tl;dr: They locked the original icon behind Reddit Premium.
Fuck Reddit, but you guys are just looking for shit at this point. It’s an app icon who cares
Do iOS users care about the app icons? Every time I hear about iOS it feels like aliens.
I’m confused, are you saying you don’t care about the icons at all? Like if they all look like complete ass you wouldn’t mind?
I’m also confused as to why you singled out IOS users, as Android literally has a built in system to change each and every icon yourself for free. If nobody cared that wouldn’t exist.
They have to look different from each other so that I can find them but otherwise no, I do not care how the icons look and I have never met another android user that does either. While there are third party launchers for android to customize your user experience and they allow you to change icons I have never met anyone that uses launchers exclusively for that purpose.
The reason I am talking about iOS is because that is what we are talking about. iOS has a system to pay for app icons and Android doesn’t. Paying $5 for an app icon is alien territory for me.
IOS has no such feature, what’re you talking about? This is exclusive to Reddit, and technically Apollo as a donation system. Apple didn’t make this, and it’s not a system level feature. Reddit made this, and you access this nonsense within their own app.
Also, congrats, you now know an Android user who cares about what their device looks like. I’m genuinely surprised I’m the first though, as the level of customization Android offers makes for an ideal place for those looking to customize the look of their device.
Btw try not to use so many strawman arguments in the future. I never said people used third party launchers exclusively to change icons, for example. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but figured I’d let you know regardless.
Imagine having to pay to edit an icon in your home screen
This post was made by the Android gang
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
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.
Are they really that desperate now?
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, didn’t burn cash on morphing reddit into a Facebook knockof, I just focused on keeping the lights on, how much better off could he have been at this point?
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.
Ok that’s it I’m uninstalling it.
