[HN Gopher] So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
___________________________________________________________________
So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
Author : montroser
Score : 323 points
Date : 2026-07-22 12:32 UTC (15 hours ago)
HTML web link (www.cole-k.com)
TEXT w3m dump (www.cole-k.com)
| khurs wrote:
| Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely
| trying to keep other AI companies out
|
| https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
| willis936 wrote:
| Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
| inigyou wrote:
| Of course not, are you crazy?
| tweakimp wrote:
| The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are
| allowed to see.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Those little virtual stickers isn't enough? What else could
| you possibly want as compensation?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| ideally? blowjobs. i ain't shitposting for karma, dammit
| khurs wrote:
| 91.5% Gross margin :)
|
| https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-
| releases/new...
| nextaccountic wrote:
| yishan had such plans, to distribute 10% of company shares to
| reddit users
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
|
| it was obviously abandoned though
| sunaookami wrote:
| Thanks for the gold kind stranger!
| hathym wrote:
| that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments
| to advance on AI
| LaurensBER wrote:
| It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit
| data makes LLM stronger or weaker.
|
| 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.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Someone did a finetune w/ data from 4chan and found
| improvements on several popular benchmarks, so ... maybe?
| dd8601fn wrote:
| For years before LLMs got big a comment I would often see
| was, "Google search is worthless now. I basically solve all
| my problems by searching reddit."
| superkuh wrote:
| This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it
| stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted
| the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to
| monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the
| business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved
| long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people
| and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead
| of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been
| reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
| nobleach wrote:
| I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the
| "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in
| those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same
| story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it
| needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do?
| Monetize.
| mh2266 wrote:
| iirc they removed "fat people hate", a variety of subreddits
| named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and
| a subreddit for "well it's not _technically_ porn" of children
|
| 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
| superkuh wrote:
| That actually happened much later. I am talking about
| examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts
| asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to
| imply that "undesirables" means _just_ actually offensive or
| illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much
| like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal
| and varied.
|
| 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).
| mh2266 wrote:
| June 10 2015
|
| 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| I think we can all agree that the above, and other
| mentioned subreddits were genuinely undesirable, no
| quotations needed. I was clear that wasn't what I was
| talking about. Your practice of just parroting these
| nasty people and their words doesn't actually address my
| point at all. Which was that it went far beyond just the
| nasty people to groups that weren't nasty and just made
| some advertisers uncomfortable.
|
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point.
| That's the first time they tried to block the site from being
| mirrored.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've been on there too long, it feels like they died several
| times over:
|
| * 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.
| account42 wrote:
| > * Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead
| now, it used to be a huge event)
|
| The huge organized celebrity AMAs already felt like a death
| of reddit on their own.
|
| > the baseline remains
|
| Did it though?
| kotaKat wrote:
| * influx of Indian users on US-based residential proxies
| causing the 'popular in US' feed to be nothing but nonstop
| Indian-based clones of popular subreddits (indianteenagers
| and various others)
|
| * 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)
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface
| often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that
| many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The
| safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at
| a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities
| and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit
| as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I look forward to New HN.
| busymom0 wrote:
| The new interface is filled with dark patterns meant to make
| you waste as much time on the site. The huge amount of wasted
| white space making you having to scroll more and constant
| clicks ensures you spend more time on site and this watch more
| ads.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| Name one vulnerability
| krapp wrote:
| > Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and
| generates ongoing maintenance costs.
|
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that
| "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.
| cole-k wrote:
| Then they should nuke Old Reddit rather than offer a wishy-
| washy "we're being scraped" explanation. My beef is that under
| all of the layers of PR this ultimately comes down to an
| engineering liability --- which is not my problem. If they
| can't deal with *their* problem, don't pretend like it's *my*
| problem.
|
| 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.
| msny wrote:
| I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit
| because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open
| reddit clients there is no alternative.
| IrishTechie wrote:
| You can still use old.reddit, you just need to be logged in.
| That said, if old.reddit ever went away altogether I would stop
| using it too.
| NordStreamYacht wrote:
| I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right
| now.
|
| Maybe it's for specific subs?
| sphars wrote:
| Not yet, but it's coming to old.reddit.com globally soon:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-
| require-...
| therealpygon wrote:
| For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Maybe RES (or other extension) should gain a mode where new
| reddit is rendered in the style of old reddit?
| et-al wrote:
| Logging in is enough friction to prevent me from browsing
| casually. Especially when I'm on a work computer.
|
| One benefit is my productivity had a temporary boost this
| week until I find another site to read.
| encrypted_bird wrote:
| You can do it without logging in too if you use an extension
| that autoredirects. That's what I do. I use a FF extension
| called Old Reddit Redirect.
| dax_ wrote:
| I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client
| would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.
| ambicapter wrote:
| This isn't sad at all, this will help me break my reddit
| addiction splendidly.
| silon42 wrote:
| I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have
| redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to
| be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense
| cole-k wrote:
| The 2s delay before response smells of rate-limiting to me! I
| don't remember it ever being so slow before, but then again I
| don't use Reddit anymore.
|
| Unless their servers are being hit so hard by scrapers they
| can't stand up straight...
