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What would you want in a Reddit app?
My friend and I are considering finishing a prototype of a Reddit app. We've already agreed to the following features on first release (if we keep going).
- Similar urls to current Reddit website (so you can change the URL to reddit.com and see the same page)
- voting, commenting, posting selftexts and links
- Directly uploading image posts may come later if it looks complicated
- Masstagger integrated.
- Dark theme (other options in later releases)
- Primary use case: desktop and mobile web.
- Performance first. Reddit's 1 minute load time on default mobile, missing/broken features on i.reddit.com/.compact, and a few tiny complaints on the desktop site are the primary reasons we are considering writing this app. Native is not in our collective skillsets or radar, so we're going to go the extra mile to make sure the app respects both your time and your battery where possible. We did do some research and found that Reddit has actually been negligent in this regard on mobile web, meanwhile we have years of experience in the subject.
- Mailbox (send/receive messages, orange icon on new message/comment reply/thread reply).
- No infinite scroll
- View source JSON of comments/posts.
What are some features/ideas that members of this community would really like in a Reddit app?
Are you talking about a phone app? There are already a large number of third-party reddit apps that have been developed for years and are very full-featured. What would your app have that would pull users away from the existing ones?
Technically it's a mobile responsive webapp (no intent to use phonegap to put it into the Google play store). I'm not familiar or interested in any of the ones that require downloading an app because I plan on using this instead of the desktop website eventually.
Yes, but it's also intended to be better than the desktop site for desktop use (long term).
Do you know if it's against the rules to reverse engineer their undocumented API? I haven't formally looked into it. I don't feel like I can know what loose end is impossible until I get all the way to it.
The primary focus of this app is to solve specific workflow problems I have, it is not to build a user base. There are a tiny number of missing features on the Reddit web ecosystem itself, but the main issue is that I have to switch between the three sites for a ridiculous number of reasons. Compact respects my battery but has a lot of bugs and missing features, regular mobile web takes a literal minute to load, is bright white for literally no reason, and constantly nags (also has missing features). The desktop site is unpleasant to use on mobile for obvious reasons, but there are a lot of situations I have to use it anyways, like going to page 2 on a user's history. In some ways we're just cloning the desktop website with a mobile responsive css framework (bootstrap 4).
We want to open source it when we feel like it's better than both of reddit's mobile websites for non-moderator users.
We honestly haven't considered charging money for it.
We haven't considered using swiping at all, we need to think about it more.
We'll definitely evaluate this possibility.
Actually we very much want to do this. Too many times I've entered the subway and something just fails and disappears. We'd like the upvote to automatically retry and not bother the user about it anymore. I actually want to take this a step further and have comments automatically wait for the rate limit (in a transparent queue where the user can cancel and later reorder). The user should be able to review and retry any async task that fails.
I'm not thinking about it yet but I love this idea as a feature.
I'm looking to spend as little time as possible working on the CSS in the short run. Great information all around. Awesome information here!
Extra filters and highlighting are in my wishlist for sure!
I have a core feature that I hope would solve the problem snapshots is solving. We'll see!
I'm assuming that means displaying 1500 comments in a single thread? We'd like to support gold features and should look into them more.
We plan on displaying/highlighting both friend and people you are following.
Definitely on the radar, but we haven't put any further thought into it besides "yes!".
It's literally a passion project to work around how bad the Reddit mobile web experience has been for us (in addition to a tiny number of other things we personally want). Sounds about right lol. We hope it feels like what everyone likes about the desktop while being great and functional and performant on mobile.
I'll be concise, and this'll actually be very generic:
Be lightweight: use the least amount of resources and customisations, focus on function. Good examples: older reddit.com, HN, Tildes, Gmane.
Be (F)OSS: I'll always choose FOSS over not FOSS.
Sell me things and use something like Patreon: don't make money off of stuff that belongs to me, sell me your app and I'll buy, or have a Patreon campaign or the like (ideally, diversify). I'd fancy the second option more.
