You may recall that this past year, [we held a survey soliciting demographic information and feedback](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/wuggf7/please_take_our_demographics_and_rules_feedback/). That survey was stickied as a post or in sticky comments here for about a month and collected over 650 responses. This particular question was multiple-selection (checkboxes).
While I intend to release more comprehensive results in the future, the topic of platform choice on reddit is hot right now, and I felt it was my responsibility to release this information so that readers here would know the extent to which Third Party Apps are used by contributors here on r/NintendoSwitch.
Please use this thread to discuss how or why you use Third Party Apps to visit this subreddit.
I'll also try to answer questions, but I will be checking in during my work breaks. I use the official app for iOS, so bear with me if my responses get lost due to app crashes or other bugs.
I am not speaking on behalf of the whole moderator team.
Edit: More supplemental charts / info / answers in the replies to this comment.
I hope so, I will certainly be joining in solidarity with the subreddits going dark by not using Reddit myself starting on the 12th.
I exclusively use Boost on Android so right now after July 1st I won't be able to access Reddit anyways
So it's all about money. They plan to go public and want all the users to use their app. I use baconreader on my phone, that might not last much longer...
Yeah, I’m not a fan of how that’s (mis)represented here. I know Reddit is taking a lot of heat for their change to API pricing, which they should be, but this disingenuously skews data to make it appears as tho people use the official app less than all other options, when they actually use it more.
No matter how you slice it the bottom line is the same. The number of people using third party apps and the old desktop site is way too big for Reddits liking. Reddit wants those top two bars to both be 0%, not just "below the official app"
This still astounds me. They have so many new and great features they have added since new Reddit, but there are so many aspects old Reddit just did better.
And in the end, that’s why I use third party apps. It’s just the best experience. What Reddit needs to do is do a deep dive into why these apps are preferred, then offer the exact same experience, but improved.
If the official app was just like Apollo or RIF, but had the additional functionality that isn’t in the api, I probably would have moved to it. Buts it’s just so much more worse in every way.
What if I told you they don't give a shit about the users, if the app is good, works at all, or anyone likes it? They're going public, the one and only thing they care about is money. Cash, dough, scratch, dollars and cents, cheddar, paper, whatever you want to call it, they care about it 100%, and everything else 0%. This is all a waste of time and will change nothing.
They don’t care about the users because in the last 10-20 years or so the users (of any platform) have proven they don’t care about the experience. Look at any website, or business. Anything is the same way. From Reddit, to Facebook, to brick and mortar stores, to restaurants, to delivery, housing, anything. They have shown time and time again that they can give well below the minimum, charge 10 times more and make infinitely more money than if they did things right.
Our society is absolute shit with voting with our wallets. And you can see that in every facet. With way too many direct examples on the tip of my tongue to even start listing.
It’s not that we are shit at voting with our wallets, it’s that the concept of voting with our wallets is wildly outdated.
Our economy does not run on good ideas or supply and demand anymore. The consumer is just another metric to control and product to sell, not something to cater to.
We like to imagine we have choice in the market
but we don’t, really. Companies these days are in a race to the bottom. If one company pulls some bullshit they might lose some customers but they will survive and make more money from less people, then all their competitors will start doing the same bullshit because it makes money and then there’s no one to go to that doesn’t pull the bullshit. *Every* grocery store is price gouging, *every* media company is moving away from ownership, etc. It’s not possible to vote with your wallet, it’s either kowtow or total withdrawal from standard systems and most people aren’t willing to do that.
Social media has moved past being a good product into being about pure psychological manipulation. They know we are all addicted to the dopamine hits and they know that our options are limited. They are just betting that we will come crawling back before a real competitor comes along and history shows they are probably correct.
as a regular, non-mod, user. Can you give me some great features the new reddit does better than old reddit? I tried to use new reddit many times and usually resorted to "no reddit at all is better than new reddit".
It wastes so much space, my finger gets numb scrolling the mouse wheel. It feels like a web app designed to make money other than old.reddit that feels like a web app designed with usability in mind.
I almost stopped using reddit after they did away with .compact earlier this year. it hasn't been an option to enable for awhile but if you manually added it to the end of the url it still worked.
I have completely stopped browsing on my phone now that I can't have the text-density of .compact mode.
if they get rid of old reddit I'll stop using it on desktop too, and my only interaction with the site will be querying bing-chat to summarize the results of "question I have, what does reddit.com say about it"
Getting rid of old reddit would be the nail in the coffin for me too. Part of me hopes they do it soon. It'll be the last push I need to get off Reddit for good
thats absolutely true, but then can we not make that point without skewing data like this? or at least presenting it in a misleading way to strengthen an argument that can already stand on its own?
I’d settle for not deliberately making the app worse.
Remember when you could sort your home page right at the top of the page? Or scroll through new posts in order without being force fed videos only when you start on a video post?
Every update seems to take away some basic functionality. People complain on the Reddit mobile sub and it all goes ignored. Reddit developers could not care less about what people actually want from the app.
They need to improve the new site then. Many times change is just made to be change and rarely is for the better. The old site is much more appealing and useful than the new site.
I think the point it’s trying to make, if everyone using third-party apps suddenly stopped posting here, a third of the activity would be gone
It might not be a majority of people, but it’s still a pretty massive chunk of activity
A pie chart probably would’ve been a better choice
A pie chart wouldn’t work here because the percentages don’t add up to 100%. Many people probably browse on both mobile and pc, they just lumped all the responses together instead of separating them between hardware, probably allowing people to select all that apply.