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to
| new reddit.
| busymom0 wrote:
| > This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is
| basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine
| humans.
|
| I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been
| filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.
| corbet wrote:
| I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do
| ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are
| a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working.
| Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce
| the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why
| they would want to do that for anonymous readers.
| rob wrote:
| Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites
| and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started
| iterating through every possible date in "The Events
| Calendar"'s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages
| all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my
| fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
| account42 wrote:
| The response to that should be to restrict the events
| calendar and similar dynamic functionality, not to restrict
| the 99% of users who are accessing what should be 100%
| staticly cached HTML.
| rob wrote:
| Good idea; I'll make sure we have all random
| ?date=1970-01-01, ?date=1970-01-02, all the way to
| ?date=2026-07-22 URLs cached, even the ones that are 404s
| but the crawlers still try anyways. Thank you!
| account42 wrote:
| It's always entertaining when people proudly display
| their lack reading comprehension.
| rob wrote:
| That's very true.
| dormento wrote:
| Of course, the _actual_ response to that should be to make
| the AI companies somehow liable for the massive disruption
| they caused (and still cause).
|
| But alas, we can't have nice things.
| inigyou wrote:
| Well Reddit would have a lot less scraper traffic if it hadn't
| shut down the feed API 3 years ago in an attempt to keep its
| data closed and only distributed to Google (which paid money
| for it). Self-inflicted. No sympathy.
| corbet wrote:
| I doubt it. The scraper botnets aren't going to bother with
| niceties like APIs, they just come in over HTTPS and grab
| anything they can.
| inigyou wrote:
| There was a whole mini-industry around scraping
| specifically Reddit using the API feed because it was so
| open. AI companies first trained on Pushshift, which is
| like Common Crawl for Reddit, which is why Reddit shut down
| Pushshift (with legal threats IIRC) at the same time.
| Hizonner wrote:
| If there were a well-known URL that retrieved all content
| added to a site after a given date, and a meaningful number
| of sites implemented it, I bet the biggest scrapers would
| use it.
|
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| Reddit used to have something like that. And what you
| said happened. They shut it down, so that they could ask
| AI companies for payment.
| uhhhhwhaaaa wrote:
| I personally don't like it, but hard to blame them.
|
| Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd
| do the same.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| I don't understand why sites like reddit need to do any work on
| (unauthd) GET. They are not instant messaging platforms, they
| are forums. You can live with a ~1-2-5 minute delay on forums.
| So POSTs (from logged in users) append to a queue, and a worker
| does work at regular intervals, creates the HTML and that gets
| sent to a cache + distributed to a CDN if needed. There's no
| need to do work on unauthd GETs for a forum.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This has to be a parody post, my god.
| cole-k wrote:
| I know I'm not arguing with you personally here since it seems
| we both have a bone to pick with Reddit, but I don't understand
| why they can't use Anubis or whatever captcha thing I may or
| may not have seen on New Reddit. It irks me that they've
| decided they will keep hosting it (for now), but they're just
| going to close the gate.
|
| 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??
| tempfile wrote:
| I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to
| anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if
| reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a
| legal identity.
| inigyou wrote:
| They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And
| if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.
| tempfile wrote:
| Email _and_ phone, or email _or_ phone?
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| I can't think of many things I'd less like to verify with
| Persona than NSFW reddit. They should just ban NSFW content
| altogether at that point.
| inigyou wrote:
| They learned from the best: Tumblr.
| felooboolooomba wrote:
| Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it
| seems.
|
| 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...
| masfuerte wrote:
| My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It
| wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via
| WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be
| buying her tat on eBay in future.
|
| I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but
| I don't suppose they will.
| NuclearPM wrote:
| What is a tat?
| seanhunter wrote:
| "Tat" means miscellaneous junk.
|
| 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.
| giardini wrote:
| How does "tat" differ from "grot"?
| phs318u wrote:
| Perhaps the options vary by region?
| felooboolooomba wrote:
| tat n. 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.
|
| People buy it all the time when they practice retail
| therapy.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Are you sure it was actually via whatsapp, and not just a six
| digit code sent via regular SMS to the phone number on record
| for her account? It's possible whatsapp on her phone has
| simply hijacked the SMS client functionality and set itself
| as the default.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| "which she doesn't have and doesn't want"
| subscribed wrote:
| > "WhatsApp on her phone"
|
| GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.
| walrus01 wrote:
| If I had a dollar for every time I've seen an older
| person that doesn't even know what application they're
| running, or can't tell the difference between the content
| of a website inside a browser window and an application
| that runs natively on their computer. I read what the GP
| wrote, I'm saying there's a non zero possibility she's
| misunderstanding something.
|
| It seems like something you have to specifically choose,
| on the amazon account side.
