330: Engaging with Reddit

Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

So I was over on the Reddits looking at slash R slash Overcast. And what do I find? I believe I find a Marco Arment with an online community that he's been managing, which is... kind of remarkable and kind of wild and something that i'm just fascinated to hear how that's gone like i knew that you'd started this thing but it has now been i think a couple of months a couple of weeks at least maybe a month something like that a month and i would say managing is generous but yes go ahead

But I guess it's been fascinating to see that you've created a new place and venue for people to talk to you about Overcast. And I'm just fascinated to hear your experience with that, how it's gone. Like I know you had – You had a Slack room for a while, which I'm not sure if you still do. It's just an interesting way in the way that you're pulling in feedback from people and kind of why you're doing that and how helpful it's been.

Yeah, I've been kind of on a journey with that, and I don't think that journey is over. I don't think it's ever going to be over, but over time with my apps and with feedback channels and everything. I have found a lot of things don't work for me. Email is one of the hardest because email, you kind of can't not have. You need email in some form.

With Instapaper, I had a really hard time with support email. I would get many requests per day. I tried a few different services and people to help answer them for me. And I just had horrible experiences. And I don't know if I just picked the wrong people or had bad luck or whatever it was. So I decided with Overcast, I'm going to try to do it all myself.

I'm going to set expectations clearly in the app before I show you the email address. Like, hey, by the way, this is not support. This is feedback. And I'm probably not going to be able to respond to the thing you're writing. And I think that has largely set expectations correctly. I think that has largely been fine. You know, like if you're out there as a developer and you're drowning in email with people who literally want you to call them and walk them through how to install your app.

I want you to know that that's, for most apps, that's optional. You can do that if you want to. If you find that worthwhile, if you find it joyful, you can do that. But for most apps, you don't need to do that. You can just say, I'm sorry, I don't offer that kind of support or literally just not even respond because...

That is kind of an unreasonable thing to ask a developer of a free app or an app that you got for a dollar. It's not going to be worth anybody's time. And so anyway, so you can go all in and you can make yourself very available that way. And then Twitter. came around and then later on, you know, other, now that Twitter has broken up in a way and everyone's scattered all over the place, you know, you can make presences in all these different places and all the different ways that you give people.

access to your attention and and you give them ways that they can expect to hear from you and the problem is as one person i don't know how anybody keeps up with any of that as long as soon as your app has any users whatsoever I don't know how you keep up with multiple channels of feedback, how you – like different emails, different posts. Do you respond to all the people who like at mention you on a social network? Like there's so many challenges to that. It's such a load.

I don't know how anybody does that and still programs anything. Like, I don't know how you do that and have any other part of your life or work because it just takes over. And so I've, I've tried over time, like, how do I like narrow this down? Like one of the things I've decided is like on.

on these new kind of, you know, Twitter explosion social networks, the only one I have a presence on is Mastodon, and even then, just barely. And I know Mastodon is pretty small and mostly nerds like us, and that's fine.

uh that's like i'm not i'm not really trying to use it as much of a like broadcast reach kind of way it's more of like i'm hanging out with my nerds you know and i i don't have a presence for either myself or overcast on most of the most of the new networks i don't have a presence in like video uh platforms um i only have a personal presence on instagram and even then it's like currently deleted off my phone like i don't have much of a presence there either

So overall, I have a pretty limited social presence. And as a result, when you are not on a social platform, it doesn't mean people won't talk about you. It just means... Generally speaking, they'll talk about you as if you're not there because you're mostly or entirely not there. Sure. And what that looks more like is maybe like a ranting space, I would say.

And this is what Reddit had become for me. If you don't form your own community on Reddit, and sometimes even if you do, but if you don't have an official presence on Reddit, what happens is once you have enough users or fans... People will make one, and if you're not there, they'll mostly just – it will become a complaining space. It will become a space where people are gathering to talk about how much –

They hate you or how much you suck or your work sucks or this thing is a problem. And if you aren't there, that dynamic seems to get worse because not only do they think you are ignoring them. Not even by any action of you, merely by you not participating or responding or being there. They will perceive that as you are ignoring them and also by you not being there.