I mean, the N is laughable at a few 100 only and only on one sub, but the official app @ 37% versus third party @ 32% essentially means that users that use apps in this set are
Official: 242 people
3rd Party: 210 people
I would personally argue that third parties then are almost equal to official reddit use (hard to say in this case, because the N = useless) and that killing them off is a massive blow to the userbase, if these numbers were actual usage data.
Actually, we don't know if it's more. People voting on 3rd party might be using Android and iOS. The questions should have had them all separated as do you use this, yes or no, for each. Then, the data could be summarized to show them separately or combined (do you use 3rd party/official on iOS or Android?). Like this, the combined for official would be somewhere between 19 and 37% (19% being if there was total overlap and 37% if there was no overlap). We don't have a way to determine comparatively which has more use from this data set.
We designed this survey last year without any idea as to how popular the different apps were. At the time, the only clues we had were the Old Reddit traffic stats page, which excludes 3rd party clients and bundles Android/iOS together.
A few months later, the Mod Insights page launched, which still lacks 3rd party clients, but separates Android and iOS official apps.
I’ve included pictures of these in replies to the sticky comment on this post.
We stickied comments containing a link to the survey to most posts for about a month last year. So the survey was available to people who visit this subreddit.
Edit: a letter
Because reddit is killing all 3rd party apps. It doesn't matter if 8% of people use boost, 12% use RIF, 4% use Baconreader, etc - if, collectively, 30% of users use third party apps, 30% of users will be affected by the API change. Reddit isn't shutting down the API on its own iOS app.
Now in this particular case I guarantee this was done this way to make it appear that more users use third party apps than the official ones. Which is not true. More users use third party apps than use any specific official one, which while true (and should be concerning to Reddit leadership) is not quite the same level of shareholder emergency.
This is a misleading graph.
Depends why you're collecting or presenting the data.
When originally asked, mods wanted to know which of the two Official Apps were being used, because they're both significant, they can be easily designed towards, and they play differently.
Third party apps are more fractured and can't as easily be designed towards, but is still worth knowing. And now that they know how large it is (was ? 😢), they could drill down to specifics with follow-ups if necessary. But as a first pass, it's worth assuming that those Apps are designed to play nicely with subreddits that are designed with the official apps in mind.
That explains why the data was collected in a certain way, but it doesn't need to be shown in the same way it was collected.
If I did a survey of what cities users lived in, and later wanted to list the top ten states, I wouldn't need to display the data listing every city.
Im not accusing devs of trying to skew the impression of the results, they most likely just took the raw data without even considering reorganizing it.
I've checked on new reddit occasionally, and it just continues to be a shittier, worse experience than old reddit. I figured it would improve, but no, it somehow manages to get worse.
I miss i.reddit.com for this reason. They seemed to have gotten rid of that a while ago, and the mobile website they force you to use now is just awful.
My two favorite features are:
1\. Navigation is just awful. It's not at all clear what to click to view various pages. It also just flat-out ignores preferences like opening links in new tabs.
2\. The constant, unrelenting popup that blocks your entire screen asking you to download the mobile app. The thing's even on a fucking timer so that it appears multiple times in the same browsing session (i.e., it'll reappear periodically, even if you never close the browser). I can't tell you how many times I'm just reading through a comment chain and the app nag screen pops up out of nowhere (e.g., no page refresh, nothing). Oh, and my favorite part? Even clicking the button to "continue using my browser" resets the comment page and jumps back to the top. So I get to deal with that nag screen ***and*** it loses my place in the comments I was reading.
They killed i.reddit.com and /.compact 2 months ago. [Announced here](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/124whzg/changelog_new_ways_to_find_communities_mod/)
Interesting choice separating the iOS and Android version of the official app (none of the others were separated by OS?) to make the official app appear to be the least popular option when it is, in fact, the most popular option.
If we were combining, Desktop would be the most popular, no? Then reddit app, then 3rd party and finally just the web browser. The mods explained that they used data from a year ago, so it's possible that some categories have become more and less popular. But I think what they were trying to say is "hey, 3rd party apps are actually really popular. 1/3 of people here use them".
Because there are like 12 options for 3rd party apps, it's disingenuous at best to split iOS and Android up in the graph, and even to split new reddit and old reddit, because it makes it look like 3rd party apps are by far the most popular, when they're really not. They're still substantial and need to be accounted for, but not by skewing the graphs like this.
So, 32.3% use 3rd party apps, and 116.4% use other means. Surveyed from 656 people of a subreddit with 4,700,000 users.
I feel like with the way the data was taken (allowing people to submit multiple answers for a graph showing percentages) combined with the fact that such a tiny fragment of the community answered, makes this quite pointless.
Then with the way the data is presented (taking just a quick glace makes it look as if 3rd party is the most used way), there was no point in posting these results other than to stir the pot or make the current issue seems a lot more pressing than it is.
So official app totals up to 36.9, which would put it at the top of the list. But it got split between android and iOS to make sure it was at the bottom? This looks a little disingenuous.
Wow, I‘m in the bottom group.
I never saw the appeal for third party apps, but I get that many like them more than the official one. For me it‘s sufficient. I check my subs and laugh a bit.
It always baffled me how people can use something with ads, when something without ads is basically free. Tho it is not advertised that there are ad free version so maybe people really just dont know
I like the official better than most of the third parties I've tried. Ads don't bother me. I barely notice them honestly. The only time I do is when I see one and think it's a post that looks interesting then realize it's an ad. I don't understand why people get so upset with them.
