To which you then receive login codes via email and recommendations to Russian subreddits
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_t...
Admittedly, Reddit might be fine with losing me because I only ever see the small niche subs I'm subscribed to, most have less than 100K subs and none have more than a million. I haven't seen the Reddit default home page or any content from the big reddit subs in over a decade.
its spez. It's always spez.
The second old goes away I’ll never go that site again except for search results.
I ADORE that a publicly traded tech giant is so fucking stupid.
Only weird thing is that since RedReader censors all NSFW posts and your RiF is now tied to that API token, you need to make yourself a mod of a subreddit to be able to view anything NSFW. RedReader is the only allowed 3rd party app because it's meant for screen readers. In the past few months, Reddit turned off the ability to make API tokens for that would enable RiF to keep working but they've since changed the policy so they have to approve your request and a 3rd party app is not a good enough reason. Although I see a ridiculous amount of bot spam so clearly their war on API access is not really working that well.
I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate.
MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to it.
> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.
This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.
> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.
What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.
I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...
On that note, X.com seems to be doing the opposite — you can only see this page if you DIDN'T log in... https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediavie...
While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot?
No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node...
The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting).
I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in.
And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol
So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit.
PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
the second old.reddit goes is the second I stop using that site
it's already very obviously chock full of slop and AI bullshit, with some subs having long unavoidable lists of "your post was removed because you did not verify" trails that imply that automated posters found a thread and went hard
but add in privacy crushing bs -- no reason to be there anymore. Back to old school forums
So yeah, I'm in the same boat: if they drop old, they drop me.
The gamification of Reddit and the ephemeral nature of the main page along with subreddits with varying amounts of overlap contributed to more active interactions, though.
Some of the volume was lower quality but not all.
The boomer posts about his petunia breeding program on a BBS and he gets feedback half a year later after the other active user gathers the energy to travel to the computer room again.
On Reddit, maybe a zoomer would have asked if you can smoke petunias in Brazilian Portuguese, but that may still count as welcome human interaction to the old man.
None of that applies to new deaddit, though.
In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...
....
I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
The only service I’ve used which does offer WhatsApp as a form of identification is PayPal. But even that is just one of many different authorisation options.
I don’t have WhatsApp either and never once found that to be a limiting. So I wonder if the experience your relative was having is more nuanced than suggested.
(*That are new of course, used and open-box still come from the seller as I expect.)
GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.
It seems like something you have to specifically choose, on the amazon account side.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...
I also chose their presumed first hand statement than your unrelated experience with unrelated third parties.
Your point re: having to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications, if we're staying in the realm of "what ifs" and looking for the awkward but possible ways to discredit the claims, I can believe that she was enrolled without being asked. I've seen at least one person complaining about that exact scenario.
Cheers!
UK, where WhatsApp is absolutely mandatory.
Noted. Another piece defining the current disaster in the uk, what was a civilization and now is a botoxed upper lip.
Any examples (of requirements of WA)?
the fact this is something to be distinguished says a lot about where we are now and none of what it says is good
That said, the anecdote is made up or important details have been elided to make it sound more interesting than it is. Amazon doesn’t depend on whatsapp for 2fa. You can configure amazon 2fa to send an SMS and it’s possible that the poster’s mother has misconfigured her phone to claim that it needs whatsapp to read the sms 2fa message but I highly doubt even that. When I look on amazon it allows passkeys, regular TOTP like with DUO authenticator or google authenticator or whatever or SMS with a backup of sending the TOTP code to the registered email on the account. Whatsapp isn’t even an option.
anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition:
* Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat.
* I'm not spending fifty quid on a piece of tat.
("Please drink a verification can.")
When do you think the last time the average Joe talked to their representative to communicate their interests, as is their democratic duty? The answer is, unfortunately, half past never. A representative cannot represent someone who keeps their interests a secret.
Starting with the premise that it's impossible won't improve society.
That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.
That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.
If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.
The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.
The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.
Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.
I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.
Why? It seems more like that’s baseless speculation with an agenda.
It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.
Times change, so does certain expectations.
Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
That's a bizarre and self-sabotaging path to take. Almost all LLMs get a substantial portion of their knowledge from Reddit. In order to evaluate the quality of those LLM responses, you'll have to click through to the Reddit threads and critically evaluate the quality of the underlying discussions.
If you just blindly accept LLM responses without evaluating the sources, you'll be accepting a lot of garbage, and it'll show.
> And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing on Reddit, and while I encounter plenty of low-quality posts and comments, I'd say that essentially none of them are written by bots.
Reddit is a good source of new happenings and discussions, but I’m willing to spend some tech company’s compute to clean it up for me. For example, I often want to branch out from a particular musical artist. Reddit has many good recommendations. LLM is perfectly capable of gathering these.
If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.
Worst case I get some pre-digested garbage and I waste less time, best case the LLM pulled out a few good nuggets of info. It’s not a perfect system yet. There’s a lot to tune with how deep to go, what constitutes garbage vs signal, and so on. At least it’s fun :)
Revanced.
old.reddit didnt but now you have to login to use it.
I just want to read. I dont want the app and I dont want to login.
Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.
Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed.
For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said.
It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing.
There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that.
So these comments were hidden by default.
This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion.
This happens ALL the time.
I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.
EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."
Reddit has become the epitome of Idiocracy, but let's not pretend like spam-level shallow commenters sucking each other off hasn't infected this place too.
I honestly think if we took voting away the dynamics of online discussion would reset to normal.
Granted, the voting system was the only thing slashdot did right, but it was good.
It is religion, but it isn’t coming from Reddit. Reddit is just the paper the new bible is printed on.
Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple spam. So much spam.
It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.
I noticed two odd things:
1. Taking a log-log plot of number v. size of Communities, there were far fewer very large communities than a straight power-law relation would suggest ... by a factor of 2--4 or so. This didn't look extreme plotted log-log, but when you looked at the raw values, there was something dampening the count pretty markedly.
2. In terms of activity, posting cadence fell off once a community hit (very roughly) about 10k members. Above that there still might be a lot of activity, but it was a lot less than size alone would suggest.
I've never been able to conclusively answer why either of these behavious should be the case, though I suspect that:
I suspect that the first has to do with the tendency of very large forums to go rogue (be taken over by bots / shills / spammers, or otherwise go off), to be moderated by site admins (excessive and pervasive violation of site policies), and/or simply put real people off participation because there's no genuine reward for doing so (questions aren't answered, or are responded to with incivility and/or spam).
The second (more activity in mid-sized communities) would probably relate to the last factor above: with ~10k members (give or take an order of magnitude), there's probably a core of a few hundred to a few thousand active participants, which is about at the threshold where associations and affinities can form. People still have conversations, at least part of the time.
Keep in mind that G+ (similar to FB) has a flat discussion format, so that the most recent comments are appended to the end of a post. Reddit, like HN, has a threaded discussion. For a long time I criticised G+ for not supporting threads, but I came to feel that this was actually a strength where discussions were well-moderated, as there was a sense of a real discussion occurring, where later respondants would often refer to an earlier comment (usually naming the author and quoting a bit of context) in replying. Conversations could and did last for days, weeks, months, and years. By contrast, on Reddit (and HN), a conversation is effectively dead within a day or so, if not a few hours. Comments are simply howling into the void.
This happens somewhat less on HN than Reddit, largely due to the finite size of HN's front page (infamously: 30 stories, though many might cycle through over a day). Odds are good that a top-5 story actually has some exchanges on it, and I've carried on a few of these for a few days.
But I'd long ago noted that Reddit was where conversation, in the sense of an exchange between multiple parties, goes to die, especially on any of the larger (million-plus follower) subreddits. Smaller (~50 -- a few thousand members) generally does far better.
In a similar sense, HN's quiet days (weekends, holidays, or during The Burn) often see far less activity but far more interaction.
Forget where I saw that one but it’s Reddit now.
lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.
You may not notice depending on your perspective.
The mid-range views leave. The extremes remain. Often a sub / moderator bias selects for one polar extreme or another.
