Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of...

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/883364

Despite site-stopping protests by mods and users, Reddit leadership chose to brute force its way through any reasonable way of continuing third-party app support. Instead, the company hopes its luxury-priced API will be its secret shortcut to an overvalued IPO. As a result, Reddit’s official iOS app is being torpedo’d in the App Store.

The final days of Apollo may be upon us, but the ramifications of Reddit’s disdain for its users are here to stay. Look no further than App Store reviews to see the results. As TechCrunch reports, data from Sensor Tower shows how Reddit is sealing its fate as a 1-star reviewed app.

The data shared with TechCrunch shows that nearly 91% of Reddit’s U.S. iOS reviews carried a 1-star rating during the initial phase of the protest between June 12–14, compared to about 53% in the previous two months until May.

There has been some ratings improvement lately as the 1-star reviews of the Reddit U.S. iOS app dropped to about 86% between June 15–26, Sensor Tower’s data shows.

That’s presumably because the App Store doesn’t offer 0-star ratings. It’s also telling that Reddit leadership thought nuking third-party apps made sense when its own app saw more than half of its reviews rank it as low as possible.

Reddit app reviews in the App Store have also become a place for users to voice their frustration with the self-sabotaging company.

The data shared by Sensor Tower also indicates the top three most mentioned terms in all of the Reddit U.S. iOS reviews included keywords “apollo”, “third party” and “3rd party,” suggesting users were bombing review ratings in light of the new API move.

Either users are pissed or they’re hosting a lot of birthday parties for the god of truth.

At any rate, there’s been virtually no good news on the Reddit front since the awesome Apollo client was forced to announce its end date. The best Reddit app is closing up shop on June 30 to avoid owing tens of millions of dollars to Reddit before ever seeing its own revenue.

    • girlfreddy@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      Makes you wonder if Wall St pays attention to anything outside of its hallowed halls?

      • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        Wall st doesn’t give a shit about user feedback. Sadly the Reddit app was the only app generating ad revenue for Reddit, so that’s all they care about, users are an avenue to profit for them, nothing more

      • Ketchup@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I’d go a step further and say, they only need to convince the pension investing zombies it’s the next hot offering “once in a life time” “ground floor” growth stock. Wall Street will dump this on retail’s head and buy the bag back out at the bid for Pennie’s before they sail it up the mast again on inflated earnings. Rinse and repeat until the name is utterly broken.

    • zosu@vlemmy.netEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      they kinda drove ppl to 3rd party apps. i mean, if there was a tiktok app with less needs for permissions or less spyware, ppl would prefer that as well.

  • Riptide502@lemm.eeEnglish
    30·
    2 years ago

    And ofc apple is using their platform to remove and suppress low ratings. Its so dam suspicious that the app has essentially only 5 star ratings now. 4.8 out of 5.

    This is an actual case where 1 star reviews are completely valid.

    • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      And there are literally long written scathing reviews about how bad the app is that are suspiciously five stars, it’s like spez himself has the ability to moderate the reviews

      • Riptide502@lemm.eeEnglish
        10·
        2 years ago

        I think thats more so a symptom of people trying to bypass apple’s attempts to remove bad reviews.

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    1 star would be appropriate if there have never been 3rd party apps. Compared to competently made apps, that official turd would deserve negative stars.

    Why is the overall rating high? Because app stores remove review bombing, and that’s because people review bomb products due to every little thing so it becomes meaningless.

    Then it’s impossible to distinguish actual dogshit products compared to those where someone just made you mad.

    I believe the Reddit app isn’t even really review bombed. I can imagine people actually trying it when they learned their 3rd party app will stop working, and going holy shitttt what a mess.

    • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      We all know google has the knowledge and tools to know if something is real or not (at least much better than they currently do) but they make their app store unusable for people since only recomending spammy-fishy-microtansaction-antiprivacy-tracking apps that further their overall goals.

    • Icarus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      we need a federated review system that’s not connected to any particular site or company, I believe that’s the only good way to avoid such things

      • RoboGroMo@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yeah everything about this just makes it ever more clear that we need to escape the manipulation of the big tech companies because they’ll all work together to establish their monopoly and milk us for every penny

    • gun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      It seems like it. I see a lot of reviews that are like “app is garbage. hate it. 5 stars.”

  • supersane@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    Lemmy seems like it’s picking up steam as a worthy adversary to Reddit. We just have to convince more people to use it.

  • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    Also sort only positive comments by “Most recent” and you will see only some bot responses, while Critical are much more in depth.

  • NedRyerson@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    I just downloaded the Android app, gave it a one star review with a few sentences of why, then uninstalled. Sad but there the way it goes