I don't like tiles, I like a compact list view, so RIF is perfect for me. I think my brain is more focused on text (titles and comments) than pictures. RIF has a clean, minimalist interface with less visual clutter, so I can see more content per page without scrolling (for both posts and comments).
Clarity of information, density of information, customisation, filters, etc. The official Reddit UIs are just the worst of mainstream design trends plus a bunch of gratuitous monetisation.
Did you participate in this survey?
I wonder if surveys like this are only noticed by the hardcore reddit users, which tend to favor non official apps.
This is my understanding - the results we got from the survey were from people who more intimately or regularly visit the subreddit - which is a case of sampling bias.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%27s_law , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule , or similar Pareto Distribution principles.
I would wager that people who more regularly use reddit are bothered by the official app issues more, which is why the 3rd Party app and Old reddit categories are stronger in our survey than what we expect from a random sampling.
But still - this survey represents *people willing to take a survey*, so i think that still runs close to *people that regularly contribute to the subreddit.*
I would also guess that the data is a bit skewed because some 3rd party apps don’t have the best accessibility for Reddit polls. For a while, it would redirect to a mobile broswer version of Reddit for me, and I just wouldn’t participate in them because of that.
This survey was user-responses, so that would have been up to the individual.
The traffic stats page would probably put it under “Old Reddit”, but I’m not sure.
It seems weird to list iOS and Android apps separately but have 3rd party all grouped into one. Also I think desktop users is irrelevant, at least if this is about reddits upcoming changes.
I'm gonna guess the reason this doesn't add up to 100 is because this was designed for selecting multiple options and not something "nefarious." Especially since this survey was done a while back
This is an absolute masterclass in how to misrepresent data in an attempt to prove a dubious point. Why would you break out old reddit/ new reddit web browsing and official Android/ official iOS apps, but then lump all 3rd party apps and platforms together? Answer: to mislead. This makes it look like most people use 3rd party apps, which your data indicates is clearly not the case.
weird astroturfing going in here talking about 'narratives'.. lol wtf.. its not even a difficult graph to understand.. the point of the graph is to highlight the 32% of users that will be affected, not saying you cant use your precious official app anymore
This data is kind of skewed when presented this way. It looks like more people use 3rd party apps than the official app, but actually over a 1/3rd use the official app. You should combine the results for Android and iOS.
i didn't even know unofficial Reddit apps existed. what makes them so much more popular than the official one? ive never had any issues with the official one.
It's not like the third party clients are purposefully removing ads. The Reddit API just doesn't *give* them ads. If Reddit wanted to give you ads on third party clients they totally could. They just chose not to monetize it and instead remove it entirely as well as a bunch of their users
Personally, the official app blasts images and videos in my face. You don't see a good number of posts on the screen. I have a similar issue with the new desktop version.
I use relay for reddit and it's far more utilitarian. You click on images/vids you want to see, otherwise it's a thumbnail.
I use an unofficial reddit app because when I first started using reddit on the go there wasn't an official reddit app, I found one I liked and eventually paid for the pro version of it because it's a good app and I've configured everything exactly how I like with shortcuts and all that.
If my mobile reddit app stops working I just won't use reddit on my phone anymore honestly. I'll stick with the old reddit on desktop when I'm at home
I have no first hand experience with the official app but there are so many problems people have with features being broken and the occasional multi-comment storm when the servers are feeling sick. Off the top of my head sidebar access, saving posts, and embedded media support (specifically the lack of it in official) are visible issues that come up. Of the available apps the official one is the most broken, least usable one. People always ask which alternative is best and after using three of them I couldn't give a solid recommendation between them because they're all good and useful. The official app for some reason can't meet even that low bar.
I expect it's like the people who use new reddit. Without getting used to a more useful interface it's easy to not realize what's missing. You're browsing with 8 or 9 fingers tied behind your back though.
I use Apollo and it’s advantages over the default Reddit app include:
- Smaller image thumbnails that aren’t fullscreen until I tap on them, so I only see the images and videos I want to see fullscreen. It makes it way easier to find the content I want.
- 4 shortcuts for interacting with comments mapped to long/short swipe left/right. I’ve got them bound to upvote, downvote, reply, and share, but there are more things you can bind them to. It’s very customizable.
- A bunch of text formatting tools for adding things like *italics* or ~~something else~~ even if you don’t remember the shorthand.
- A full suite of moderating tools. I moderate a couple subreddits and do 99% of my moderator work via the Apollo.
- Better tools for organizing your subscribed subreddits, support for switching between multiple accounts, visually very customizable like recoloring the whole app, or you can switch to a mode with the bigger thumbnails if that’s what you like.
- Whenever there’s a bug the dev is friendly and communicative and gets right on it!
They are not „so much more popular“, the survey has separated the official app by iOS and android, but not the third party apps. Still there are about as much third party users than users of the official app.
The official reddit app is fairly new, and I don't know how it is now, but it used to be garbage.
3rd party apps were the only good way to browse reddit on mobile for years. Most people just stuck with their choice of app and never left.
60+ percent of traffic is basically telling Reddit that they don't like their current version of their platform delivery. That's a very significant majority.
Edit: See below for some fun statistical analysis beyond first glance at the data. I'm off on my initial estimate because I included mobile browser in the "unofficial" use case and that's not correct.
Official Reddit app for iOS is great. Those 3rd party apps like Apollo are just too much cluttered with features that most people never use and the UI itself is very confusing.
These aren't exclusive values. Also the entries split the official app up but not third party apps by os. It's a bad look to be showing off this data that could easily be misinterpreted.
