
On another thought, they are trying to operate slowly like a Netflix or Spotify. But the content is from users who dont consider the app as "work". Unlike singers and actors.
Unhappy with the direction investors were taking Reddit, Spez secretly started working on an alternative to the website that he lovingly named the fediverse. However, he couldn't figure out a way to drive traffic to the Fediverse - at least not without publically breaching his contract in a major way.
His distress grew and grew. His own company was a disappointment. He had the solution, but no way out.
On top of that, his favorite activity - doomscrolling twitter in bed for hours - had become a less and less satisfying experience, as well, since Elon Musk bought the company.
It was for that reason he typed into DuckDuckGo: "twitter alternatives" - and immediately, it dawned on him. He couldn't help but say it out loud:
"Elon, you beautiful son of a bitch, you might have just saved the internet".
You know, I kind of agree. It's almost like they're trying to make people stop using it. They're copying things from other companies that are already known to cause backlash in a community.
Suddenly end all outside developer access after years of allowing it? Check.
Removing things that users have already paid for the use of? Check.
Heavy content moderation? Check.
Poor treatment of mods and staff? Check.
Heavy amounts of ads mixed in with the rest of the posts/content? Check.
Powertripping admins doling out random site-wide bans? Check.
Creating and spreading easily disproved lies about a potential competitor to try to make them shut up about you screwing them over? Check.
I'm curious as to whether or not your theory about someone bribing managers from the inside is accurate. It could maybe be something political, or maybe someone is trying to innovate a new social media. It could also be someone who has no experience making these calls, or it could be someone just doing it for shits and giggles.
Part of me kind of wonders if this might be a scorned employee who worked their way up to the level of company decision-making. Spite and anger can cause a person to do and endure crazy things for a long time. Hypothetically, that person could be angry at Reddit, Spez, or another high-ranking person.
It could even be someone who has hated reddit for years. A lot of people have gone though hard times because of reddit. Situations like "We did it reddit!" come to mind, where people harassed the family of an innocent guy who was killed during the Boston bombings. That type of behaviour wasn't a one-off, either. Multiple people have lost their jobs and/or families (justified or not) after people tracked them down online and doxxed them.
Do you remember the GameStop stuff that happened with the bond traders and Reddit?
There are lot of parts interested in taking down Reddit. And same thing will not stop at the fediverse.
I just hope fediverse is harder to control. If an instance grow so much like Lemmy world we could end up on a similar boat right?
There is a big difference between users that consider Reddit/Lemmy as a work place and users that consider it as a forum (expecting 0 money from the app. Just helping others or getting help from others).
Your free choices are pixelated snoo, a goddamn doge head, or wall street kid? Those are some douche-tastic options.
I guess Spez is revving for a very specific user base.
Here's what I don't understand. Your platform is extremely popular, to the point where you're worried you'll hit saturation. Sure I get that.
But at what point do you decide "I SOMEHOW need more money, I'm running out of people." instead of being like "we're gonna make this service so good, everyone will have to go through us"
Netflix did this as well. When they hit a critical mass of subscriptions, they had really good shows. Instead of saying we're gonna stay the best streaming platform out there, they went "NOO yOU can'T ShaRe youR PasswoRds yOu SILLY person"
It's desperate and pathetic, and companies which fall this way will get no sympathy from me.
what in gods name is happening over there, between this and removing awards they've been acting really weird since the protest
The CEO likely wants to cash out his job and is making moves that only look good for the short amount of time he has arbitrarily set for when he decides to step down. His bonus is likely dependent on how much the IPO goes for and he doesn't care long term since he's one foot out the door.
He's on record saying they sold for too little the first time and that it had grown more than he thought it would and the $10-20mil he got wasn't enough.
Pigboy fancies himself a Zuck or a Musk and is mad he couldn't figure out how to cash in and has to settle for being a puny millionaire. He came back to cash out, he'd cover the site in nudes of his own mother and the family dog if it meant one more dollar for him to walk away with after the IPO. He's a craven little pigboy, there's nothing in there but greed.
What a pathetic, desperate move.
If you ever needed evidence that Spez is completely incompetent, or that Reddit are totally willing to milk users for every cent with zero remorse, this is it.