I used to use RiF back in the day when it was still a buggy mess. I don’t even remember when I moved to the native app. I don’t agree with Reddit’s policy update (why I’m here) but I thought the default app was fine for normal browsing. I never had issues with the video player or anything else.
I use Samsung Galaxy devices if that’s relevant.
Same. RiF and relay gave me video issues and I couldn’t post sometimes. So I switched to the official app and it was SO full of ads.
It’s not just the ads, but the astroturfing on Reddit is so damn blatant. For instance, there was a video about pressing vinyl records, and the comment section felt like an ad for some movie (“that’s the soundtrack for [insert new movie] I ordered it!”). I had been posting evidence of this to r/hailCorporate but at some point I realized that’s just how the majority of Reddit was.
Bot activity is off the roof, especially on political subs. The entirety of r/Canada is taken over by antivaxxers and ford supporters with multiple bot accounts, to the point people had to migrate to r/OnGuardForThee. But what about casual users who aren’t aware of this? They are susceptible to being influenced by bots. There’s no real discourse or community anymore.
I became really disheartened when I saw people earnestly engaging in obvious bot reposts, or how effective the bot strategy of taking one response and copying it as a reply to another worked - the discussion was so mundane that sometimes you wouldn’t even realise.