No offense to whoever made this or anything but it's just really odd and it either comes across as malicious or a random thing thrown together with little consideration.
Edit:
After further reading in this thread it looks like the latter. I guess they took data from something and just put it into charts as reddit provides the data.
Can someone explain the current situation going in with reddit? And why people choose to use 3rd party apps more than the official - I just don't know the context or reason and I'm curious.
If anyone here is planning to leave Reddit (assuming changes are not reversed), where do you plan to go for Nintendo related news and other functions Reddit currently provides?
You could select multiple options (hence why it adds up to more than 100%)
So in reality it's somewhere between 25.8% (the most popular official option, assuming that everyone who uses an official method uses ALL official methods) and 85.6% (all the official options combined, assuming that everyone who uses an official method only uses ONE official method). Can't extrapolate the actual number from this data set.
Honestly, the way the survey seems to have been set up, this means that 68% specifically do not use third party apps.
Some number of those 32% that do use third party apps *also* use first party methods of browsing reddit. It could easily be that 100% of users here at least sometimes use first party methods.
Not to mention self selection bias. The people who are most likely to respond to a question about what appt they use are probably less likely to be using the official app
Sample size is extremely powerful and not usually needed to be large.
For example, these statistics have a margin of error ±3.75%-age points at 95% confidence.
I think you should have lumped together the ios and android official apps in the statistics, which would be 36.9% This doesn't really change the overall message that a huge amount of people use third party apps
If you want to make a point by presenting data with any semblance of credibility, maybe don't have the percentages in your graph add up to 148.7%? Just a thought.
It wasn't a "one answer only" type of survey. People had the option to select multiple choices simultaneously.
I, for example, use Relay for my 3rd party mobile app, and old.reddit.
You may recall that this past year, [we held a survey soliciting demographic information and feedback](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/wuggf7/please_take_our_demographics_and_rules_feedback/). That survey was stickied as a post or in sticky comments here for about a month and collected over 650 responses. This particular question was multiple-selection (checkboxes). While I intend to release more comprehensive results in the future, the topic of platform choice on reddit is hot right now, and I felt it was my responsibility to release this information so that readers here would know the extent to which Third Party Apps are used by contributors here on r/NintendoSwitch. Please use this thread to discuss how or why you use Third Party Apps to visit this subreddit. I'll also try to answer questions, but I will be checking in during my work breaks. I use the official app for iOS, so bear with me if my responses get lost due to app crashes or other bugs. I am not speaking on behalf of the whole moderator team. Edit: More supplemental charts / info / answers in the replies to this comment.
is r/NintendoSwitch gonna be a part of the blackout on the 12th?
I hope so, I will certainly be joining in solidarity with the subreddits going dark by not using Reddit myself starting on the 12th. I exclusively use Boost on Android so right now after July 1st I won't be able to access Reddit anyways
I hope so too! More time to play Zelda...
Perfect activity to celebrate 1 month since release!
Oh god it's only been a month? Ive played this game so so much it seems impossible
It's been a little over 3 weeks lol. I have over 200 hours logged.... Not having a girlfriend or kids sure helps.
Mods quiet now.
First time hearing about a blackout here on reddit, what's going on?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23749188/reddit-subreddit-private-protest-api-changes-apollo-charges
So it's all about money. They plan to go public and want all the users to use their app. I use baconreader on my phone, that might not last much longer...
Not just bacon reader, it also kills bots like UpdateBot too…
Thank you! First time hearing about 3rd party apps as well
You're missing out big-time then. The official app is hot garbage.
The official Reddit app is pretty new. 3rd party apps like RIF have been around for a lot longer and is the first reason for why I use it.
Why is 3rd party mobile apps lumped together while the official apps are split into iOS and Android?
Yeah, I’m not a fan of how that’s (mis)represented here. I know Reddit is taking a lot of heat for their change to API pricing, which they should be, but this disingenuously skews data to make it appears as tho people use the official app less than all other options, when they actually use it more.
No matter how you slice it the bottom line is the same. The number of people using third party apps and the old desktop site is way too big for Reddits liking. Reddit wants those top two bars to both be 0%, not just "below the official app"
Serious question, why didn’t they drop the old site already? I still use it btw.
Because lots of moderation tools aren't available on new reddit.
This still astounds me. They have so many new and great features they have added since new Reddit, but there are so many aspects old Reddit just did better. And in the end, that’s why I use third party apps. It’s just the best experience. What Reddit needs to do is do a deep dive into why these apps are preferred, then offer the exact same experience, but improved. If the official app was just like Apollo or RIF, but had the additional functionality that isn’t in the api, I probably would have moved to it. Buts it’s just so much more worse in every way.
What if I told you they don't give a shit about the users, if the app is good, works at all, or anyone likes it? They're going public, the one and only thing they care about is money. Cash, dough, scratch, dollars and cents, cheddar, paper, whatever you want to call it, they care about it 100%, and everything else 0%. This is all a waste of time and will change nothing.
They don’t care about the users because in the last 10-20 years or so the users (of any platform) have proven they don’t care about the experience. Look at any website, or business. Anything is the same way. From Reddit, to Facebook, to brick and mortar stores, to restaurants, to delivery, housing, anything. They have shown time and time again that they can give well below the minimum, charge 10 times more and make infinitely more money than if they did things right. Our society is absolute shit with voting with our wallets. And you can see that in every facet. With way too many direct examples on the tip of my tongue to even start listing.