It kind of gives people almost like the freedom of how people, when they are driving in their cars, do things that are kind of nastier or more selfish than they would do face-to-face with somebody, like standing in line at the bank.

Sure. But in their cars, they're protected from the humanity of other people. Well, in an online community like Reddit or something like that, in an online community, if you aren't there and they're talking about you, they will tend to be... meaner and and more harsh to you because you aren't seen as a person who will read that you're seen as like you know just this entity that they are all complaining about but you're not there there's there's a shift that happens like

back during the twitter days like there was a shift of like you used to be able to like rant about oh i was on this united flight and it sucked you know then eventually the brands got on twitter and then Anytime you mention something happening with a brand, you know some customer support rep would send you a response. Hey, we'd love to get in touch. And it kind of deflated the fun of ranting.

That happens with a lot of online communities. Once the company or creator that you are ranting about shows up... Everyone kind of like pulls back on the nastiness a little bit and is like, oh, now the dynamic is different. Now I know that they will see this probably or there's a decent chance they will see this.

And that changes the way you talk about things. And it changes both what you choose to rant about, whether it's small stuff or big stuff, and it changes kind of just the basic tone and civility.

that you do it with if you have a pretty good idea that that company is going to see what you're writing. And so what I decided to do, I decided for a number of reasons.

I wasn't happy with a situation where there's a Reddit group of people who mostly don't like me and are complaining about me. And then I have no presence on Reddit. And then also, I am trying to... have like a more public communication platform that is not just like my blog or a mastodon channel that only nerds follow i decided let me let me try engaging with reddit

And that that was not an easy decision. And I certainly went into it very nervously because the only thing I had seen from Reddit up to that point was people who mostly hated me and complained about me and were pretty rude about it. Sure. And so I thought this is a risk for sure. I was I was nervous about it. I wasn't sure, like, should I even do this? How should I do this?

I decided to create my own Reddit instead of joining the kind of fan created one that was our fan. I'm using the term fan loosely, but the fan created one that was already there because I kind of felt like I don't want to like invade. their community so much. If the creator of the app all of a sudden shows up, I think that changes the dynamic quite a bit. And if there's a group of people there who...

has something going already, I don't want to invade that and take it over. I'm going to go create my own, make it the official one, and if they want to keep the other one going, fine. And then, you know, and then I have my own space and we each have our own spaces and we can each have them be the mood and the people and the kind of community that we want them to be. And so I made my own.

And I pointed people to it. And I also shut down the Slack channel. The Slack was, I created it to be like, basically like this, like, you know, kind of an overcast, you know, power user community and beta feedback. And what I have found over time is that it was just shrinking. Traffic was dwindling down.

This happens with communities. Sometimes they work and they take off and they stick around forever. Sometimes they kind of peter out and it doesn't really stick. And that's what happened to the Slack. It just didn't really stick. I was not getting a lot of feedback. It was like the same five people. that I was hearing from all the time, I decided, let me do something public. And also, what's nice about Reddit also is that whatever you write there is searchable by search engines and AI.

I figured like if I'm going to do something that is that like if I'm going to give an answer to a question, I want future people to be able to benefit from that in some way. Because that's, you know, the whole problem with email is that you write an email and one person sees it. You've wasted a lot of that time, basically. But whereas, like, if you can document things in some kind of public forum, then they can be findable by others. And even if it's not, like, super easily.

findable at least you know ask any ai a question that's like a factual answer and the answer you will get is often a reddit post that they have indexed and they're they're spitting out back to you um so i figured reddit was a good place for You know, kind of knowledge base accumulation. You know, I'm not really one for documentation, really. And so I figure this could maybe be like a bit of a substitute for it.