This is where HN's (generally) political-neutral moderator stance, maddening as it often is to both sides (see dang's many, many, many, many comments on perceived bias), seems to have largely succeeded. Neither side dominates, and the middle isn't excluded.
Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly memes and jokes.
I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously.
And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow.
I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.
This was totally me. Advice Animals was my go to when I needed to decompress from being overworked as a developer. Just funny, silly memes, and cool inside jokes you could share with your friends. If you knew some of the inside jokes, you were considered one of the cool kids in your group.
Reddit almost always was first run to the big stories as well, then a few weeks later it show up on FB. Still remember the one day I was telling my GF something I saw on Reddit and she was like, "That was on FB last week" and I knew it was over.
The final coffin was when the political rubes overran AA and turned into a political echo chamber. Post something that wasn't political? Downvoted into oblivion.
That was it, the fun was over, nothing was cool any more so I checked out.
at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.
I use old.reddit.com all the time.
If old.reddit.com goes, I'm done with reddit.
I might try out some kind of alternative front end from https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#reddit though.
But if that's not good enough, I'm done.
I assume this is because their largely drooling, double-digit IQ community would revolt if they rolled it out overnight.
Ever seen what a riot in a maximum security prison looks like? Well it would be nothing like that. But there would be lots of complaining and boxed macaroni and cheese involved.
Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had accounts.
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
This hasn't been true for a while now. A lot of what you find on reddit these days feels incredibly fake. It's like there should be a variant of Goodhart's law: Once a forum becomes known for genuine human writing it stops being a forum for genuine human writing.
You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.
+ Hey how do you do thing?
|
-+ [deleted]
|
-+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.So I deleted all my content. If people can’t view my content, why have it online?
More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree" due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669
Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it is.
The original helpful comments were probably provided by switched-on users of whatever subreddit, and those same users are the ones most likely to nuke/overwrite their comment history when they leave the site.
Reddit, the site whose CEO edited the comments of other users, autobans people for saying "fuck spez" (it's fun, try it), and claims the right to all content posted by users and sells it for AI training?
It is javascript that allows corporate interests to pop up and nag screen you, and otherwise control your web browsing experience to their favor.
I have an app in my browser that allows me to toggle off javascript and vanquish most pop ups and nag screens.
I use this on news sites to get rid of the paywall.
https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
It does create some bad incentives however.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
it was obviously abandoned though
Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.
One benefit is my productivity had a temporary boost this week until I find another site to read.
Maybe it's for specific subs?
It's ... deader now.
I'd noticed this change myself a few days ago, suspected something was up.
(Occasionally visit for information that's not readily available elsewhere. Log in only to pull content from my now-private subs, perhaps a few times/year.)
Lemmy is good, but not enough people on there for network effect to kick in yet.
I think once the enshittification gets too bad for even the average person, people will look for alternatives, and old style forums will return.
Although with all the ID verification, those forums might end up on Tor or something.
I tried looking into how to do things the "correct" way nowadays and they seem to have completely changed their app platform since the last time I looked. They've completely locked out the old method for requesting API access in favor of whatever this Devvit thing is: https://developers.reddit.com/docs/
If you want just plain old data access you have to submit a help ticket, which as far as I can tell just goes completely ignored if it doesn't get rejected outright by some automation.
It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).
The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.
to give some examples of mod abuse:
- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power
- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company
- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)
- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed
- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)
I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit
> to give some examples of mod abuse
You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/saas based subreddit.
Other subreddits like /r/worldnews are clearly propaganda operations.
All of these are solvable problems but Reddit simple has no one left who'd care to solve them.
I suggest decentralized Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy https://lemmy.world/ as Reddit will never get better.
Many of the mods for various subreddits also have commercial interest (own a business in the niche related to the subreddit) and ban/remove mentions of competitors but keep mentions of their own products.
^This strategy was shared with me by an aquintance who is the main mod of 1M+ subreddit. And again - this is also just scratching the surface.