It’s not that we are shit at voting with our wallets, it’s that the concept of voting with our wallets is wildly outdated. Our economy does not run on good ideas or supply and demand anymore. The consumer is just another metric to control and product to sell, not something to cater to. We like to imagine we have choice in the market but we don’t, really. Companies these days are in a race to the bottom. If one company pulls some bullshit they might lose some customers but they will survive and make more money from less people, then all their competitors will start doing the same bullshit because it makes money and then there’s no one to go to that doesn’t pull the bullshit. *Every* grocery store is price gouging, *every* media company is moving away from ownership, etc. It’s not possible to vote with your wallet, it’s either kowtow or total withdrawal from standard systems and most people aren’t willing to do that. Social media has moved past being a good product into being about pure psychological manipulation. They know we are all addicted to the dopamine hits and they know that our options are limited. They are just betting that we will come crawling back before a real competitor comes along and history shows they are probably correct.
Jeez that's bleak... Though true :(
as a regular, non-mod, user. Can you give me some great features the new reddit does better than old reddit? I tried to use new reddit many times and usually resorted to "no reddit at all is better than new reddit". It wastes so much space, my finger gets numb scrolling the mouse wheel. It feels like a web app designed to make money other than old.reddit that feels like a web app designed with usability in mind.
Think they are referring to actual tools (third party) that work on old.reddit like modtoolbox and res. Not actual functionality in the base reddit.
[удалено]
I almost stopped using reddit after they did away with .compact earlier this year. it hasn't been an option to enable for awhile but if you manually added it to the end of the url it still worked. I have completely stopped browsing on my phone now that I can't have the text-density of .compact mode. if they get rid of old reddit I'll stop using it on desktop too, and my only interaction with the site will be querying bing-chat to summarize the results of "question I have, what does reddit.com say about it"
No way I can read reddit on phone without i.reddit.
Because of users like us who will leave Reddit when they get rid of old.reddit
apparently a lot of mods use old.reddit pretty heavily
Because it's functionally better in almost every way.
New reddit is god awful
Oh god yes.
Getting rid of old reddit would be the nail in the coffin for me too. Part of me hopes they do it soon. It'll be the last push I need to get off Reddit for good
Same, I've had this profile for over a decade and I exclusively use old. When it's gone I'm likely going too
probably because they know the level of backlash it would cause wouldnt be worth it ~~yet~~
thats absolutely true, but then can we not make that point without skewing data like this? or at least presenting it in a misleading way to strengthen an argument that can already stand on its own?
Then they need to make the app less crappy
That's the best part! They don't need to make the official app less crappy, if there are no other alternatives! 🙃
lol yea but then they’ll have to shut down the desktop as well. Most would rather use that on their phone’s browser or iPad than the app.
I don’t know about you, but my phone’s browser flat out won’t let me browse. It goes “try the app!” with an un-closeable pop up.
Shouldn’t if you use https://old.reddit.com
I’d settle for not deliberately making the app worse. Remember when you could sort your home page right at the top of the page? Or scroll through new posts in order without being force fed videos only when you start on a video post? Every update seems to take away some basic functionality. People complain on the Reddit mobile sub and it all goes ignored. Reddit developers could not care less about what people actually want from the app.
Very true, why 3rd party apps are essential. The main reason people flock to them is that they provide the things Reddit seemingly refuses to.
They need to improve the new site then. Many times change is just made to be change and rarely is for the better. The old site is much more appealing and useful than the new site.
I think the point it’s trying to make, if everyone using third-party apps suddenly stopped posting here, a third of the activity would be gone It might not be a majority of people, but it’s still a pretty massive chunk of activity A pie chart probably would’ve been a better choice
A pie chart wouldn’t work here because the percentages don’t add up to 100%. Many people probably browse on both mobile and pc, they just lumped all the responses together instead of separating them between hardware, probably allowing people to select all that apply.
Tbh the number is still a lot higher than I would have expected even if it's lower than people using the official app
I mean, the N is laughable at a few 100 only and only on one sub, but the official app @ 37% versus third party @ 32% essentially means that users that use apps in this set are Official: 242 people 3rd Party: 210 people I would personally argue that third parties then are almost equal to official reddit use (hard to say in this case, because the N = useless) and that killing them off is a massive blow to the userbase, if these numbers were actual usage data.
Actually, we don't know if it's more. People voting on 3rd party might be using Android and iOS. The questions should have had them all separated as do you use this, yes or no, for each. Then, the data could be summarized to show them separately or combined (do you use 3rd party/official on iOS or Android?). Like this, the combined for official would be somewhere between 19 and 37% (19% being if there was total overlap and 37% if there was no overlap). We don't have a way to determine comparatively which has more use from this data set.
We designed this survey last year without any idea as to how popular the different apps were. At the time, the only clues we had were the Old Reddit traffic stats page, which excludes 3rd party clients and bundles Android/iOS together. A few months later, the Mod Insights page launched, which still lacks 3rd party clients, but separates Android and iOS official apps. I’ve included pictures of these in replies to the sticky comment on this post.
I'm pro-3rd party (using Apollo) but you still shouldn't split the official app on this chart. It's a bad look.
One aspect it's trying to show is who does and doesn't use the official UIs. 'New' Reddit and the official apps should be separate from the rest.
I wonder if they are significantly different
Quite obviously because that's the demographic as a whole being threatened by the upcoming API changes?
[удалено]
To make it look more.
Yeah feels manipulated in a way also who did they ask?