Obviously, like doing all these things would be better, but I'm not going to because I mean, I know myself pretty well at this point. So anyway, I decided I will engage with Reddit. I will answer questions whenever I have the chance. I'll be able to explain kind of what I'm doing and why. There's a lot of like a lot of the negative reviews or support emails that I get, feedback emails that I get are kind of of the nature of like.

this thing doesn't work and it's your fault and a lot of times the answer is it's not my fault but people don't know that sure and part of it is you know that that's largely on me because i need to communicate that better or like you know show it in the app better or things like that but a lot of times um it might help if people could have a thing to point to and say oh well if you're having this problem this is actually an ios 26 bug that's fixed in 26.1 beta and

Hopefully a fix will be out soon. That kind of thing. So that's why I decided to engage. And it was kind of remarkable by having an official presence and by engaging directly. The negativity that I expected to be there and that largely was there before was significantly diffused. And part of what happened is because I was directing people there from my own.

official channels part of it is some of like you know quote my people went to reddit or went to that reddit and so part of it was it was more people going in who are largely fans of my app because they follow me on social media or whatever um but a lot of it was like the same kind of people who were there before again the tone changes when you have an official presence and people feel heard people feel

People sometimes get those answers like, oh, this thing that you thought was the app's fault. That's actually some other problem. And here's maybe how to work around it. It's been an incredibly positive experience. And I think it's. It's largely because I just stepped right into it and engaged directly and positively. I'm not going to get dragged down into any arguments or anything, but that's for the most part. People who have posted questions are like, I think it should work this other way.

A lot of times I just post an answer of like, well, here's why I made it work this way. And in most cases, they're like, oh, that makes sense. Or that's understandable. It so diffuses that anger. And that frustration to be there and to explain myself, to explain why things are the way they are. Or, you know, actually, that's a good idea. I tried that. Here's why it didn't work. That is very helpful to me so far.

And it has radically changed the conversation and radically changed the mood. And it's not, look, it's not 100% positive. It never will be. But being there has been substantially beneficial compared to not being there.

We are brought to you this episode by Things. Things is one of those great apps that's always ready for the new Apple OS's on day one. Of course, things have been thoroughly updated for iOS 26 with a fresh new look and loads of great little improvements. So first of all, brand new Liquid Glass app icon looks perfect on all the 26 OSes. And of course, it supports, you know, the dark and the tinted and the glass styles.

And the entire app's interface has been refreshed throughout. You've got the more rounded corners for Windows to-dos, controls, wider spacing, kind of matching the 26 aesthetic, a little bit of glass in the sidebar that lets some color shine through, glassy buttons here and there, and of course... if you're on iPad. Things also supports all of the Mac improvements on iPad as well. So the new windowed apps mode on iPadOS, multiple window support, new menu bar support.

It is one of the best productivity apps for iPad with deep integration with all the new iPadOS 26 features. On the Mac, you'll find things now integrate to the control center with two new control buttons, one to add a new to-do item and one to jump into any list. Of course, you can put them right into the menu bar because that's how control buttons work now on Tahoe.

And even if you're on a Vision Pro, Things works there too. It has widgets there now to place around your room, support for Apple intelligence, writing tools. There is so much great about Things. Things is one of the best Apple platform apps I have ever used. The interface is sublime. It's so well designed, but it also, it isn't just like a boring stock app. It looks like things, but it also looks native on their platforms.

This new design and features keep making things a delightful app to use. It's a native app made to the very high standard of quality. It's won the ADA twice. So if you haven't tried things, check out the latest version. Go to the website. It's things.app. Very simple.

things.app learn all the great new features and download a free trial on your mac today at things.app or on the app store just search for things whatever it is you want to accomplish in life things will help you get there try things today at things.app or click the link in the show notes you will not regret it our thanks to things for the support of this show and all of relay so your experience there is fascinating to me because i think it is definitely

counter to yeah like in my mind reddit is a place that people go to shout um and it is lovely that you have and i guess in some ways that's what you found previously but it is fascinating that by creating a a more official personal place for that. You know, it's one thing to be shouting into the void. It's a different thing to be shouting into your face. And so it is, you know, sort of refreshing to hear that that civility and.