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?no
| deI...
| subscribed wrote:
| I choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick for being
| unable to differentiate between apps :)
|
| 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!
| alasdairking wrote:
| No, my Microsoft Azure 2FA sends codes to WhatsApp, not
| SMS.
|
| UK, where WhatsApp is absolutely mandatory.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _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)?
| em-bee wrote:
| but then amazon would not tell her that she should find the
| code in whatsapp, because amazon would still be sending
| send an sms. it should not have any awareness of whatsapp
| hijacking the sms function, and therefore the amazon
| message should reference the SMS. if it references whatsapp
| then it means amazon wants to send to whatsapp directly.
| dude187 wrote:
| Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
| dude187 wrote:
| Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| The frustrating part is that since so many companies
| collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it
| for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal
| scam or illegal scam.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.
|
| the fact this is something to be distinguished says a lot
| about where we are now and none of what it says is good
| masfuerte wrote:
| Yes. I'd gone round to see her and I checked her history to
| ensure it wasn't dodgy.
| jayGlow wrote:
| I has Facebook send a verification through Whatsapp, I
| legitimately thought it was a scam until I googled it and
| realized they do actually send verification that way.
| delecti wrote:
| Still annoying, but at least then it's the same company.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Which country was this? I've never known Amazon requiring
| WhatsApp. It uses SMS a lot.
|
| 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.
| mrec wrote:
| I've never had it require SMS either. Probably because I've
| never given it a portable telephone number. (Until a couple
| of years ago I didn't have one, and I still use it as
| little as possible.)
| whoopdedo wrote:
| > She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future. A third of the
| things I buy* from eBay come shipped by Amazon. I can't
| always tell if they were using the warehouse for logistics or
| the seller is doing arbitrage. Either way, it would seem
| Amazon isn't bothered by people "voting with their wallet".
|
| (*That are new of course, used and open-box still come from
| the seller as I expect.)
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| While your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we
| push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future
| and 'drink verification' copypasta[1].
|
| [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve
| ...
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| That is funny, sad & scary at the same time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I _guarantee you_ that there are real people out there in
| tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world
| would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing
| things that bring us closer to that world rather than
| farther away.
| Cider9986 wrote:
| >You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in
| to your Reddit account or use your developer token
|
| ....
| uhhhhwhaaaa wrote:
| I would view a website that requires users to go through a
| lengthy verification process.
|
| Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this
| would give a bit of trust.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Would it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for
| websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices
| set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Wasn't twitter/x meant to be that? Pay and verify to enter
| members club. Didn't quite take off all while destroying
| goodwill that blue badge used to have.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their
| direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of
| like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us
| all" threats.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It doesn't matter what they spent excatly
|
| 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.
| nottorp wrote:
| > he entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of
| lobbying is an AI hallucination.
|
| I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for
| them to do the "think of the children" lobby.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| >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.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the
| amount matters because it is invariably very, very small
| compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the
| impact the lobbying has.
|
| It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or
| six figure donations to their campaigns.
| giardini wrote:
| "excatly"????wtf?
| felooboolooomba wrote:
| Meta hasn't corrected it and there's absolutely no way I give
| Meta the benefit of a doubt.
| walrus01 wrote:
| (13 years ago)
|
| https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
| dredmorbius wrote:
| TIL the phrase's origin.
|
| ("Please drink a verification can.")
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| And ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda
| normal.
|
| Times change, so does certain expectations.
| teeray wrote:
| I really wish there was a way for the electorate to preempt the
| votes of their representatives, so this kind of lobbying would
| be less effective. Sure, they might try carpet bombing the
| airwaves with PSA campaigns, but if the people really really
| don't want what the lobbyist is selling, they would still be
| able to rip the ballot out of their congress critter's hands
| and change the vote.
| voakbasda wrote:
| I would settle for representatives that actually represented
| the interests of the people rather than those of the
| wealthiest and their corporations.
| win311fwg wrote:
| That would require the people making their interests known,
| which would never happen in practice. The reality is that
| most representatives are well-intentioned and try to do the
| job in good faith, but only the wealthy/corporations ever
| give them the time of day to tell what their interests are.
| The representative can only work with the information they
| have available.
|
| 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.
| upboundspiral wrote:
| "Never happen in practice" is objectively false given the
| civil rights wins of the past century. While incomplete
| they were real, and real change followed.
|
| Starting with the premise that it's impossible won't
| improve society.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They arent there to represent the interests of the people.
| Rather, the people vote for representatives whose positions
| they agree with.
| mothballed wrote:
| Ballot initiative. Californians tried that to stop "gay
| marriage" (Prop 8) so the courts just told the people to fuck
| themselves and overturned it. Again in South Dakota for
| legalizing marijuana, the voters voted in favor by special
| initiative so the state just overturned it.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| It will sound insane, but I would love a parallel (not a
| replacement!) internet where everyone is ID verified. Time and
| place for both.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
|
| 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)
| khurs wrote:
| Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a
| preferred narrative that is controlled.
| rjh29 wrote:
| You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of
| information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you
| mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not
| difficult.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I tried this for a while. My local subs have been taken over
| by ideologues and the niche subs still get political/outrage
| bait flare-ups regularly. I've decided that the best way to
| consume reddit is through an intermediary, whether it's
| Google or an LLM that I ask to crawl through subs for recent
| posts, remove emotional/political content, and summarize for
| me. Ironically that's exactly what Reddit is trying to
| prevent, but when push comes to shove I'm happy to miss out
| on the 5% of useful stuff rather than have to wade through
| the memes, outrage, and bots.
| wraptile wrote:
| > For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the
| IPO.
|
| 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.
| instagib wrote:
| https://old.lemmy.world/
|
| works also.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| i like lemmy but the idea that it's not astroturfed just
| ain't there, plus the number of dubious phishing links and
| images is offputting
|
| limited doses
| iamnothere wrote:
| The problem with Lemmy is that every instance seems to treat
| itself as an insular fiefdom that bans dissenters. It's the
| same problem scaled up. Instances can cross-post in theory,
| but often people seem to treat the domain as a tribal
| affiliation, and mods may block subs or even entire domains
| based on petty disagreements.
|
| 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.
