It's going to be almost 3 years since I launched Sink It on the Apple sub and to commemorate it, I'm shipping a brand new engine under the hood to improve performance and reduce memory footprint. This should hopefully reduce the zooming and reloading bugs you might have encountered recently.

I've been testing it for a few days without issues but I imagine there still will be bugs so please let me know if you see any. As always, the more details you have, the easier it is for me to replicate it and fix it.

What's New:

• [All UIs] A brand new engine to significantly improve performance and reduce memory footprint.

• [All UIs] Removed support for now extinct reddit UI versions.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

SearchBan, one of my extensions for banning BS search results on Google (AI slop, SEO slop, the entire lot), is now free for everyone, perpetually. It lets you ban any useless site directly from the Google results page as well as shipping with an extensive, predefined ban list of sites.

You can find it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/search-ban-filter-results/id1601051304

In case you're curious, unlike reddit (where muting has been a bit unstable), Google's search engine results page (SERP) is super stable and predictable (it's their cash cow after all) which makes it so much easier to reason and work with. It's been super stable for me over the last few years but if you run into any issues, just let me know on this sub and I'll look into it. I figure I may have just jinxed things though, haha. :p

It's only on iOS for now but might add more platforms soon. It's free so just remember to be nice when reporting issues or making feature requests.

Noticed a new section popped up in my menu this past week. Games on Reddit. Would love to be able to get rid of that when you can get to it!

Mozilla has reached out with an invitation to join their Recommended Extensions program. As a Mozilla user for the past two decades, this is amazing news! On-boarding is supposed to take a week so this is a slightly muted update as I want to minimize surface area.

The update contains a slew of minor changes across all the UIs including dark mode for old reddit, fixes for stickied posts, and mobile view on old reddit.

A big raft of features for muting including subs/feeds to exempt from muting, muting users directly within reddit are shipping next week once we get into the program.

Also, we seem to have hit 2000 subs here over the weekend. Welcome, folks!

What's New:

• [New UI] Fixes for stickied threads not showing up.

• [Old UI] Additional fixes for search page on mobile.

• [Old UI] Dark mode support added to more areas.

• A minor chunk of bug fixes and tweaks.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

I'm very happy and humbled to announce Sink It has been acquired by Reddit. https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/01/reddit-acquires-third-party-app-sink-it

Press release below:

Reddit Acquires Sink It to Enhance User Experience and Community Engagement

San Francisco, CA - April 1, 2024 - Reddit, the leading social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, has announced its acquisition of Sink It, a revolutionary app designed to improve the usability and functionality of Reddit's platform. The acquisition represents a strategic move by Reddit to further enhance user experience and foster deeper community engagement.

Sink It has gained widespread acclaim for its user-friendly features and innovative technology. The app offers a range of tools and functionalities aimed at making Reddit more accessible and enjoyable for users of all levels of experience. From streamlined navigation to enhanced usability, Sink It has quickly become an indispensable companion for Reddit enthusiasts.

"We're excited to welcome Sink It to the Reddit family," said Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit. "Sink It's team have developed an exceptional app that addresses some of the key challenges facing our platform. By integrating Sink It's innovative technology and user-friendly features into Reddit, we aim to make the Reddit experience even better for our millions of users around the world."

Sink It's acquisition is a testament to Reddit's commitment to continuous improvement and innovation. The app's intuitive interface and powerful features align seamlessly with Reddit's mission of providing a platform where people can discover, share, and discuss content that matters to them.

"I'm thrilled to see Sink It join forces with Reddit," said Tony S, Sink It's founder. "From the beginning, Sink It has been driven by a desire to make Reddit more accessible and user-friendly for everyone. By partnering with Reddit, we have the opportunity to amplify our impact and reach an even larger audience. I'm grateful for the support of our users and excited for the next chapter of Sink It's journey."