Reddit has been dead for ages
I think Nostr solves this problem; individual relays may block certain accounts, but there’s no tribal signifier for preemptive blocking, and you can still get data from blocked accounts by using other relays. It would be very hard to get all relays to collaborate to fully block an account (and in any case you could spin up your own relay if this happened).
The “Satellite” client used to have a Reddit-like presentation, although they seem to have converted back to a Twitter-like feed—not sure why, perhaps it wasn’t a popular format. (The protocol is capable of Reddit-like communities.) I guess “Stacker News” is the current champion for Reddit-ish clients, although it’s more akin to HN or maybe Tildes. It’s a shame that it’s so crypto-focused.
works also.
limited doses
The flipside of powertripping mods is that Reddit does not support their moderation teams properly. Actually, that big stink people made over killing third-party Reddit client access was all powermods, because doing your job as a moderator is nigh-impossible with the standard Reddit tools. That's why we had so many subs get blacked out in protest, and why Reddit's response was to start deposing moderators until they caved.
As an example of what I mean by "do not support moderation teams", Reddit still has no good tools to prevent brigading. That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[1]. You generally can't stop someone from voting in your subreddit. But if they comment, you can scrutinize their post history and ban them from commenting if they're from the other sub that's brigading you.
There's also that video[2] that did the rounds a while ago of a Reddit mod trying to explain how them promoting a scam is really Reddit's fault for not paying mods. Despite the fact that this person is incredibly cringe, I actually do think he's grasping at an actual problem - it's just not one that exonerates him in any way. Reddit wants it both ways, and as a result, they get the worst people.
And they've been doing this since they were a start-up. Remember when one of Reddit's most popular subs was /r/jailbait, a forum dedicated to trading suggestive pictures of young women around? That forum was kept around because its top mod, /u/violentacrez, was doing basically all of Reddit's CSAM compliance. That's the business model of Reddit in a nutshell: find the scummiest people who are still capable of doing the job and give them total power over their domain so they don't question the lack of pay. The IPO was only tangentially related to this, in that it's when a lot of less power-trippy mods jumped ship.
[0] This is a big part of systems theory but it equally applies to critical theory
[1] The pattern is generally always "small group of people holding heretical opinions joins forum with orthodox opinion to agendapost", I've never seen the other way around - i.e. I haven't seen militantly "pro-vax" people going on anti-vaxxer subs to downvote everything.
I sort of got the impression it was because of that back when it happened. But when I say it out loud everyone protested reddit because the moderators didn't have what they needed to ban people unfairly and clamp down on free speech it just sounded a little weird.
>That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[
I remember suggesting such a tool, long ago, when you could still talk to the admins on IRC. Would've been in 2008. I suggested that it would be possible to either ban or have votes ignored (by a moderator) of those people who were voting wrong. Hear me out... if the subreddit was r/tomcruiseisawesome, and there is a person (or many) constantly downvoting Tom Cruise submissions (or upvoting Tom "Cruise sucks!" submissions), then they're just in the wrong place and causing trouble. They retorted that the moderators shouldn't be allowed to see who votes on what, but when I pointed out that you wouldn't have to let the mods know who voted what, just give them the tool that says "banhammer everyone who downvoted/upvoted at least 3 of these" they shut up and stopped talking.
So, they've wanted it to be this way for a very long time.
Except, of course, that then sites would start lying and sending abridged, poisoned, or nonexistent data.
Nice things cannot be had, no matter how many levels you go down.
But alas, we can't have nice things.
And dang it, I swear to god they put in a 2s rate-limit on the page, which it seems they have left in after the transition (perhaps because it's being rolled out still, although they could be so kind as to not rate-limit me now that I've logged in). Was that all they tried??
Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd do the same.
I did my normal morning routine of checking 8-10 subs that still have interesting content and did not see any nag screen for logins at all. Everything worked on my end just as it always has worked. I read comments and post titles with no issues and no login prompts.
I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices. I surf entirely from a desktop using Firefox or Librewolf and a couple of extensions. I never log in to reddit unless there is some issue that I can help with. I avoid most of the popular subs and focus on things that I have direct experience doing or using. If I do post I leave it up for a day or two and then edit it a bit like Yossarian-style censoring - death to all modifiers!