Don't do Agile and stuff: give me fully-baked app, don't make useless random changes, inform me beforehand when making changes.
Text, not icons: three lines stacked on top of each other, or a half of an elips with a circle over it don't mean much. But "menu" and "profile" are quite clean and unambiguous.
Treat me like an adult: there's this tendency to write stuff like 404 pages or docs or blogs with jokes and gifs and silly childish images and excessive familiarity which deeply bothers me. Be serious, a joke every now and then is fine, but more than that waters the site down and quickly becomes cringy.
When I say "to me" I mean to the userbase. But there's lots of personal views in this too. I wish you success! Please notify us when you're releasing, I'd like to have "Show Tildes" posts here like there are "Show HN" posts over at HN.
Currently we show both icons and text and are wanting to add a setting to disable one or the other.
I can't imagine putting effort into making one of those lol!
We're currently using fontawesome 4.7 which is like a 1MB font file (wtf???). When we have enough of the app scaffolded out we will switch to something like fontello which will give us the same FA4.7 icons but only the ~10 we will be using which hopefully will be closer to 10kb or less.
http://fontello.com/
Tildes has actually been a great inspiration that not proved it was possible, but made me realize it was necessary. We'll fly as close to tilde' performance profile as possible when considering features.
We consider this inevitable for our long term goals.
Patreon is possible but we're not thinking about ways to get money at this time.
We were already considering a changelog, but as for how we can push updates but respect that you don't like surprises, I think we'll be able to find an acceptable middle ground when we go Foss and by being very careful with rearranging things after 1.0 and also by keeping old versions available.
Great!
My gut feeling is that thinking about this early on is better. I think people would love to be among the earlier supporters (I felt so when I started pledging Tildes, it feels like really being a part of it rather than a user). But I don't have much experience (just observing stuff), so take that with a grain of salt.
BTW, any sorts of breaking changes and fast-paced development early on is totally acceptable for me.
If it's an app or app-like, please spend some time in Apollo for iOS. I was an Android user for years and tried just about every app there is for Reddit, but since switching to iOS and using Apollo, nothing on Android comes close. You owe it to yourself to see just why so many Apple users are in love with this app.
I don't have the option of trying iOS apps but I'll definitely try to find a YouTube video of it in action.
I would love the option to hide the vote count.
The main annoyance for me with the Reddit app is not being able to copy/paste images directly.
Yes, this one is a killer. We didn't plan on adding any extra redirect wrappers or use reddit's existing ones. We do want to go a step further and eventually add a button that triggers a direct download, specifically if we can bypass when imgur adds
_dto an image preventing the user from downloading the full size.I currently use RedditIsFun. It's pretty good, but one thing that it's missing that I wish it had is Reddit's "Other Discussions" feature, listing other discussions in other posts of the same URL.
The "other discussions" is broken/useless on .compact, we definitely want this one to work on first release.
Extensive moderator tools and built-in /r/toolbox support. That would be the dream.
That's on my not-this-year radar, I moderate a few subs and have heard horror stories from bigger subreddit moderators about how weak the current toolset is. We're focused on "for regular users" for the foreseeable short-term future. We haven't done any due diligence in measuring the scope of moderation tools specifically for subreddit moderators.
A bit different from other comments here, and probably not in the scope of what you're making, but I would love a deliberately "narrow" reddit app. What I mean is that there is just too damn much on reddit for me these days. I either visit and leave immediately, overwhelmed by the number of new posts, or I fall into a several hour hole of looking through random posts, subreddits, and comment trees--none of which sticks in memory. At the end of those hours I'm left with little more than a profound vacancy. I can't account for the time I spent, nor name a single noteworthy thing I read or saw. It was all just temporary mental noise.
This happens especially when I'm busy or stressed, so I suppose it serves some sort of useful function for me, but I can't shake the feeling that I'd be better off doing something else with my time. I actually frequently uninstall my reddit app from my phone and feel liberated for a couple days, but it seems to always find its way back--especially because I sometimes do need the app for useful information. I'll find myself wanting to look up something on, say, /r/linuxquestions, but that invariably becomes a gateway drug to the mindless, like my slackjawed binge watching of hundreds of consecutive posts in /r/unexpected.
