On a whim I decided to give the official app a try because a lot of people will be forced to use it, if they decide to stay on Reddit.
Holy hell, it’s just slow. Can’t scroll through a subreddit without annoying hitches and stutters. Comments aren’t any better also.
On the other hand, Sync is just fucking gorgeous and runs immensely better than the encumbered official app.
How can apps made by small teams or even a single person be better optimized than one supposedly made by a larger team with a larger development budget?
A lot of content on reddit is posted by bots. Votes are often bots generated. Comments are increasingly bot generated. Especially in the larger subs, and when it comes to (international) politics.
When reddit was new, reddit they used bots and fake accounts to make it seem less empty. Huffman has admitted this publicly and in interviews.
With this whole API debacle, I’ve seen numerous identical comments about not using third party apps, so reddit.com is almost certainly using bots to swing the narrative on the API too.
Have a guess why the average review of the app is high? Even ignoring the people who aren’t rating the app but reddit itself, it’s almost certain that that rating is rigged.