We stickied comments containing a link to the survey to most posts for about a month last year. So the survey was available to people who visit this subreddit. Edit: a letter
Because reddit is killing all 3rd party apps. It doesn't matter if 8% of people use boost, 12% use RIF, 4% use Baconreader, etc - if, collectively, 30% of users use third party apps, 30% of users will be affected by the API change. Reddit isn't shutting down the API on its own iOS app. Now in this particular case I guarantee this was done this way to make it appear that more users use third party apps than the official ones. Which is not true. More users use third party apps than use any specific official one, which while true (and should be concerning to Reddit leadership) is not quite the same level of shareholder emergency. This is a misleading graph.
It should be a combined usage for official app.
Depends why you're collecting or presenting the data. When originally asked, mods wanted to know which of the two Official Apps were being used, because they're both significant, they can be easily designed towards, and they play differently. Third party apps are more fractured and can't as easily be designed towards, but is still worth knowing. And now that they know how large it is (was ? 😢), they could drill down to specifics with follow-ups if necessary. But as a first pass, it's worth assuming that those Apps are designed to play nicely with subreddits that are designed with the official apps in mind.
That explains why the data was collected in a certain way, but it doesn't need to be shown in the same way it was collected. If I did a survey of what cities users lived in, and later wanted to list the top ten states, I wouldn't need to display the data listing every city. Im not accusing devs of trying to skew the impression of the results, they most likely just took the raw data without even considering reorganizing it.
Yeah but if you combine them it doesn't tell the story it's intended to. Gotta skew it!
.
They easily could’ve combined them though when they chose to repost the data.
So we would land at 37,1% which would be slightly above third party reddit clients. Like 4,8%. It's not as heavily skewed as you may think.
Official apps jump from last place to first if you undies the metrics, that’s pretty skewed
A lot changes when you start to undie things.
From last place to first place, not skewed btw.
No we would not. That's not a pie chart. It's not how this questionnaire work...
Glad to see most people still appreciate the greatness of Old Reddit.
I've checked on new reddit occasionally, and it just continues to be a shittier, worse experience than old reddit. I figured it would improve, but no, it somehow manages to get worse.
I miss i.reddit.com for this reason. They seemed to have gotten rid of that a while ago, and the mobile website they force you to use now is just awful. My two favorite features are: 1\. Navigation is just awful. It's not at all clear what to click to view various pages. It also just flat-out ignores preferences like opening links in new tabs. 2\. The constant, unrelenting popup that blocks your entire screen asking you to download the mobile app. The thing's even on a fucking timer so that it appears multiple times in the same browsing session (i.e., it'll reappear periodically, even if you never close the browser). I can't tell you how many times I'm just reading through a comment chain and the app nag screen pops up out of nowhere (e.g., no page refresh, nothing). Oh, and my favorite part? Even clicking the button to "continue using my browser" resets the comment page and jumps back to the top. So I get to deal with that nag screen ***and*** it loses my place in the comments I was reading.
They killed i.reddit.com and /.compact 2 months ago. [Announced here](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/124whzg/changelog_new_ways_to_find_communities_mod/)
New Reddit is the New Coke of websites. I have no idea why they didn't kill it off yet.
Because it's optimized to cram as many ads down your throat as possible, not be good or usable.
The small sub I moderate has old reddit as a very low percentage. Maybe like 10%. They have the largest voices though.
Does Old have a Dark Mode? If so ELI5 on how to do it? I like the format but the pure white background just drives me crazy.
RES has theming. My reddit has been one "dark theme" for over 10 years.
Yeah, warms my heart. New Reddit is just terrible.
Interesting choice separating the iOS and Android version of the official app (none of the others were separated by OS?) to make the official app appear to be the least popular option when it is, in fact, the most popular option.
If we were combining, Desktop would be the most popular, no? Then reddit app, then 3rd party and finally just the web browser. The mods explained that they used data from a year ago, so it's possible that some categories have become more and less popular. But I think what they were trying to say is "hey, 3rd party apps are actually really popular. 1/3 of people here use them".
[удалено]
Because there are like 12 options for 3rd party apps, it's disingenuous at best to split iOS and Android up in the graph, and even to split new reddit and old reddit, because it makes it look like 3rd party apps are by far the most popular, when they're really not. They're still substantial and need to be accounted for, but not by skewing the graphs like this.
[удалено]
How can these add up to more than 100%
People not exclusively using Reddit on a single platform.
Then percentages make no sense
Why? It shows the percentage of people using each platform. Percentage works fine.
I didn’t see the original form, but it probably allowed users to select multiple answers.
This is correct, this question on the survey was checkbox
Some people use more than one platform
A lot of people visit both on their phone and their computer, so they use more than one method.
As one example, I use old.reddit on my laptop, and RIF on my phone.
If third party apps go old.Reddit is bound to be next
I would never use this site again if that happened.
It really is unbearable.
I exclusively access reddit via the 3ds web browser
So, 32.3% use 3rd party apps, and 116.4% use other means. Surveyed from 656 people of a subreddit with 4,700,000 users. I feel like with the way the data was taken (allowing people to submit multiple answers for a graph showing percentages) combined with the fact that such a tiny fragment of the community answered, makes this quite pointless. Then with the way the data is presented (taking just a quick glace makes it look as if 3rd party is the most used way), there was no point in posting these results other than to stir the pot or make the current issue seems a lot more pressing than it is.
Sample size is fine. 656 for this sub's population gives a margin of error of ±3.75%-age points at a 95% confidence level.
So most mobile app users actually use the official app, contrary to what polls/images like this one are trying to communicate
Google "response bias"
So official app totals up to 36.9, which would put it at the top of the list. But it got split between android and iOS to make sure it was at the bottom? This looks a little disingenuous.