As such, I would love a reddit app that will save me from myself and won't give me access to everything. I don't have a good sense for what it would look like, but maybe only showing a "best of the day" feed where it only gives me posts over a certain threshhold (e.g. over 1000 upvotes, posted in the last 24 hours). It would also be nice if it would block non-subscribed subreddits, so that I can't just jump to somewhere else once my feed ends. The trick has to be that it gives me a finite snapshot of content, rather than letting me swim in an ocean of posts.
Tildes has this quality right now because it's so small: I can easily log in and check the handful of new posts that have gone up since I was last here. Once I process those, I step away from Tildes, easily, every time. reddit, on the other hand, has way too much and is way too magnetic for me. I would love an app that could cut it down into something much more digestible.
Can't you unsubscribe from the unproductive subreddits and replace them with more productive less addictive ones?
Or even create a new account to subscribe to a different type of content?
I can (and have). The problem is self control. If the app is installed, no matter how disciplined I am and how narrow my subscriptions, I still find myself "wandering" through reddit. It would be nice if I could have an app that would keep me from doing that, so that I can still get the small amount of reddit that I consider beneficial but avoid the rest that's detrimental to me.
On the other hand, this whole setup is really just me externalizing a bad habit of mine. This isn't a problem that will be solved through an app but one that will be solved through me taking ownership of my behavior.
Do you think the multi-reddit feature could be utilized by an app to make a step towards optimizing your experience?
I'm not too familiar with the multireddit feature. If I understand it correctly, it lets me aggregate multiple subreddits under one feed? Did you have an idea in mind?
Yeah basically, so you could make your productivity multireddit, special interest multireddit, meme multireddit, etc.. I don't have a specific idea in mind (for me or for you) but I would like to take advantage of multireddits but I don't have a clear concept in my head with what I don't like about them on desktop. In my case, I'm hoping my solution will materialize itself as I add support for multireddits.
Filters.
Post filters and comment filters.
The only reason I can stand reddit is because of RES filters. They allow me to filter out meme comments (DAE absolute unit, lolololol, ugh) and seasonal buzzwords (Halloween, Christmas, celebrity who recently died, etc).
Given how I'm not aware of any reddit apps that have those features as of right now. I would immediately jump ship to any who did. Though maybe no app has it because it's not possible, or because not a lot of people are interested, who knows.
Also, why no infinite scrolling?
I like this idea long term, when the time comes I'll try to use your existing filters from RES before considering to roll my own.
We want to try an alternative idea before considering it an option. I've had a lot of bad experiences with them.
paged scrolling (similar to duckduckgo) but infinite would be the dream. especially if you could add a shortcut back to the results starting from a certain result.
Paging to the end of time (via the reddit API) should work on individual users and subreddits and comments in a single post. Things like /r/all (and maybe multis?) have a limit like maybe 1,000 or 10,000 items. I know how to build infinite scrolling on top of that pagination. Keeping your position in results is 100% a requirement for me to consider implementing infinite scrolling.
you could have it update the url so that it would be ?after=<id> &continued=[1..n] or something similar
A version of Atenna or Baconreader that doesn't close out of nowhere every now and then, nor become less responsive with time.
We're planning on being minimalistic with css/js "effects" (so, none if possible). In theory we're using a generic bootstrap css file (colors modified, not a full theme with template) and assume we can swap out with any bootstrap4 bootswatch css file when the time comes.
Red reader does it all for me except for links, but I'm sure it's an option somewhere. But it's ad free and simple, with some nice features like pinning subs to the main menu.
I'm actually amazed no one knows about it.
One of my favorite but often overlooked features of Relay for Reddit is mapping the volume keys to go to the next parent comment in a thread. It's so convenient.
Configuration options would go high up on my list.