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| ^This
|
| 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
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Powertripping mods have _always_ been a problem with Reddit
| ever since they had user-created subreddits. The real problem
| is that Reddit has been very two-faced with what their
| expectations on moderators are. If we take "the purpose of a
| system is what it does[0]" then Reddit moderators exist
| primarily as unpaid volunteer employees, paid in control over
| the narrative of certain communities.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/67CXV4o4dYM
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >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, an
|
| 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.
| tassadarforaiur wrote:
| I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I
| logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the
| knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations /
| guides? Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for
| niches you're newly learning about. Discord is it's own problem.
| I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while. Do we
| have to find an old dump of reddit html, and self host a snapshot
| of days before the front page of the Internet went behind a login
| page?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| What niche are you looking for? I usually append "forum" to
| topic searches when I am looking for humans with similar
| interests. I have found communities for all the niche topics I
| have looked for so far.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I liked the anime discussions because I don't speak Japanese
| and there's often stuff that is not translated well (at least
| in the first official subs) that people will go out of their
| way to explain the language (or reasons for changes) or
| cultural significance of things that don't exist in other
| places. Also if one has read the source, one can discuss the
| differences, or if not, one can get clarification from
| readers on some things without getting spoilers one did not
| ask for. There's also nintendoswitch subreddit I used to look
| at for upcoming releases and opinions, nintendolife.com is
| ok, but not nearly the breadth of activity.
| yesmens wrote:
| I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as
| i2p or tor.
| skydhash wrote:
| I spent my whole childhood without computers and a good chunk
| of my teenage years without stable internet connection. Now, I
| have both, but due to the state of the internet, I'm returning
| to my old routine: A load of books to learn from and hopefully
| finding some time to apply the knowledge.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Don't give up yet.
|
| 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.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Let's bring Stack Exchanges back!
| markdown wrote:
| Or the OG, Expert Sex Change.
| opengrass wrote:
| IRC
| jdw64 wrote:
| It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just
| Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I
| thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying
| before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.
|
| 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.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet
| traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast
| majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those
| organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with
| annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories
| about the latest
| product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The
| entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid
| for by the highest bidders.
|
| 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.
| inigyou wrote:
| Note that Cloudflare is the least reliable source for who's a
| bot.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| says who?
| inigyou wrote:
| everyone who's ever been detected as a bot by cloudflare
| jdw64 wrote:
| I think it's not so much a problem with social media itself,
| but rather a phenomenon that occurs when consumption points
| converge. Anger is great for grabbing attention, and for
| newcomers trying to get noticed at a converged consumption
| point, generating anger or outrage is just the easiest way.
|
| 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.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| What a lovely idea. Maybe I should try this.
| jdw64 wrote:
| Personally, if you need a moderate level of connection,
| there's something called the IndieWeb. Of course,
| sometimes you just need your own world without any
| connection at all.
|
| Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a
| valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a
| good day :)
| inigyou wrote:
| Good. The community _business_ needs to die, and we need to
| return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the
| previous transition to community businesses, it may take some
| time to recover.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Who will pay for these "actual communities"?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| presumably people that pay for coffee in coffee shops, or
| rent league lanes in bowling alleys, or whoever brings a
| bottle of wine to a meetup at a friend's place, etc.
| cole-k wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| jdw64 wrote:
| hmmmm, what I mean is this. There's been backlash about
| Reddit's ecosystem, but fundamentally they've transitioned
| into a business model that monetizes proprietary data for AI
| training. From that perspective, it's been successful. The
| problem, though, is that the quality of that data continues
| to decline. So it looks successful now, but I question
| whether that will hold in the future.
|
| 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.'
| cole-k wrote:
| It seems you're viewing this from the perspective of
| Reddit-the-company, and if your interests are to maximize
| profits then I don't really disagree with what you have to
| say.
|
| I miss Reddit-the-communities, personally, whose interests
| as you observe seem to conflict with those of Reddit-the-
| company.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a
| Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our
| community".
|
| 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.).
| khurs wrote:
| If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch
| many YouTube vids embedded
|
| 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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not.
| I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.
| account42 wrote:
| It's particularly sad when its institutions doing that who
| should really have the capability to host their own videos.
| imzadi wrote:
| If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it
| disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation
| Gareth321 wrote:
| I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit
| altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new
| interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark
| patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and
| I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and
| magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful
| habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it
| on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit
| forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the
| internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look
| back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a
| supreme waste of my life.
| inigyou wrote:
| They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit
| now for some accounts.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| That would be a hard no for me.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think my account's old enough to drink liquor. Or had been,
| before they banned it.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| same. already looking into private forums for if/when that day
| comes.
|
| some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along
| just fine
| account42 wrote:
| I noticed they logged me out when I happened on a link recently.
| I don't think this change will make me log back in. The value of
| the site has already crashed, now the only question is which site
| will manage to capture the mainstream link/image discussion next.
|
| > 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.
|
| 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.
