I remember when the official Reddit app released. As an avid RIF user then, I thought it was garbage. Now we’re almost 10 years later and guest what? It got worse. It’s quite an achievement, really.
As someone who did some UX for a touchscreen product in Healthcare, it’s 100% just boring old capitalism making real work impossible.
Any time immediate profit is put above the company “Mission Statement” (which is every time) it becomes impossible for designers to do a good job.
I was working with a broken and 90’s looking UX/UI and made a modernized Material 3 style redesign that never even got full evaluation because it “wasn’t a priority”.
They’d regularly recognize UX problems and ask for the best solution. I’d research, test, and design options, explaining how I got there, and then a non-designer from an unrelated department would say some nonsense and we’d scrap the whole thing.
I think it’s fairly obvious with what reddit did to alien blue when they bought it, that they don’t intend for the app to be user friendly or an app that people even like. They simply wanted to monetize it to hell and make it earn them the most $$$. That’s all it’s about with that company.
In case you aren’t aware, Alien Blue was the Apollo back in the day. It was the OG best third party iOS app for Reddit. Reddit bought the app and totally shit on it by removing everything good about it.
Bingo. The Reddit app wasn’t designed for UX; it was designed as an IAA engine for their ad network. I know we’re tired of the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” adage, but reading through the Reddit for Business page, you realize that’s what you are:
Having lived in that whole gross mobile attribution / AdMob / CPx world for a hot minute, I’m especially appreciative of platforms that don’t all immediately race to the bottom. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”. Good times.
Revamping the ad group creation flow and audience manager tools
Starting this week, we are changing the way you build audiences by refreshing the ad group and audience manager creation flows. We’ve rebuilt these tools from the ground up to create a clean interface that outlines all of the targeting available to you within one flow.
While all the 3rd party API and blackout shit was going down Reddit were busy talking up their rebuilt ad manager tools, not their lack of mod tools or support improvements for their unpaid staff holding up the foundations of the platform.
It’s not surprising as the motivations are quite different. Reddit wants their app to be a shitty Facebook clone while Memmy/Lemmy focus on the user experience.
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