I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.
Nope, I surf exclusively on a desktop using Firefox and yesterday I got hit with the login prompt for old.reddit. Don't have an account and don't plan on making one, so much for reddit!
https://lemmy.today/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopD...
OR
https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=TopDay
https://piefed.social/ (more or less the same as above)
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
I neglected to editorialize this part, but I suspect this is because *they don't have to*. I don't doubt that there are some new things on Reddit that people like, but Reddit was functionally complete as a place to interact with other people when it was launched.
I'm not an internet historian, but sites akin to Reddit have existed for a long time, and my understanding is that it happened to take over when the last forum aggregator died for whatever reason.
I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic.
If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it?
Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help.
But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility)
But I may just be a crusty old mind.
Part of the problem with that suggestion is everyone likes to tell everyone else who it is they should and shouldn't be trusting, so that dataset and acting on it would become a huge hot potato.
This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
(So like, 20% as useful, but still...)
It started dying for me when they started censoring posts and comments to appeal to advertisers, followed by killing non-official clients, then the light mobile website. Killing old.reddit feels like the last nail in the coffin.
Unfortunately, we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.
I was a little annoyed by being asked to log in. But I don't want to browse 'reddit.com' because I don't like the way the new UI looks. It's hard to read and scan the first few pages quickly in the new UI (also looking at you Vanguard; you destroyed your old UI which was compact and informative).
Worse, now that I'm logged in and can use "old.reddit.com", Reddit serves me what it "thinks" I like, so now I'm trapped in the subreddit/topic bubble that Reddit selects for me (btw, it selects things poorly). I want to go to the old front page, so I click on 'Hot' or 'Top'. But Reddit still interleaves the posts with what it thinks I'd like to see.
Madness and sadness ensue.
reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet
some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine
Best to treat Reddit archives as read-only and modern Reddit as a marketing slopfarm. It mostly consists of bots trying to get their brands into AI training data.
I stopped using Reddit when they blocked 3rd party apps and forced people to use their first party ad-ridden and painful UX. Every time I go back I find some other annoying unilateral change like deleting r/all.
In any case, Reddit was so filled with politics and bots and low-effort drive-by comments that I don’t miss it too much.
I did that several years ago, after encountering a very abusive mod.
I was a heavy user, visited the site several times a day for like a decade, and yet I was surprised to realize that I did not miss it one bit.
Just leave Reddit for good. :).
The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.
Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.
I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.
At first I thought it might be a problem with social media, but it seems more like a problem that arises when groups converge in one place. So these days, I just write my thoughts on my own homepage. That way I can write my own thoughts without getting angry at other people's posts.
Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)
A failure in what sense? That they can't pay the bills or that they can't see the VC-desired 10X ROI? Because my impression (as a layperson) is that the Reddit of yore could have stayed afloat from ad revenue + user donations, but it wasn't turning a huge profit. Anyone else remember the sidebar with the quota for Reddit gold for server costs? I don't remember it being short that often...
In other words, if openness and user experience are compromised, the real experts who provide deep, professional insights will disappear. Most experts have a desire for recognition. In Korea, we have a saying: 'Plankton and whales' meaning whales can only exist when there's enough plankton.
Anyway, I think Reddit itself is a successful exit. They sold their past data at a high price. But I question whether this is sustainable in the long run.
It's a difficult trade off: short term profit versus long term sustainability. Given the AI era, the timing seems right in terms of value. But separate from that, any new communities that emerge will likely suffer from long term value depreciation because of this precedent
Maybe I'm just caught up in the illusion of 'sustainability.'
I miss Reddit-the-communities, personally, whose interests as you observe seem to conflict with those of Reddit-the-company.
Was a surefire way?
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/10/reddit-ba...
> The move frustrated some commenters on the initial post. “Why is /r/fatpeoplehate banned, but /r/coontown get to exist?” asked redditor CrackheadControl. “That’s bullshit.” “Because the admins are fat, not black,” replied The_Wizard_of_Wang.