| account42 wrote:
| Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread.
| + Hey how do you do thing? | -+ [deleted]
| | -+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Some of that was a reaction to Reddit closing the APIs and
| blocking apps.
| mothballed wrote:
| Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it
| contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my
| account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits
| requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An
| Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year
| after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal
| legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Which lawyer?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I got suspended for criticizing the state of Israel's
| treatment of civilians in occupied territories, but they
| didn't delete my account, though I stopped logging in
| after a week. (Logging in retains your subscriptions).
| I've seen plenty of similar comments to mine so I assume
| it was the work of some oddball who I responded to that
| has an connection to somebody who works there so they
| could pull some strings to suspend my account.
| markdown wrote:
| Nah, it's rare to see [deleted].
|
| More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree"
| due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old
| data.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Reddit _users_ also very frequently delete accounts and
| /or content.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669
|
| Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it
| is.
| dagurp wrote:
| More than 20 years
| Klonoar wrote:
| Put a fork in me, I'm done.
| VCFundedGenYer wrote:
| Reddit HAD almost 20 years of comments, until about three
| years ago when they started to lock down APIs, remove
| moderators, and make poor choices. Users reacted accordingly
| and now you will just see a whole lot of [deleted] or comment
| content replaced with garbage data. It's no longer an archive
| or wealth of information it once was.
| Klonoar wrote:
| That redacted amount is absolutely miniscule and blown out
| of proportion.
| tumult wrote:
| Not in my experience. I see it almost every time I end up
| in a reddit thread from search results. I've recently
| started demoting it in Kagi. It's just not as good as it
| used to be. Newer threads tend to be full of junk and
| bots.
| ikr678 wrote:
| I see it quite often in reddit threads that appear in my
| google search results for obscure technical/hardware
| issues.
|
| 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.
| alex1138 wrote:
| [This comment removed due to protest of Reddit's API
| changes]
| davkan wrote:
| The rest of the internet is so enshittified by SEO garbage
| that searching for a problem you're having and appending
| reddit is the only way to get a quick answer without
| scrolling for 5 pages down an article.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _The value of the site has already crashed_
|
| 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?
| wwalexander wrote:
| Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable "better
| in the app" popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can't
| scroll up to get the iOS-native "Open in App" toolbar that
| actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their
| hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or
| reload the page and tap the native "Open in App" button before
| the popover reappears.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun
| shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results.
| Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you
| could expect mostly humans participating.
| mehagar wrote:
| On iOS this popover breaks scrolling, which is required to show
| the Chrome URL bar, meaning I have to literally close the
| Chrome app and reopen it to even navigate to another page. I've
| taken this as a sign to stop using Reddit entirely.
| inigyou wrote:
| There is a Nitter for Reddit, called Redlib, correct?
|
| 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.
| throw7 wrote:
| old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't
| work/go away.
| alex1138 wrote:
| This is also INCREDIBLY BASIC.
|
| "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
| nottorp wrote:
| > is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine
| humans
|
| Was a surefire way?
| inigyou wrote:
| Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm
| BryantD wrote:
| "Safety" is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new
| front end doesn't seem safer for end users. It probably does make
| it safer for Reddit in that it's harder for scrapers to do their
| thing.
| knorker wrote:
| I assume this is another push to force people onto the terrible
| "new" UI.
|
| 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.
| decimalenough wrote:
| > _This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query
| is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine
| humans._
|
| This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
| ditchfieldcaleb wrote:
| Still works as long as you don't care about recent results and
| are okay with filtering for pre-2023 answers.
|
| (So like, 20% as useful, but still...)
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| at least with pre-2023 those shillbot accounts were run by
| people directly!
| absoluteunit1 wrote:
| Many still are
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a
| useful asynchronous human interaction. I think reddit lost the
| useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that
| drama.
|
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| The problem isn't "Is this human or AI?" it's "Do we trust the
| entity with this identity or not?" meaning it's entirely
| possible to be anonymous but use a web-of-trust style system to
| promote/demote stories.
|
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| There's a third theory of why they're doing this that I don't see
| discussed too much.
|
| 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.
| cole-k wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| benjiro29 wrote:
| As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little
| projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are
| just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit".
|
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit"
|
| 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
| avadodin wrote:
| Old-school forums never left, still inhabited by the few
| boomers and genXers who could figure out the Internets back
| in the day and aren't dead yet.
|
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| the big click of reddit like yahoo forums and other earlier
| things is that each 'sub' reddit can have its own rules
| culture, etc. its like facebook groups in a way.
| Unfortunately with how bad reddit is, I see mostly my
| interest niche hobbies moving to facebook.
| nothercastle wrote:
| Forms are sadly dead. They cost a lot to operate and
| maintain security updates for so without a critical mass of
| users they are dead
| chuckadams wrote:
| I never used to be an old.reddit die-hard, but new got so bad
| it chased me there to where I now use a browser extension to
| redirect all reddit links to old. I was convinced that the
| website continued to get worse so they could steer you into
| the app which hoovers up all your personal information. But
| then the app is so godawful unusable that I think we're just
| looking at straight-up incompetence.
|
| So yeah, I'm in the same boat: if they drop old, they drop
| me.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I assume they are being screen scraped by LLMs even though you
| can find exports of reddit posts elsewhere. I can't blame them
| for trying to charge for API usage, it was never a cheap cost to
| them to begin with.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Cannot duplicate.