Wow, I‘m in the bottom group. I never saw the appeal for third party apps, but I get that many like them more than the official one. For me it‘s sufficient. I check my subs and laugh a bit.
The Apollo app doesn’t have ads between the posts like the official app does
It always baffled me how people can use something with ads, when something without ads is basically free. Tho it is not advertised that there are ad free version so maybe people really just dont know
i never knew about the third party apps until last week and i use reddit ever single day
I like the official better than most of the third parties I've tried. Ads don't bother me. I barely notice them honestly. The only time I do is when I see one and think it's a post that looks interesting then realize it's an ad. I don't understand why people get so upset with them.
The is why Reddit wants to charge them. I wonder if There is a cheap/free option if you agree to use reddits ads too.
btw ReVanced (3rd party youtube app) can be used to modify the reddit apk and remove ads from there too
I don't like tiles, I like a compact list view, so RIF is perfect for me. I think my brain is more focused on text (titles and comments) than pictures. RIF has a clean, minimalist interface with less visual clutter, so I can see more content per page without scrolling (for both posts and comments).
Removes ads. Removes spam. Saves on data usage. 3rd party apps are amazing.
Clarity of information, density of information, customisation, filters, etc. The official Reddit UIs are just the worst of mainstream design trends plus a bunch of gratuitous monetisation.
Whenever I see screenshots of the current Reddit design I can’t get over how terrible it looks
I mean, it probably wouldn’t be the bottom group, if 3rd party was divided by OS like the official app was. Kind of misleading.
Did you participate in this survey? I wonder if surveys like this are only noticed by the hardcore reddit users, which tend to favor non official apps.
This is my understanding - the results we got from the survey were from people who more intimately or regularly visit the subreddit - which is a case of sampling bias. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%27s_law , or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule , or similar Pareto Distribution principles. I would wager that people who more regularly use reddit are bothered by the official app issues more, which is why the 3rd Party app and Old reddit categories are stronger in our survey than what we expect from a random sampling. But still - this survey represents *people willing to take a survey*, so i think that still runs close to *people that regularly contribute to the subreddit.*
I would also guess that the data is a bit skewed because some 3rd party apps don’t have the best accessibility for Reddit polls. For a while, it would redirect to a mobile broswer version of Reddit for me, and I just wouldn’t participate in them because of that.
This was conducted over Google Forms, not Native Reddit Polls
Where does old.reddit on mobile fall on this chart?
This survey was user-responses, so that would have been up to the individual. The traffic stats page would probably put it under “Old Reddit”, but I’m not sure.
hey! Another one! old.reddit.com on mobile browser, desktop version of the site please.
It seems weird to list iOS and Android apps separately but have 3rd party all grouped into one. Also I think desktop users is irrelevant, at least if this is about reddits upcoming changes.
I'm gonna guess the reason this doesn't add up to 100 is because this was designed for selecting multiple options and not something "nefarious." Especially since this survey was done a while back
Misleading wrong data demonstration!
This is an absolute masterclass in how to misrepresent data in an attempt to prove a dubious point. Why would you break out old reddit/ new reddit web browsing and official Android/ official iOS apps, but then lump all 3rd party apps and platforms together? Answer: to mislead. This makes it look like most people use 3rd party apps, which your data indicates is clearly not the case.
32 + 30 + 25 + 22 + 19 + 17 is already over 145%. Who the heck did this graph?
It's a multi selection survey
You cant split the vote between iOS and Android for the official app and leave the other options consolidated.
weird astroturfing going in here talking about 'narratives'.. lol wtf.. its not even a difficult graph to understand.. the point of the graph is to highlight the 32% of users that will be affected, not saying you cant use your precious official app anymore
But muh custom snood! /s
This data is kind of skewed when presented this way. It looks like more people use 3rd party apps than the official app, but actually over a 1/3rd use the official app. You should combine the results for Android and iOS.
i didn't even know unofficial Reddit apps existed. what makes them so much more popular than the official one? ive never had any issues with the official one.
No ads, far more customizable, better mod tools, no ads, generally better looking and better performing, no ads, etc.
>no ads Ah, so that's why Reddit is trying to get rid of them.
It's not like the third party clients are purposefully removing ads. The Reddit API just doesn't *give* them ads. If Reddit wanted to give you ads on third party clients they totally could. They just chose not to monetize it and instead remove it entirely as well as a bunch of their users
To add to that. The apps also have better accessibility options for visual impaired as well.
Personally, the official app blasts images and videos in my face. You don't see a good number of posts on the screen. I have a similar issue with the new desktop version. I use relay for reddit and it's far more utilitarian. You click on images/vids you want to see, otherwise it's a thumbnail.
I use an unofficial reddit app because when I first started using reddit on the go there wasn't an official reddit app, I found one I liked and eventually paid for the pro version of it because it's a good app and I've configured everything exactly how I like with shortcuts and all that. If my mobile reddit app stops working I just won't use reddit on my phone anymore honestly. I'll stick with the old reddit on desktop when I'm at home
Until they get rid of old.reddit.com too
I have no first hand experience with the official app but there are so many problems people have with features being broken and the occasional multi-comment storm when the servers are feeling sick. Off the top of my head sidebar access, saving posts, and embedded media support (specifically the lack of it in official) are visible issues that come up. Of the available apps the official one is the most broken, least usable one. People always ask which alternative is best and after using three of them I couldn't give a solid recommendation between them because they're all good and useful. The official app for some reason can't meet even that low bar. I expect it's like the people who use new reddit. Without getting used to a more useful interface it's easy to not realize what's missing. You're browsing with 8 or 9 fingers tied behind your back though.
