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
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.
>
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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].
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.'
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
* 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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?
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.
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
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It’s just crazy to think that Reddit and the massive volume of text it allowed to be created helped lead us here….
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.
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.
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)
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.
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>I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients
Revanced.
VPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.
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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.
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.
https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master...
I cancelled my Reddit subscription when they killed third party clients and haven't really used the site since.
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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.
Yeah, it's a problem a lot of those subs are grappling with.
At least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's arguably the real users that are worse...
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."
> 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.
Looking at the conversations tied to movie fandoms has been fascinating. People treat movie franchises like a religion.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
Eh, that only works when fleets of bots aren't upboating their own commercial content.
I don't go to reddit for answers.
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.
Reddit is must have if you want GEO presence
once they break RedReader ill be out. old.reddit.com is now defunct
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.
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That's news to me, I use old reddit com all the time
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.
> "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
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.
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.
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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...
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...
That is funny, sad & scary at the same time.
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>You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token
....
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.
> 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.)
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.
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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.
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Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
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What is a tat?
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Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
It will sound insane, but I would love a parallel (not a replacement!) internet where everyone is ID verified. Time and place for both.
(13 years ago)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
TIL the phrase's origin.
("Please drink a verification can.")
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.
I would settle for representatives that actually represented the interests of the people rather than those of the wealthiest and their corporations.
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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.
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And ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda normal.
Times change, so does certain expectations.
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.
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.
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Meta hasn't corrected it and there's absolutely no way I give Meta the benefit of a doubt.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread.
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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.
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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.
More than 20 years
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> 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?
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.
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...
Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
91.5% Gross margin :)
https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
Of course not, are you crazy?
Those little virtual stickers isn't enough? What else could you possibly want as compensation?
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Thanks for the gold kind stranger!
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
The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are allowed to see.
that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe RES (or other extension) should gain a mode where new reddit is rendered in the style of old reddit?
For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.
I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right now.
Maybe it's for specific subs?
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This isn't sad at all, this will help me break my reddit addiction splendidly.
I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.
[dead]
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?
Let’s bring Stack Exchanges back!
Or the OG, Expert Sex Change.
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.
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.
I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.
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.
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.
IRC
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)
got banned on my EU country subreddit for saying hamas dresses as civilians
reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet
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.
The new UI you're talking about has entered 2nd grade
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.
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.
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.
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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.
This has to be a parody post, my god.
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??
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.
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.
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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.
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)
> 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.
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.
https://old.lemmy.world/
works also.
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
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.
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.
Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.
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
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
at least with pre-2023 those shillbot accounts were run by people directly!
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
same. already looking into private forums for if/when that day comes.
some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine
They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.
I think my account's old enough to drink liquor. Or had been, before they banned it.
That would be a hard no for me.
Almost. NYSE:RDDT has decided that plain HTML is unprofitable. That is the entire premise in one sentence.
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. :).
“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.
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.
they mean keeping their board/investors safe from scraping. that's all.
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.
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.
Note that Cloudflare is the least reliable source for who's a bot.
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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.
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> 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...
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.'
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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.
Who will pay for these “actual communities”?
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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.
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).
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.
> is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans
Was a surefire way?
Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm
If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation
I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.
i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense
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...
How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to new reddit.
old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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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.
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.
> * 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?
* 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not. I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.
It's particularly sad when its institutions doing that who should really have the capability to host their own videos.
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?
> 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.
hey, it's working again!
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.
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
Related:
Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...)
An earlier thread:
Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857
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...
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.
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.
They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.
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.
Email and phone, or email or phone?
When we spend this much effort picking through their bullshit, whether we prove our case or not, they win.
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"
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.
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.
> 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.
I look forward to New HN.
Name one vulnerability