After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps, including Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader.
Given all the antics by the company and the despicable behavior by spez and his henchmen, my position on reddit has gone from "I'll use it much less now that my mobile app is gone and I only have desktop access" to "I will go out of my way to avoid providing value to the company even if it inconveniences me".
I just spent the better part of 5 hours yesterday manually deleting all my top comments from reddit. They can revoke edits made by pushshift, but they won't be able to figure out which manual edits to revoke. I used to give out technical advice on reddit and I used to get messages thanking me for posts I made years ago. Now all of those posts are gone.
9 year user of Sync here. Was so sad to see it go, and can't wait for the Lemmy version! I'm using liftoff right now, and it's very nice.
We all know how shitty it was for Reddit to close the API, but had anyone else noticed how God -awful the Google search results are now? What the fuck with the "restricted/open in app" bullshit?!?!
Confirmed Slide no longer works either and unistalled it from my phone. So long reddit, it was fun (but utimately misguided of me to invest time/attention towards it).
lol left as well, deleted all submissions and then replaced every single one of my comments with a hardy "fuck /u/spez" before deleting my account. gotta take our content with us on the way out, it's the only thing reddit has to monetize.
Sync shut down right before I went out for the morning. Got back this arvo, sat down, immediately opened the app and had to just stare at a blank screen for a bit to let it sink in. And now I'm here lol.
In consideration of how Reddit has been treating its users, "flipping the switch" on the API was, to me, like locking a door I had no intention to open again in the first place.
the attitude is so fucking weird. why are they forcing us to comply with their garbage? shouldn't the site want users to like the change? or a change to be legitimately built with users in mind?
So, RIF is still showing posts, but won't let me log in (i don't think, it logged me out and I never tried to log back in) is that what these other services are doing as well?
you'd think it'd be a fucking advantage for a site to have robust 3rd party apps to serve the needs of more users
furthermore in fact, you'd think the primary goal of a discussion site would be to better the experience for the user, not the advertiser. the site exists to facilitate a user's posts, not an advertiser's schemes and whims
They could have had third party apps and kept the advertisers happy. All they had to do was put ads into the API and kill access for any app that didn't show those ads.
This was about user data, I suspect. Way too many apps request and acquire more permissions and data than is remotely acceptable, but people put up with it for lack of alternatives. Reddit's leadership wanted not just the users' data from using reddit, but all the data they could siphon off from direct access to users' phones.