It seems like you just want to point out nasty terrible people to stop conversation of if it was justification for doing bad things to everyone. That's a popular sentiment these days but it is wrong. Just because one group of people (or subreddits) in those punished by the authorities is actually nasty doesn't meant that all group of people punished by the authorities are.
* CEO changes
* Creation of new / infinite scrolling UI (and app)
* Restricting content (banning racist subreddits, hiding NSFW from /all)
* Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
* introduction of paid APIs / "fuck spez" campaign
I'm sure there's many more but my point is it's "died" many times over yet still it exists; the drama passed, the baseline remains.
The huge organized celebrity AMAs already felt like a death of reddit on their own.
> the baseline remains
Did it though?
* influx of group-specific-hate subreddits being allowed to exist freely (it's OK to hate men, but not women, from what I'm seeing on Reddit)
Unless their servers are being hit so hard by scrapers they can't stand up straight...
"oh sorry. common bug, we didn't notice"
Well FIX IT. But you don't care, because your entire IPO oriented faux-value is around New Reddit and how many fucking ads you can cram in
When they eventually remove the old reddit, they'll lose this 18 year reddit veteran. No way in hell am I using that infinite scroll abomination.
I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos
Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.
To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request.
Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck.
You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too.
If you're more familiar with the mechanisms by which New Reddit defends itself against scraping, I'm happy to issue a correction --- especially so if it can be explained why Old Reddit cannot offer such a defense.
> Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck.
Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice.
> You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too.
Alas.
This is a common pattern across many services that can be accessed by more than 1 client, whether it me on the same platform/device/OS or different.
For example an SaaS provider might offer support for Windows Vista, and when Windos 8 releases, they still support Windows Vista, and when Windows 10 releases, they are now supporting 3 versions. They may decide to stop supporting Windows Vista at some point, that's completely normal for many reasons and security is one of them, on two counts, one that they would need to backport security features which is added work, and second that the old version API (Windows Vista in this example, Plain HTML in the other) doesn't support some security features or guarantees.
An even bigger version jump than a major revision would be a different platform, Android for example is a competing Operating System with much stronger security guarantees, so it may happen, and has happened in the past, that a provider will stop supporting Windows applications and only support Android/IOS applications, (consider banking applications, which may only support access from phones due to its security and antitampering features).
So yeah, getting familiar with Software lifecycle practices in general would help explain this, rather than rabbit holeing on reddit specifically.
>Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice.
Can happen, what I've also seen happen is that account creation and account management is handled by the new client, so if you create your account on the new client, they push most gatekeeping mechanisms onto that part and they allow you to use the old version for a little bit longer before sunsetting it completely as suggested.
To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request.
I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.
Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217
(Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...)
Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login
What I'm getting is a temporary/false "You've been blocked by network security" page but refreshing then brings up the reddit page as per usual.
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
You should become a pariah if you were anywhere close to companies like Reddit. Or at least Steve Huffman. There are some companies that clearly decided at some point "yeah, no. fuck the user"
I find I spend a lot less time on the site as a result, which really is a blessing in retrospect. I'm pretty convinced it's at least half AI bots now. Given how much AI sites use reddit as a source of "truth", it's not a good sign.
Still, I was among the first couple thousand people to create an account, so it still annoys me that the automated process just happily nuked me. Oh well.
Old reddit is going to be MUCH, MUCH easier to scrape. Scraping has the potential to bring down the site. Gating old reddit to logged in users will massively mitigate that.
I don't like it either. But it's not hard to see a good reason why doing so helps "keep reddit safe"
Even if it also coincidentally makes it easier for them to make more money. Grr.
I'm even fine with them saying "because old.reddit.com is used by scrapers, we're locking it down" which I would still contest the need to do when other sites can use e.g. Anubis, but I probably wouldn't write a rant about it.
> Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
To be pedantic, it is accurate, but missing context. Please forgive me for doing the same thing the Reddit PR team has done, I am not so morally just.
Arguments aside, this is a touchy spot for me because I really do view my time spent on Reddit positively, and seeing where it has gone makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.
For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.