I'm trying to take the most charitable interpretation possible instead of assuming malice on the part of reddit, but it's difficult to interpret it any other way than they have decided to kill 3rd party clients and not be upfront about their intentions.

It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.

One way to do that is fix their own mobile app so it's not a pile of trash. I wouldn't mind seeing the ads if the app was as good as Apollo.

You mention it like they haven't done a ton of user hostile releases, like the constant UX dark patterns to push you to a mobile app, etc. This argument is so strange, should we refute anything against Meta with "but the original founder is there, there's no corporate"?

Fair enough, in that case this is Digg v4 levels of arrogance. Tons of moderators depend on 3rd party apps to moderate [1]. These people are providing free labor on an industrial scale to reddit and it might be wise not to frustrate their work.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...

Given in the announcement thread they got wrong about it affecting third party apps at all and then on calls with third party devs do not seem quite sure if it will effect NSFW content or not, that does not seem to be the case.

Indeed, it seems to be a chaotic mess, as most of Reddit's "throw shit at a walk and hope something sticks" development methodology is.

It's a recurring joke in /r/AoE2 (Age of Empires II) to label screenshots of particularly aesthetic base/farming layouts as NSFW.

For context, normally you are placing 3x3 tile farms either around 2x2 tile mills or 4x4 tile Town Centers, so you end up with a "pinwheel" at best. But the Poles can build a 3x3 Folwark (like a mill but makes your food come in faster if the farms are close enough) leading to some very satisfying ways to use building space efficiently and aesthetically.

joke's on you now. Looks to me like people were misusing a feature so bad consequences are not entirely a surprise...

At least on desktop the old UI has a bug in narrow browser windows, but besides that I also use it 99% of the time. The new interface simply doesn't bring any noteworthy value in comparison while being more annoying to use.

I also use old.reddit all the time but come on, you seriously can't mean it's a good mobile experience. The text is tiny and you need to zoom in and out all the time just to be able to read anything. It becomes exhausting reading a comment thread by all the zooming. The image posts also don't have the actual image embedded, which makes it a really bad experience on mobile when you have to go to another URL just to look at it.

Yeah. I use old. mainly because I prefer it on mobile.

I'm still so pissed about this. It was so information a dense/clean.

I wonder how many people are so reddit addicted that they would spend many hundreds of dollars to keep using it?

I would if said choices included “an os as polished as ios”.