Example: I currently use some RES rules to hide the entire silver/gold/platinum system. Obviously, that level of customization is probably out of the question, but I would absolutely kill to be able to hide that bullshit on my phone.
Sync is the closest-to-perfect Reddit app, in my opinion. Something that gave me that degree of configuration and improved on it would basically win me automatically.
I'm not sure what you could really do with the desktop site that RES doesn't allow you to do better already. If you're not making a native desktop app, that seems like a really fruitless endeavor to me, but then I don't know what your vision ultimately looks like.
I like the idea of user settings to hide bullshit, like gold.
I did my first test run as a Reddit client today using the production build on my phone in Firefox nightly for Android. I had to quit nearly instantly because the css for posts was hilariously bad and I need my webhost to understand what to do on dynamic routes (if you open a link in a new tab). Total show stoppers for me, but they'll be quick fixes when I get home.
Day 2: voting, comments, and crossposting work great. Fresh pageloads make blocking API calls that need to be cached. Need to add "other discussions" feature desperately. There is a bug were I can't switch postlist sort method sometimes. On small screen I don't see the orange "new message" mail icon. Clicking "next page" should take you to the top of the page. Collapse comments needs to be moved. User submissions didn't work.
Day 3: gifv thumbnails don't become animated when expanded. I feel like this is already better as a daily driver on my phone, but we're short on feature parity. We'll fix ASAP: When you click done after a comment, your comment should be there. Need additional space or footer at bottom so scroll-to-top doesn't block buttons. Need imgur album support. Need can't post in subs that banned you message. Needs subreddit subscribe button Sorts need time period filter.
Subreddit title and subtitle need to be swapped.
Days 4&5: Nothing interesting was truly broken, but work was done: showing user/link flair in more places, sent masstagger dude a message, added details like [locked/sticky/pinned] to comments/posts, both friend and follow button for users, added logo and favicon, added a log to see your past 32 entries of reddit browing history and last 32 items of reddit api activity.
Having a red mail icon was probably the first thing I did after login, but now when you click it you can read your messages, mark/unmark sent, and reply. Also added /subreddits/{index,mine,new} pages.
masstagger integrated!
My 12 days of silence may appear like inactivity on the project, but actually no slow downs have occurred! The prototype has proven to me that enough of my goals are already achieved and that enough remaining ones are still possible!
I'm already using this as my daily driver. I had to leave the app to remove an abusive comment as a moderator, then completed the mod comment removal feature when I got home later that day.
The last 2 weeks has been mostly yak shaving, making sure anything I need to do is on par with compact/bloated reddit mobile website. Basically adding features and solving workflow/usability issues.
This morning I encountered the anticipated wave of reddit 503s for the first time. The idea that you upvoted something, but it didn't actually happen and was lost forever keeps most of us up at night shaking in terror--I know.
I need to do a little bit of refactoring to accomplish following increase of durability in user actions (remember there is no server side infrastructure on my part).
I think I would want to make a stable version of this feature and add screenshots to the repo before making the project public. This project might not be good for most people, but it's made a huge difference in solving my workflow problems in browsing reddit.
Nothing. Reddit, along with every other big social media site, has become a serious detriment to society and is being run by corrupt, morally bankrupt individuals.
The sooner those sites die, the better.
Modtoolbox full support. I currently use two apps in order to accomplish what I can do with the desktop version. If this is implemented, I'll pay for your app no questions asked (I'm not particular about it being open or closed source).
Easy to access hide button. I navigate by new and, in my multi, use the hide button all the time to keep it tidy. Baconreader has been my reading app for years simply because they have a big fat X right underneath the post. All the others I've tried end up costing me time because of this.
My hide button already works for posts, except I think I need to figure out if I need to do anything extra if an item shows up with hidden=true. I'll figure that out.
Just checked, the API does not send me hidden links. I thought comments could be hidden but Reddit does not support that.
fyi, reddit.premii.com is a thing. It's not as polished as it's hackernews counterpart, but it's still a decent webapp.
There are already some perfect reddit apps. The problem is the content and people on reddit.
I don't.