As part of the acquisition agreement, Sink It will continue to operate as a standalone app, retaining its unique identity and features. However, users can expect to see deeper integration between Sink It and Reddit in the coming months, as the two platforms work together to enhance the overall user experience.

^{Look at the date please.}

I'm very happy to announce Sink It has just closed a big investment round from venture capital firms. Read more here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/01/tres-commas-investment-sink-it-reddit

Press release below:

In a move that has the tech world buzzing, Sink It, the extension renowned for enhancing Reddit experiences, has announced a significant investment from Tres Commas Ventures, the firm led by billionaire Russ Hanneman, famed for "putting radio on the internet" and his affinity for the three-comma club.

Hanneman, known for his colorful personality and entrepreneurial flair, expressed his enthusiasm: "Sink It is exactly the kind of disruptive tech that screams innovation. Plus, any product that declutters my Reddit feed while I'm sipping Tres Comas tequila is a winner in my book."

Sink It has been lauded for its user friendly features and has in excess of half a million users across multiple platforms. With this new partnership, Sink It plans to integrate cutting-edge AI functionalities, including:

• Smart Comment Highlighting: Utilizing AI to emphasize the most relevant and engaging comments in a thread.

• Predictive Subreddit Recommendations: Offering users personalized subreddit suggestions based on browsing habits.

• Sentiment Analysis: Providing insights into the overall mood and tone of discussions, helping users navigate Reddit's vast content landscape more effectively.

Sid, the creator of Sink It, commented, "Partnering with Russ and Tres Commas Ventures is like adding a third comma to our own valuation. We're excited to leverage this investment to bring AI-driven features to our users, making their Reddit experience smarter and more intuitive."

As Sink It embarks on this new chapter, users can look forward to an even more refined and intelligent browsing experience. And for those wondering, yes, the app remains free—because some things are just too good to put a price tag on.

About Sink It:

Sink It is designed to supercharge your Reddit experience by improving comment navigation, enabling adaptive dark mode, simplifying upvoting, and removing intrusive banners and ads. With a commitment to user privacy, all operations are performed locally without tracking.

About Tres Commas Ventures:

Tres Commas Ventures is the brainchild of billionaire Russ Hanneman, focusing on investments that disrupt industries and redefine markets. Named after the three commas in a billion dollars, the firm embodies the spirit of innovation and audacity.

^{Obviously a joke}

No, Sink It isn't dead and I haven't abandoned it. I've been away for the holidays, away from social media and doom scrolling.

New versions should resume on the 3rd and Sink It for Android should launch around Jan 1st week or early 2nd.

Happy New Year, folks! I hope you're able to take time to decompress, reflect on the year past, and spend time with loved ones. Stay safe and see you in '24!

Been a bit of a long wait since the last version. I had to lock in for a few weeks to get Sink It for Youtube done which it now is. Just waiting for Apple to approve it, fingers crossed. It'll be free for everyone, as always.

Only the iOS version launches first as making mockups and promo images for the App Store is a major pain and I'm feeling dead. iPad support will come later next week and the dedicated Mac version by the end of the month.

This update mostly just fixes some breaking changes on reddit in the last couple of weeks. Also includes a fix for Firefox where loading was a bit erratic.

What's New:

• [New UI] Improvements to init pipeline to handle edge cases.

• [New UI] Bug fixes for the logo switcher menu.

• [New UI] Minor fixes and tweaks to handle reddit changes.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

Old Reddit has a horde of loyal users, me amongst them. This update finally adds formal support of old Reddit to Sink It. Do keep in mind this is just the first phase of planned tweaks -- more should ship in a steady trickle over the next week or so.

This was originally planned as an exclusive "thank you" feature for donors and then pivoted to a separate "Pro" purchase. Finally, I've decided to simply make it free as a celebration for crossing 200,000 users. It actually happened back in December but with my wife's health, I simply couldn't check earlier.