Um, understanding has been something that is, has come out of that. And it is certainly very positive and, and, and good. It's like the thing that I think about when I consider, Oh, is this something that would be useful for.

you know, for my apps is it's just, it is always one of these complicated things on the internet. Whenever you create a community, it will need to be tended to that. Like, Any online community is like a garden and you either – it's like if you – tend to it and you prune it and you make sure that it's well taken care of and it's moderated correctly and all those things they can be wonderful and they can be beautiful and they can be super helpful but at the same time as soon as you stop letting

You know, you stop taking good care of it. It'll potentially be the kind of thing that goes in directions that are not so nice and not so lovely. And so it's...

is attention, right? And I think what's been fascinating too is you've been really busy with the actual coding part of Overcast in a way that, you know, if I think of the last year, that's definitely come in ebbs and flows for how you've been how engaged and how productive and the number of overcast test flight builds that I'm getting on a daily basis now.

is fabulous, is wonderful. And it is, the thing I would be so worried about is that something like this would be a distraction or pull away your attention or someone would say something mean and it ruins a day's productivity or it... draws you in a direction that is not actually productive or helpful for making overcast better. But it's a fascinating thing to think about. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying, though, of how...

People are going to have that conversation regardless and whether or not it is useful for us to engage in it at a personal level. And it's always one of these weird things where for us, we're like our app and us. At least from my perspective, if they feel like they are very closely related, but potentially from –

our audience's perspective or our customer base's perspective, they are completely different things. I imagine the vast majority of people who use my apps would not recognize my name if they saw it. It is not something that... they're building a connection for. But in this case, it's like Marco Arment is in Slash Overcast and is talking about his app in an official way. And so that has a certain...

weight to it. But have you found it distracting? Have you found it helpful in that way? Or is it a thing that is taking a lot of your time or pulling you in different directions that maybe you weren't expecting or hoping for?

I think you have to be careful to realize that in any channel that you have, that is a subset of users, and it is not a random representative subset. The Reddit users... They have kind of their own kind of, you know, preferences and types and kind of tone. And that's different from what was in the Slack. It's different from what I see on Mastodon. And those are all different from what I see in email.

These are all different subsets of users, and they're not randomly selected. So they're not representative of the whole. And you have to be careful what you're listening to. For instance, what are people asking about? People who write the reviews in the App Store usually have very extreme feelings. So if you cater to the App Store reviews, then what you're going to cater to is people who have extreme...

Extremely strong, positive or negative feelings, usually negative. And it's going to be like, you know, the entire middle, like the silent, happy middle majority, their needs are going to be mostly ignored. If you cater to a place that has a more nerdy audience, like Mastodon, you're going to do nerd features, you're going to do nerd requests, and you're going to ignore all the non-nerds' needs.

One thing that I found recently is there was some dust up with Pocket Casts and their users. And as a result, I got a bunch of people coming from Pocket Cast to Overcast over the last couple of weeks. And what I keep hearing basically is complaints that Overcast is not like Pocket Casts. That's because it's like, oh, these users, these actually are not my users. They came from a different app. They want my app to replace the app they were using, but to be the app they were using.

And that's not what Overcast is. It's a different app with different styles and different choices, different functionality. That's the whole reason there are different apps. And if I listen to... some of these like this big burst of recent feature requests that basically are like can you please make your app pocket casts then i would be doing a disservice to all of my other users who chose my app because of what my app was and and wasn't you know and so

I'd be doing a disservice to like, you know, overcast core users. So if you know, on the in Reddit in particular, what I have found is that instead of being distracting. And taking me in these different side quests of doing features that only these 10 people will want. I've actually found it's actually helping to focus me because I'm starting to see what are the common themes? What do people in this Reddit group?

Report or request that I have also been hearing about in email for years or months. And I can start – it's one channel of many. It serves a decent function of beta feedback that, again, I was hoping the Slack was going to do a better job on beta feedback. But over time, it kind of got too small to be relevant and important and useful. But Reddit is...

nerds who install betas quickly. There's a fast response loop. So if there's a problem with the build, I usually know about it within a few hours. So it serves a really good beta testing function. For, like, the feature kind of direction, it really does help to see, like, oh, this is something. Like, I keep seeing these same posts over and over again or these same complaints.

And sometimes to have the engagement, to have the back and forth, like I was saying earlier, there's issues with priority podcast sorting in playlists. And it's like, okay, well... Here's – I was able to post like here's the challenge. Here's why this is a hard problem. There's these edge cases that are really hard to know what to do and there's kind of no right answer in some of them. And that starts a discussion and people will actually say, oh, well.

How about, what if you do this? Or, oh, I expected it to work this way. And to have that back and forth with multiple people in public, that actually helps me understand my users better. And that can help surface ideas that I wouldn't have thought of or perspectives of like, you know, people interpret this to mean this. I wouldn't have thought of that. Like people think this.