|
| 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...
| cole-k wrote:
| It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere
| in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-
| will-require-...). Sorry, I neglected to mention/link to this
| news article.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| An earlier thread:
|
| _Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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...)
| dust-jacket wrote:
| I feel like this is a deliberately obtuse response to a real and
| irritating change.
|
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| IF you're an actual user of the site, like, logging in and what
| not, you can still just set your preferences to use the old
| design. Never need to go to old.reddit
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Almost. NYSE:RDDT has decided that plain HTML is unprofitable.
| That is the entire premise in one sentence.
| Hitton wrote:
| Old reddit still works for me even without login though. I'm too
| lazy to figure out which from the multiple of userscripts and
| addons I use allows it, but apparently the block is done half-
| assedly and easy to circumvent.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| It still works for me too (I have no account on Reddit and have
| no intention to have an account, even if they try to insist),
| and it is also possible to add .json on the end of the URL for
| JSON data (although, so far, I only use this feature to view
| pictures at the original size that are too small if I do not do
| this).
| impish9208 wrote:
| I feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on
| the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too
| idealistic back then, but it's clear that the modern internet
| needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep
| the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you
| bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole
| eyeball scanning thing though?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I read the author's post and many of the comments and decided
| that I was finished with reddit, finally. I have always used old
| reddit to surf the subs and have never used new reddit.
|
| 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!
| cole-k wrote:
| It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere
| in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-
| will-require-...). I neglected to mention/link to this news
| article.
|
| I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Well. This will be the end of reddit for me. I rarely log in
| when I surf those subs. If someone needs help and I know the
| answer then I will log in, otherwise I just bounce around.
| I'm not changing that. If a login is required on old reddit
| then I will finally be officially done with it.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices.
|
| 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!
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Oh boy. I guess my time is coming too. Pretty funny. I've
| been cutting way back on my engagement across the board.
| Luckily I have real hobbies and can spend time doing
| productive things. Maybe.
| saghm wrote:
| I got presented with the "login or switch to the new UI" thing
| on my laptop yesterday. I don't think this is mobile-only.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I haven't been hit with it yet. I won't be logging in just to
| surf subs though. That just isn't going to happen. Sounds
| like I will finally not be a redditor.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I can confirm it's not mobile-only.
| storus wrote:
| Old Reddit is the only way to read text there for me so if that's
| login-walled or gone I am done with them as well.
| LoganDark wrote:
| New reddit has a literally worse user experience. No comments
| display more than maybe 1 reply and if you click to view more, it
| takes you to a dedicated page for just that reply. If you click
| the back button it completely forgets where you were in the
| original comment thread. Basically impossible to peruse comment
| sections like on askreddit posts, etc.
| plqbfbv wrote:
| I closed all my Reddit accounts after they instantly shadow-
| banned my 8+y main account after I shared a single gdrive link to
| reply to a user with actual data. I've been appreciated as
| contributor in various places for being helpful, thorough and
| precise, but Reddit doesn't care to have good content. It's
| simply not a good discussion platform (and the UI sucks).
| leptons wrote:
| Mods are the death of reddit like I've been saying for at least
| 10 years. Shadow ban after shadow ban, the dopamine rush a bad
| mod gets from shadow banning someone must be amazing. It's way
| too easy for them.
| pestat0m wrote:
| hey, it's working again!
| programmertote wrote:
| I am like OP -- I use old.reddit.com strictly in Firefox. I'm
| comfortable and familiar with the old UI (been a Reddit user for
| as long as Reddit has been around).
|
| 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.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| The new UI you're talking about has entered 2nd grade
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my
| questions are already answered by LLM.
|
| And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled
| with bots.
| seanw444 wrote:
| At least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's
| arguably the real users that are worse...
| reorder9695 wrote:
| I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party
| clients, I have to say it doesn't seem like I've been missing
| much. The rare occasion I do need to see something on it, it's
| just full of deleted accounts and comments. I do also love how
| VPNs get blocked but accessing it over tor is allowed
| (genuinely I think allowing access over tor is great, but it
| seems so antithetical to everything else they've done recently)
| Sha1rholder wrote:
| VPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.
| leptons wrote:
| VPN blocking is a thing now. It's always a game of
| whackamole, but the whacker is getting a lot better lately
| thanks to states and countries having new laws against
| accessing age restricted content.
| m00dy wrote:
| yeah, residential proxies are the future.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| _> I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party
| clients_
|
| Revanced.
| roysting wrote:
| I suspect they're not blocking tor to maintain both an image
| of being some kind of safe haven for democracy warriors and
| because tor is monitored by the 5+1 eyes it's also a conduit
| for intel and asset development among those kids who think
| they're democracy warriors or something.
| the-mitr wrote:
| You can't login via tor anymore in my experience
| cyanydeez wrote:
| once they break RedReader ill be out. old.reddit.com is now
| defunct
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's news to me, I use old reddit com all the time
| brokenmachine wrote:
| What do you mean it's defunct?
|
| 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.
| human305893 wrote:
| It now only works if you're logged in.
| alterom wrote:
| Bastards. I didn't notice.
|
| Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had
| accounts.