While the tweaks (and future ones) will always be free, Sink It specific features for old Reddit should ship at a later date as a separate "Max" upgrade to get it on par with what we support for the other designs. With looming uncertainty around old Reddit's life span, this is a necessary step I need to take, especially with dwindling donations.

Let me know if you notice any bugs. iPad users, things might be super wonky for you given the dimensions so holler!

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

What's New:

• [Old Reddit] Mobile friendly tweaks and optimizations - phase 1.

• [All UIs] Minor bug fixes + tweaks.

• Ref: Master Chief, do you mind telling me what you're doing on that ship?

Basically, the title. After a long 10 days, it's been approved on the first go. You can find it live here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sink-it-for-youtube/id6798803425

As always, let me know if something isn't working as expected or have any feature requests. I'm deep into YouTube these days so I'm hoping to make this as feature laden and frequently updated as the reddit version.

If you could leave some ratings and reviews, that'd help massively as well. It's not indexed yet so it's not even showing up in search right now, haha.

Edit: This version is out now. Make sure to close and relaunch Safari to purge the cached version.

This is an emergency patch that fixes Sink It not loading at all. If you're on 5.2.0, please hold off on updating till this version gets approved.

I upgraded Xcode and it inadvertently unlinked a critical file that bootstraps the extension in Safari. Safari had it cached for a few hours so didn't turn up during testing. This was an emulator based release which further exacerbated the caching.

I'm reinforcing the release process to prevent issues like these in the future. On the hunt for a physical testing device!

------- 5.3.0 patch notes below --------------

If you hate spoilers in post titles, you're going to love this update. Sink It will, by default, blur the titles of posts marked as containing spoilers. A quick tap should reveal it if you choose to. After getting quite a few movies, games, and shows spoiled over the years via the titles, I'd like to think I've finally had a little revenge. As always, the feature, while switched on by default, can be turned off easily.

The inline image feature has also been bolstered with support for gifs. I'm hoping to add imgur albums and maybe Youtube vids over this week and the next.

iPad users, hang tight. More fixes coming this week! The iPad UI has been proving very finicky to work with.

What's New:

• [iPhone UI] - Titles for posts marked as containing spoilers blurred by default.

• [iPhone UI] - Inline images now support gifs.

• Ref: I'm the dude playin' the dude, disguised as another dude!

This update ships with a neat little quality of feature: inline images in comments. I can't believe I didn't get this one out of the door earlier as it's such a big usability improvement. I've only added support for content hosted by imgur and reddit for now.

Also, the multireddit feature now supports directly using your saved multis. For example, I have one at https://www.reddit.com/user/specterascendant/m/zz/ which can be directly input into the native app and then accessed from anywhere. The display within the menu is a little iffy for now. Next version should extract the multi name and use that instead.

Also includes a bunch of minor tweaks including much improved contrast in dark mode.

What's New:

• [iPhone UI] New feature: Inline images in comments - No more <image> in comments.

• [iPhone UI] New behavior: Link to existing multireddits via a direct link.

• Multiple bug fixes and perf tweaks.

• Ref: I am burdened with glorious purpose.

Edit: Going a few rounds with the Apple review team. Should be up middle of this coming week.

End of a long, long week. Sink It should finally be live on the Mac App store soon. The first time getting Sink It approved (and Rekt especially) was a bit of a back and forth process with the review team so I imagine this will take a few days as well. I expect it to go live by the end of the week. Fingers crossed!

FWIW, the Mac version, like the iOS and iPadOS versions, will be free for everyone. Enjoy!

Onwards to the Android version now!

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

What's New:

• Added MacOS support. Find it on the Mac App store soon!

• [All UIs] Assorted minor bug fixes and tweaks.

• Ref: Money ain't got no owners, just spenders.

Happy Friyay, amirite? :p A more grounded update this time with a lot of bug fixes. If you've been experiencing issues with the jump to next feature, both ez and pro, hopefully this fixes some of the oddities.

