Reddit is Fun

» see redditisfun.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the android side of reddit had two killings in a single week of june 2023. rif and sync, both gone on the same day. honestly, apollo got most of the press because christian selig had receipts and a podcast and a public conference call to play back, but rif was the older app and the larger one by install count. andrew shu, who posted on reddit as u/talklittle, shipped the first version on april 26 2010 to the android market when the android market still had that name. for the next thirteen years he ran it as a one-developer side project that eventually paid enough to be a real job.

i was on reddit in the rif window, but i was on a laptop, not on a phone. the desktop reddit habit i had in the 2010s did not need a mobile client, when i did open reddit on my android phone it was usually in chrome through old.reddit.com. rif's reputation reached me anyway, in the same way apollo's did from the iphone side. it was the default android reddit client. the official reddit app was a slow, ad-heavy, video-heavy product that subreddit moderators recommended people avoid.

on april 18 2023 reddit announced that the public api would move to a paid tier. the rates were structured so that an app at rif's scale would owe reddit several million dollars a year, against revenue that was a fraction of that. apollo got hit harder in absolute terms, the famous twenty-million-a-year number, but rif was in the same shape. andrew shu put out the shutdown post a couple of weeks later. the june 30 deadline was the same one reddit set for everyone.

~ the case file ~

~ how it ended ~

on june 30 2023 the new api pricing went live and rif stopped working at the same hour as apollo. baconreader and sync went down the same week. official reddit kept the only working mobile experience, plus the old.reddit.com browser interface, which was kept on as a concession to the long-running protest. the official app was widely criticized for being slower and less usable than rif had been on the same phones. that did not change the api pricing.

shu was quieter than selig through the controversy. his shutdown post was honest about the math and short on theatrics. he did not record the conference call with reddit. he did not post the receipts on a podcast. the shutdown of rif was the working-class half of the api massacre, an android developer with millions of users and a clean exit instead of a public fight. by july 1 2023 the app icon on android phones still launched a window that just said the service had ended.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be on android for, and i was, but i was not in it. the rif user interface was closer to the old reddit web than the new reddit web. dense lists, link previews, thread navigation that used your phone's volume buttons by default if you turned that on. it was a client built by someone who used reddit himself and wanted it to look like the reddit he used. the new official reddit app of 2023 was built by a much larger team for an advertising model.

the api massacre of 2023 followed the twitter one in january of the same year. tweetbot and twitterrific had already been killed by elon musk's price hike at twitter. reddit picked the same play and ran it harder. by the end of june 2023 the open social-graph api as a developer category was effectively closed. apollo, rif, sync, baconreader, tweetbot, twitterrific, fenix, all gone in six months. the third-party social client era ended that summer.

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