| gonzalohm wrote:
| Not true, I use Firefox focus to access it, so now I
| can't
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| Seems to work fine here?
| pixl97 wrote:
| It's on and off for me, it's like they are A/B testing
| non logged in users.
| pudgywalsh wrote:
| They are slow-rolling it by IP block.
|
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| They broke the mobile website. You scroll a little and it
| blocks content and asks you to get the app.
|
| 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.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-
| instances/blob/master...
| analog_daddy wrote:
| Not sure how long it will survive, but opening it in a
| private browser tab helped.
|
| 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.
| valiant55 wrote:
| A lot of the programming adjacent subreddits have been post
| after post of weekend vibe coded projects. It's become really
| exhausting how easy it is to turn out a new wheel that's going
| to get abandoned in a few weeks at best.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, it's a problem a lot of those subs are grappling with.
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah the software related subs are worthless now. All spam.
| smrq wrote:
| Admittedly, HN is suffering the same fate to some extent.
| ksd482 wrote:
| The discussion quality is unbelievably shallow in most of the
| subreddits.
|
| 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."
| markdown wrote:
| > I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all
| about silly memes and jokes.
|
| Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't
| get the current silly memes and jokes.
| ksd482 wrote:
| I never said anything about not getting the current 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was
| all about silly memes and jokes.
|
| 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.
| PearlRiver wrote:
| The world has gotten more political. Everything is going
| to shit and we have not even really started the climate
| change.
| pudgywalsh wrote:
| > everyone jumped on the bandwagon
|
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The only subs of any value are the niche subs, hobby subs
| that show off creation, and city-sized geographical subs.
|
| Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple
| spam. So much spam.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Not even the city-sized ones. My local ones (Seattle when I
| lived there, and Orange County ones now) are political
| cesspools full of intolerant people and outrage bait.
| api wrote:
| "Pajama Nazis vs Basement Bolsheviks."
|
| Forget where I saw that one but it's Reddit now.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Not sure why you'd _expect_ anything except a list like to
| be of "any value".
|
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >and city-sized geographical subs.
|
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's not just leftists. It's polarization generally, with
| scale.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Certainly describes my local city sub.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Back in the End Times of Google+, I had access to a data
| dump of all n-million Google+ Communities metadata (name,
| subscribers, and visible activity on the Community
| homepage, the last of which gave an indication of post
| cadence).
|
| 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_.
| whycome wrote:
| Looking at the conversations tied to movie fandoms has been
| fascinating. People treat movie franchises like a religion.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Well. Sort of... if you are an NPR or POLTICO or WAPO or
| NYT follower, you are going to have been told for months
| how amazing The Odyssey will be and how it definitely makes
| sense to cast a 5'2" small transgender person as a warrior
| etc etc... and that the only people that don't like these
| all non-Greek and nonsensical casting choices are _the bad
| people_.
|
| It is religion, but it isn't coming from Reddit. Reddit is
| just the paper the new bible is printed on.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| If you think that's bad casting, I've got some bad news:
| the guy who plays the cyclops _has two eyes._
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| How do you think the bots are trained? Reddit has really good
| data since its comments and tags and specific subreddits
| basically have ranked questions and answers by points driven by
| the title and the comments are ranked by points which have
| quality answers.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, that only works when fleets of bots aren't upboating
| their own commercial content.
| dlenski wrote:
| > I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of
| my questions are already answered by LLM.
|
| 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.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I agree with them. In many of the subs I used to frequent,
| the outrage is high and the signal is low. LLM really is the
| best way to consume the content there. Retrieve the new posts
| of the day/week, filter out the outrage and politics and low-
| effort Reddit in-jokes/copypasta, then summarize the various
| comment threads. My time is too valuable to sift through the
| utterly mind-numbing nonsense to get the occasional new piece
| of info. If you want to dig deeper, ask the LLM to dig in. Or
| have it regurgitate verbatim a pre-filtered selection of
| comments.
|
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| It's just crazy to think that Reddit and the massive volume
| of text it allowed to be created helped lead us here....
| a2tech wrote:
| I'm a moderator on a moderately popular and active subreddit,
| and I can assure you that there is an unreasonable amount of
| bot activity on reddit. They range from just spam (usually
| obvious) to bulk astroturfing. We try to stop what we can,
| but plenty gets through.
| edoceo wrote:
| Any ideas to mitigate?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Call your buddy and come up with a meeting spot.
| hogwasher wrote:
| those bots are extremely effective at manipulating LLM results
| via comments and faking entire reddit threads.
|
| at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from
| reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| I don't go to reddit for answers.
| chillfox wrote:
| I cancelled my Reddit subscription when they killed third party
| clients and haven't really used the site since.
| m00dy wrote:
| Reddit is must have if you want GEO presence
| EA-3167 wrote:
| I left Reddit years ago and it's been an absolute pleasure.
| I've never come close to wishing to participating there again,
| and everything I hear from people who still hang on seems to
| reinforce my decision.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major
| client revision, they can put security measures in the new
| version that are not present in the older one, this happens in
| many many industries.
|
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major
| client revision, they can put security measures in the new
| version that are not present in the older one, this happens in
| many many industries.
|
| 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.