You know, this term I'm using in the app, they're misinterpreting it to mean this other thing. So that so maybe I should use a different term or this behavior in the app is confusing these people. Maybe like and I wouldn't have thought of that on my own.

So it's almost serving as a form of user testing and of collaborative brainstorming. As long as I keep in mind what I was saying a minute ago about this is just a subset of users. So it doesn't help me decide what... broadly i need to work on i i have to use like the sum of all of my inputs to determine what broadly to work on but it does once i've decided what to do

And I'm trying to figure out how to do it. Or I'm trying to see how certain things fly with the users. It's great for that. And that kind of discussion and collaboration angle of it is pretty unique to that form.

Yeah, and I think what you're getting at there that I do think is really – like there are many ways that I've gathered feedback on my apps over the years. Like all manner of – many of the same things that you've tried. And I think the thing that is most – complicated sometimes is to feel like you understand the actual user of your app not the extreme user but like someone who's within that like one standard deviation above the mean

of your app because they are so quiet. Like it is less likely that you're going to run into them, that you're going to be able to have a conversation. Like, I think I remember where I heard this, but I remember someone saying that they were trying to understand their users. And so they had a fairly somewhat mainstream app. And so they just went and sat at a McDonald's. And with a sign that was like, try our app, we'll give you a $10 McDonald's gift card kind of thing.

And it was just a way to talk to just random people about what they thought, what they expected, how good was their onboarding, what confused them, what was nice. Because I think it was getting at the – which I'm not saying it's a great idea, but it is something that gets at this idea that it is so difficult often to really understand.

the typical user. And obviously, like in this case, Reddit's not necessarily the typical user, but it is a different kind of interaction. But it's a different kind of interaction that you're having with a different kind of group. And there's an element of...

On the one hand, you want to have lots of interactions with lots of people to have a wide thing that you can pick up trends and see lots of things. Obviously, the wider you – you're growing wide in some directions but narrow in others. It's not necessarily that. Any one of these things is – you know, it's the most helpful. Like sometimes I'd be, I wish I could just have like,

A tenth of a percent of my users just randomly have to have a conversation with me on iMessage. And it's just like, what do you like about the app? I guess it's a survey, I guess. But it's not just having to be one-sided. Why do you think that? How do you like it? What do you wish it did? And so it's fascinating and not necessarily all that surprising that it can be useful to you and that it can be helpful.

Yeah, I think you're very aware of this. We've talked about this countless times, I think. But it's like the only thing that is always in the back of my mind with these types of discussions is being – you and I have to be very careful and protective. of the voice of our apps and what they do and how they do it. Because there's so many different voices that we can listen to that are telling us things.

If we always are doing what the last person complained about, the app is unlikely to be getting better. It's unlikely to actually be heading in a useful, constructive direction. And sometimes... Like, you know, this just happens to us. Like someone will complain about something and I'm like, you know, I don't want to hear that complaint anymore. So I just go and do the thing.

But at the same time, it's also important, I think, for us to understand that we need to have a voice in this ourselves. We need to be talking, I guess, having a conversation with ourselves, if that doesn't sound confusing. But that voice that we're having is also like, we're making these apps for us.

for our own reasons or for our own perspective on what the best version of this is. And sometimes it's useful to be able to have a conversation and someone says, why doesn't it do it this way? And you're like, because I tried it and it didn't work and here's all these things. And sometimes they're like, well...

I don't care. I still just want it to work that way, regardless of why that technically would be really complicated or there's some kind of performance issue or some other reason why that isn't the case. But I think if we can keep our own inner voice, like... strong in these conversations like it is certainly useful to to have these things and it's really encouraging and i'm you know i think when you mentioned a while back that you were thinking of getting into reddit i would

I was very nervous for you. So was I. That would go really, really not nice. And it still might. Like, I don't know how this is going to end. Maybe it will. But for right now, it's been a positive experience. It's been a useful voice. And that's great to hear. And I love the experimentation and the way that you're just being open to finding ways to make your app better. And ultimately, that's what we can hope for. Thank you.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Thanks for all the good feedback everywhere. And we'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.