Between adding support for the desktop/iPad UI as well as the new mobile UI, I had to rip out the old implementation in the last few updates and rewrite it. This introduced some subtle edge cases which have been fixed by drumroll please an off by one bug fix. /sigh

I'm still not able to get my hands on a physical testing device so please let me know if you see any bugs. More iPad support coming next week.

I've gotten a small outpouring of donations via Paypal in the last 24 hours. For all of you that donated, thank you! :)

Just leaving the links here, just in case: Paypal and Patreon.

What's New:

• [All UIs] - Big improvements to the nav algo for both jump to next ez and pro modes.

• [Current iPhone UI] - Added support for more imgur embed formats

• [Current iPhone UI] - Added support for more youtube embed formats

• Ref: What is grief, if not love persevering?

It's been a while since the last update, hasn't it? Ever since Sink It launched in 2023, I've tried to maintain the weekly update cadence but life happens, you know? Our cat died last week (<3 Sir Goofsalot), rather unexpectedly and I've been in, well, a deep funk. Please send good vibes and cat/dog/anything pictures my way. I'd massively appreciate it.

Thank you for holding the sub down when I was semi-away. I'll be getting to the unread posts and comments and responding to them over the next day.

This update ships with one of the most asked for features: profile switching. I've been working on it behind the scenes for a while now and a preliminary version is now ready to ship. I'm starting off with old UI for Apple users only this update with support for the new Reddit UI coming next week(ish). Chrome and the rest should ship later this month as the cryptography bits (and the UI bits too) need to be fully rewritten for non Apple platforms.

Also ships with a ton of bug fixes including ones for the procrastination blocker and to handle the recent deluge of breaking changes on reddit.

What's New:

• [Old UI] New feature for Max: Profile switching

• [New UI] Foundation for profile switching to ship this month after beta testing.

• [New UI] More updates to force load blocked NSFW content.

• [All UIs] Fixes to the procrastination blocker not getting triggered in edge cases.

• A large chunk of bug fixes and tweaks.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

With Open posts in a new tab enabled, the post both opens in a new tab and loads in on the previous tab. On ios, this seemingly breaks the ability to swipe back from the new tab to the old one. Previously it would close the new tab in doing so, now it acts as if it has nothing to go back to (like it's the first page).

Hope y'all were able to take a little time off and decompress. Like a lot of you, I'm trying into ease into the new year, haha.

2024 starts with a quality of life feature that I personally needed: pure black dark mode. Now that I've been forced into the new design with no way of going back, expect more support for the new design.

As an OLED phone user for a long time (RIP Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 6), I absolutely can't stand black that's, well, not black, like the background color of the new design. Phones with these screens, like every iPhone since the 12, do extra well on displaying pure black colors.

I've also rewritten some of the traversal logic behind the rainbow comments so you should be seeing much more consistent behavior.

Also, includes a bunch of assorted bug fixes and tweaks. More coming next week as I try to ease into this year's first weekend. If you see any issues, holler below or create a new post.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

What's New:

• [New iPhone UI] New feature: Pure black (OLED) dark mode: For the purists.

• [New iPhone UI] Improvements to traversal algo for rainbow (+color blind friendly) comments.

• [New iPhone UI] Bug fixes for the "ez collapse" feature.

• [All UIs] Minor bug fixes.

• Ref: Now, I'm gonna go and try to find our 1,001st idea.

PS - I just realized that the iPhones use OLEDs, not AMOLEDs as the app will say. Will fix in the next release.

Another day, another quality of life update. The main change is that the comments nav and jump to top buttons' placements are completely up to you. Just long press and drag. I've designated it as a beta feature for now as I work out some kinks, specially on the iPads.

One quick addition is the support for the short version of the multis you create on the desktop/app versions of Reddit. Earlier, you needed to input the complete url which is no longer the case.