| cole-k wrote:
| While most of the rant was indeed about their posturing (which
| I personally would not call "politics" but we need not debate
| semantics here if I understood you well enough), even putting
| that aside I wasn't able to find strong evidence of the
| "security measures" you speak of.
|
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| It's not necessary to analyze the specifics of reddit's
| architecture.
|
| 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.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| If you were using old.reddit.com then presumably you were viewing
| popular by default? In which case you have some alternatives:
|
| https://safereddit.com/
|
| 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)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Pretty clear they are defending against (a) AI scrapers (b)
| impending age verification requirements. Honestly, requiring
| login is probably the _least_ they could do with old Reddit to
| keep it running with those two constraints.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The solution to this is to leave Reddit for good.
|
| 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. :).
| russellbeattie wrote:
| After 20 years my account on reddit was "permanently suspended"
| after some right wing nitwit reported a comment of mine as
| threatening. (It wasn't, though it also wasn't kind towards him
| and his ilk.) Happily, my login still works fine so I just keep
| using it as a permanent lurker.
|
| 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.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Oh I despise them
|
| 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"
| analog8374 wrote:
| When we spend this much effort picking through their bullshit,
| whether we prove our case or not, they win.
| rose-knuckle17 wrote:
| they mean keeping their board/investors safe from scraping.
| that's all.
| DivingForGold wrote:
| Actually plain html is what IS safe.
|
| 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.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Here is the recommend app for this, used primarily by the Tor
| browser.
|
| https://noscript.net/
|
| I use this on news sites to get rid of the paywall.
| hogwasher wrote:
| ublock origin (not to be confused with the lite version) can
| also do this, and is more flexible. But it's easy to miss
| this functionality because you have to know about and read
| some documentation to learn how to turn ublock's "medium"
| mode on and how the controls work.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Reddit's been dead to me for years.
|
| 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.)
| jokoon wrote:
| got banned on my EU country subreddit for saying hamas dresses as
| civilians
|
| reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I don't buy the "scraping" protection when appending .json to any
| reddit URL still gives you the data.
|
| Example:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_t...
| 20k wrote:
| They're just trying to manufacture a reason to kill off old
| reddit. Someone internally clearly hates the fact that its
| still quite popular, despite all the efforts to make it
| unusable so far
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| New Reddit for my phone has decided to put a bottom popup
| forcing me to the app.
|
| 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.
| garciasn wrote:
| Their users and those users data are the product; you are
| insignificant in the eyes of their shareholders.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| You don't seem to understand. It isn't about me. Or even
| people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not
| even be obvious to people, but they'll slowly turn away
| at this or the next thing or the next one after that.
|
| 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.
| rmunn wrote:
| The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last
| paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and
| that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:
|
| > 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Yes! You're gonna love Ismo (the Finnish standup who
| pokes fun at quirks of the English language). This bit^1
| on the word "shit" was the first I saw of him online.
| I've since seen him live and, I guess if you know, you
| know. Genius.
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/ifNEgwGACEQ?is=cJHqXIkZVqgmt4iO
| victor9000 wrote:
| UBlock Origin can clear those on FF mobile with one of the
| Annoyances lists
| jonathanlb wrote:
| If you're on iOS, you're out of luck. FF extensions
| aren't supported.
| Twistyfiasco wrote:
| You can hide distracting items in safari to remove the
| popup.
| mrandish wrote:
| The day they kill off old.reddit.com is the last time I'll
| visit Reddit (after >15 years, >7,000 comments & >70,000
| karma). Old.reddit, the Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES),
| custom userstyle CSS and uBlock make Reddit tolerable.
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Same, old makes Reddit useable.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Ditto
| dieselgate wrote:
| Literally yesterday I started getting a login wall for
| old.reddit. Not sure the targeting rules on this (it's been
| sporadic across sessions/devices) but definitely on a
| mobile browser while on cellular data.
| monksy wrote:
| > Someone internally clearly hates
|
| its spez. It's always spez.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Didn't they just say they're removing this?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...
| janalsncm wrote:
| It's really hard to feel bad for these Web 2.0 platforms that
| made money off of free content and are now enshittifying on top
| of it.
|
| 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.
| sco1 wrote:
| This is sad. I've been using a few read-only lurking apps to
| browse reddit for a while now and unfortunately this change seems
| to have broken most of them.
|
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| The funnest kinds of problems to solve are the pretend ones.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I've pretty much switched to Lemmy. It's one of the few Fediverse
| systems that actually seems to live up to its private
| counterpart.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Interestingly, I remember that the clean interface of old Reddit,
| not so different from current HN, was one of the nice things when
| coming from Digg back in the day.
|
| 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.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| If you want to be paranoid it's a decent idea, if you also make
| your own internal html/xml alternative you can then say your
| sanctioned html flavor is safe, but regular html would mean it
| has to came from an outside third party no matter where you
| encounter it.
| luciana1u wrote:
| the platform that built its entire identity on user-generated
| HTML pages now considers HTML a security threat. somewhere a web
| standards working group is having an existential crisis
| dyauspitr wrote:
| When I'm browsing, reddit on my iphone on Safari, when the little
| pop-up shows up that tells you to use the app it completely locks
| up Safari (it doesn't hang) I can't change tabs, bring up the
| back control buttons or do anything else except exit out of
| Safari how are they doing that?
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