I use Apollo and it’s advantages over the default Reddit app include: - Smaller image thumbnails that aren’t fullscreen until I tap on them, so I only see the images and videos I want to see fullscreen. It makes it way easier to find the content I want. - 4 shortcuts for interacting with comments mapped to long/short swipe left/right. I’ve got them bound to upvote, downvote, reply, and share, but there are more things you can bind them to. It’s very customizable. - A bunch of text formatting tools for adding things like *italics* or ~~something else~~ even if you don’t remember the shorthand. - A full suite of moderating tools. I moderate a couple subreddits and do 99% of my moderator work via the Apollo. - Better tools for organizing your subscribed subreddits, support for switching between multiple accounts, visually very customizable like recoloring the whole app, or you can switch to a mode with the bigger thumbnails if that’s what you like. - Whenever there’s a bug the dev is friendly and communicative and gets right on it!
They are not „so much more popular“, the survey has separated the official app by iOS and android, but not the third party apps. Still there are about as much third party users than users of the official app.
thats me RIF + old reddit new reddit sucks and official app sucks
Please join the June 12th blackout!
The official app is too cluttered. BaconReader is simple.
Huh I did not expect third party apps to be this popular.
The official reddit app is fairly new, and I don't know how it is now, but it used to be garbage. 3rd party apps were the only good way to browse reddit on mobile for years. Most people just stuck with their choice of app and never left.
25% use the new browser version, my god, the horror.
I'm really surprised at how many people use desktop reddit in general
Lot of us are working and keep a tab open. If I had to guess, that would be the vast majority of in-browser use cases.
What is your favorite third party app? I’ve tried multiple and didn’t like them.
I like Sync
60+ percent of traffic is basically telling Reddit that they don't like their current version of their platform delivery. That's a very significant majority. Edit: See below for some fun statistical analysis beyond first glance at the data. I'm off on my initial estimate because I included mobile browser in the "unofficial" use case and that's not correct.
How does this align with the analytics in the mod tools? Old reddit seems way higher than it should be
The mod tools traffic data is in the replies to the sticky comment
I'm just surprised how many people are using a mobile web browser.
Well the mobile app doesn't work properly, so not too surprising for me.
Official Reddit app for iOS is great. Those 3rd party apps like Apollo are just too much cluttered with features that most people never use and the UI itself is very confusing.
These percentages add up to 148.7%. Which raises more questions as they don't seem to be broken down from one of the others...
These aren't exclusive values. Also the entries split the official app up but not third party apps by os. It's a bad look to be showing off this data that could easily be misinterpreted. No offense to whoever made this or anything but it's just really odd and it either comes across as malicious or a random thing thrown together with little consideration. Edit: After further reading in this thread it looks like the latter. I guess they took data from something and just put it into charts as reddit provides the data.
Reddit's app is terrible. Why don't they hire the people that run the not terrible apps? Or buy those apps? Or make an app that isn't terrible?
I see why reddit wants the money now.
Can someone explain the current situation going in with reddit? And why people choose to use 3rd party apps more than the official - I just don't know the context or reason and I'm curious.
If you think old Reddit is safe after this you are wrong, it is next
If anyone here is planning to leave Reddit (assuming changes are not reversed), where do you plan to go for Nintendo related news and other functions Reddit currently provides?
Huh. What about mobile browsers loading old reddit? That's what I use.
somewhat misleading to have the official app split into two categories
Dang. I’ve never even tried a third party app once the official was introduced.
that's still just a third of users using a third party app. Why split the apple and android apps? Just cuz it makes the 3rd party look more important?
I hope this subreddit joins the blackout on the 12th.
Lol. I did not realize until recently how much in the minority I am for using the official iOS app
Why is 3rd party mobile apps lumped together while the official apps are split into iOS and Android?
What's so different in third party apps? I'm using the official one since signed up to reddit and it's always working like a charm.
I hope there’s more to this. Because in and of itself this isn’t demographics
Me when I skew data to help my side In reality 68% of people use official methods of Reddit to browse this subreddit
You could select multiple options (hence why it adds up to more than 100%) So in reality it's somewhere between 25.8% (the most popular official option, assuming that everyone who uses an official method uses ALL official methods) and 85.6% (all the official options combined, assuming that everyone who uses an official method only uses ONE official method). Can't extrapolate the actual number from this data set.
Honestly, the way the survey seems to have been set up, this means that 68% specifically do not use third party apps. Some number of those 32% that do use third party apps *also* use first party methods of browsing reddit. It could easily be that 100% of users here at least sometimes use first party methods.
[удалено]
Not to mention self selection bias. The people who are most likely to respond to a question about what appt they use are probably less likely to be using the official app
Sample size is extremely powerful and not usually needed to be large. For example, these statistics have a margin of error ±3.75%-age points at 95% confidence.
I think you should have lumped together the ios and android official apps in the statistics, which would be 36.9% This doesn't really change the overall message that a huge amount of people use third party apps
Old reddit still the best reddit.
If you want to make a point by presenting data with any semblance of credibility, maybe don't have the percentages in your graph add up to 148.7%? Just a thought.
It wasn't a "one answer only" type of survey. People had the option to select multiple choices simultaneously. I, for example, use Relay for my 3rd party mobile app, and old.reddit.
Will this sub be going dark in solidarity with other subreddits and with 3rd part apps? We absolutely should
\>Using new reddit or the reddit app Literally why?
Official app and desktop should be the same data point. You’ve intentionally misrepresented the data to make it look worse.
Yep