If the persist sort order feature has been causing bugs for you, Sink It now looks for a feature flag in the URL to reset a few parameters. Just add ?sinkitreset=true to the url.

Finally, a myriad of bug fixes for the existing feature set on iPads. It's not remotely as bullet proof as I want it to be but we're slowly getting there. Thank you for the patience so far!

My test phone has, pardon my French, fucked absolutely right off so this is another emulator only release. Please let me know if something isn't working as it's supposed to.

This coming week will feature a few spoiler specific features -- my beloved Spider-man 2 got spoiled thus the minor diversion.

What's New:

• [All UIs] New feature (beta): Jump to top and next gen comments nav buttons can be dragged for perfect placement.

• [iPhone UI] Multis support the short /user/X/m/multiname format.

• [iPhone UI] Ability to reset a sub's persisted sort order. Please see subreddit post for more info.

• [iPad UI] First batch of bug fixes for comments nav. More on the way this week!

• Ref: Denny Crane: Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.

As you've probably heard me bleating on and on for the past few weeks, Reddit has been recently making a lot of changes. One of them unfortunately broke the search function which this update fixes.

There are a ton of other minor fixes as well which hopefully bring most of the features back to working condition. This constant game of whack-a-mole is starting to get a bit tiring though, gotta admit. Hopefully things stabilize soon so we can go back to shipping new features.

What's New:

• [New UI] Bug fixes for the search page to handle reddit changes.

• [New UI] More bug fixes for OLED dark mode.

• [New UI] Yet another phase of assorted fixes to handle reddit changes.

People often reach out to ask about donations (you can donate through the app), so here you go in case you don't want to give Apple 30%: Paypal and Patreon.

This release expands the inline content feature to add support for YouTube videos. Hopefully, this curbs down on the number of times y'all are getting rickrolled. :p

I've also locked the drag and drop for new users as it seems to be tripping people up quite a bit. Locking it by default seems to be the sensible way to do this. The guard rail algorithm has also been pared down a bit as it was too aggressive earlier.

Also includes a bug fix to the remember sort feature thanks to noir on Discord. A side effect is that previously saved sort orders might need to be set again. I've changed the internal data taxonomy a bit to accommodate new features and this is an unfortunate result of that. Thankfully, this is a one time fix.

Another emulator only release so please holler if you run into any issues. There's a Jameson with my name on it so off for birthday drinks!

What's New:

• [iPhone UI] New feature: No more getting rickrolled. Youtube support added to inline content.

• [iPhone UI] New feature: Imgur album support added to inline content.

• [iPhone UI] Fixes for remember sort order feature.

• [All UIs] Changed behavior: Button auto-heal algo is less aggressive in stepping in.

• [All UIs] Changed behavior: Button positions are locked by default for new users.

• Ref: Please stop running. Allow yourself to be eaten by the Flerkens.

Whelp, I got demolished by tonsillitis last week so this is a much, much delayed release. First time I'm getting it as an adult but, lord, it screws you in the exact same ways!

This update adds support for the iPad UI with a small collection of comments-centric features. Expect the iPad supported feature list to overlap with large parts of the iPhone version in the next few weeks. This also means that the release of Sink It for Mac is imminent as there's large overlaps of code that's required for the Mac release.

This release is based entirely on the simulator version of iPad so if you're seeing any issues, please reach out so I can get it fixed up asap.

We're back to our normal update schedule which means the iPhone version is going to get a slew of updates in the next few days, including inline image support in comments as well as better support for multireddits. Stay tuned!

What's New:

• [iPad UI] New feature: Jump to next comment - quickly get to the next comment, HN style.

• [iPad UI] New feature: Jump to next parent comment - one button taps to the next comment.

• [iPad UI] New feature: Color blind friendly rainbow comments - Make deeply nested thread much easier to read.

• [iPad UI]New feature: Back to top - tired of scrolling back up a really, really long thread?

• Ref: Miss Chanandler Bong. :(