Bitcoin Magazine's app (the carrot app) has since 2020, been one of the easiest ways for people to Read, Learn and
Earn Bitcoin to receive sats. Users were able to learn about Bitcoin, take a test and read articles to earn sats. However, because of how it was designed to pick up on at best skim readers, and at worst screen flicking sat farmers, the user experience of reading slow enough not to be seen as gaming the system was pretty poor.
Sadly, If a user got really interested in an article, they'd forget to read slower and get booted back to the home screen, try to read the article again, or give up. I gave up long ago.
Because of this it's been quite a while since I've booted up the app on my old phone and it now seems that Bitcoin Magazine has dropped it's earn 50 sats for reading an article to just 5 sats.
In addition to this, you'd get an article that you'd read for 250 sats - these seem a thing of the past now too.
On Fridays on Twitter you were able to scan a QR code, within a few hours of it being posted, and get a few hundred sats - later having a bonus code whenever a retweeted enough. Again this seems to have gone.
The last time that the app's account posted anything on X was on July 17th - asking people to wait while they sort out a 'withdrawal issue'. If you try to withdraw your sats, even three months later, this issue certainly hasn't been fixed.
Three days before, on Valentine's Day 2023 they did claim that fraudulent accounts were abusing their generosity.
Reminder: we ask our users to create only REAL accounts👌Fraudulent accounts will be suspended and removed ⛔️. Next time you see a bounty run out of sats too soon, know this is someone abusing our generosity #fraud We can 👀 you
Bitcoin Magazine is obviously still alive and well: publishing articles and hosting conferences. However their app, once successful in introducing new stackers onto the scene may be all but retired.
With SN now on the scene and taking up BM app's mantel, and giving a far better user experience, BM's 'carrot app' has been eclipsed - and having many users reporting and commenting on Bitcoin ideas.
Thankfully SN chose the Progressive Web App (PWA) route and not the usual IOS and Google apk one. PWAs can evolve far quicker needs no updates at the user's end. Plus, with users being able to suggest new ideas via posts, there's it bypasses the need to use github.
Could other apps find themselves squeezed out of existence after being successful? Who knows.
In this environment you need to evolve quickly to survive.