Reddit's website uses DRM for fingerprinting
smitop.com
smitop.com
Why the hell do we need avatars on Reddit anyway? Most of them are animated, strobing distractions.
Reddit has jumped the shark. If there weren't significant opportunity cost, I'd happily work on a replacement. It's become a low-signal, high-noise ad-laden dumpster fire.
Advertising is eating the Internet alive. I fucking hate it.
Nobody wants the redesign. Reddit doesn't need avatars. It used to nicely tread the line between enough people to make it active, but not so many that it didn't still feel niche. It feels very mainstream now, and I think it's lost a lot of what made it actually good. It's asymptotically approaching a social network, but to no benefit, and only the downsides that come with that.
Early reddit was a really fun place. Not sure how to explain it, but it kind of felt like one of those movie/cartoon mad science labs, but as a community. Basically everyone was an engineer, programmer, or scientist of some sort, or so it seemed. Most of the front page was science, tech, and programming news, and the remaining bit was people posting about tech gadgets and other stuff they made. It seemed pretty similar to HN, but more active and with a less market-oriented crowd just making stuff for the hell of it (which HN still gets a decent amount of).
Then people started posting pictures of cakes, political/religious discussions were everywhere, and it just felt weird. Digg was starting to decline and small waves of people started coming in, and once v4 launched and killed Digg, reddit's comment section completely changed, and the submitted content soon followed.
Now I go and see avatars and people buying gifts and gold (someone actually took an old 4chan joke and turned it into a business idea) and endless fake videos and random images. It looks like an absolute circus now.
People having been mentioning that finding niche subreddits is the answer, but in my experience, it's just a game of musical chairs. Virtually all of them get bad eventually.
I think this is where everyone goes off the rails a bit, and I want to explain why: Reddit can't be a community. Reddit is too big to be a community. Reddit is too diverse to be a community. Where's the community between Old-School Runescape players and Lisp programmers? There might be some tiny Venn-diagram overlap, but there's no shared goal there, no spirit of common purpose. The two worlds aren't allied, they aren't opposed, they're simply sharing a common platform useful for allowing online discussions, and they don't cross paths otherwise.
After all, what's a great white shark to a wolf?
If you expect a platform-as-a-whole to be a community, you'll be driven off one platform after the other, time and time again, until you either find one so niche it's never going to grow, or you die unsatisfied. Hell, you might not even be satisfied with the niche platform, given that it'll be a stagnant backwater utterly ignored by the rest of the Internet.
Reddit's solution is Usenet's solution: Subdivisions! Allow tons of smaller sub-platforms to proliferate, and allow them to be communities. Or not. There are some fairly community-like subreddits, and there are some clubby Usenet newsgroups.
That's how the WWW felt when it first started, then the AOL lot turned up.
Even Twitter was like that in the first 6 months or so.
Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.
Like pretty much everything on the internet.
It wasn’t just random, I noticed a major shift leading up to the 2008 election. Reddit’s decision to lock some vocally awful subreddits (/r/politics /r/atheism /uspolitics etc) made the homepage a gaggle of Obama & anti-religious rhetoric rather than anything compelling.
Back in the day, I was an avid SlashDot reader, I even participated in the Sony Rootkit fiasco (I got my 10 minutes of Internet fame for compiling a list https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/398332-neowins-official-s... ) .
At the end of that time, I remember briefly looking into Digg and been nauseated about it, looking into Reddit and just finding it weird (no story summaries?) and looking at HackerNews comments and thinking what a bunch of capitalists wannabe they were (I think with time the discourse in HackerNews has become more "leftist" leaning towards Open Source, freedom, and similar thoughts).
I ended up coming more and more to HackerNews as the quality of the discourse in Slashdot went down, and because the quality of the discourse here in HackerNews became better. I also got into the "startup culture" around that time, so I am sure my perceptions changed.
For some reason I also got more and more into reddit at that time, specific subreddits (mainly about my country while I was an expat, but also about US Politics which I find pretty entertaining to follow).
One thing I have been seeing in HackerNews in the last years is that the "comment effort" has decreased. You see more people writing single line comments like "or so he said" that do not really contribute anything. Although the moderation team make their best to maintain a good amount to SNR in the site, I think something like a reminder each time you are commenting with the main guidelines (be civil, strongest plausible interpretation, good-fate, etc) would help as more an more new people join.
I think this is the inevitable result of letting anyone post anything.
Yup. I've had a reddit account since r/politics was relatively balanced! It was fun and awesome.
And now I am seriously thinking of deleting my account altogether. It is just not worth it any longer.
Use Archive.org to compare 2008 to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and onwards. The addition of thumbnails and gradual shift of the frontpage away from textual content and towards images is almost as remarkable as the increase in high-anxiety, anger and tribalism.
At some point sub-reddits were added, as well, which probably didn't help with the tribalism.
Hah that was in 2006.
The real change for subreddits was when they became user-creatable, but even that was already in 2008.
Point is it's not like they're a recent addition.
Reddit was a better Digg, just as Digg was a better Slashdot. Like Digg before it, there was an “Eternal September,” and one of the consequences was that Paul Graham launched Hacker News to preserve the culture that was being diluted.
This is one of the reasons HN has a strongly opinionated culture and the appetite for firm moderation to maintain that culture: It’s not just a tool for YCombinator, it’s a deliberate attempt to maintain something that was repeatedly lost when previous “hacker” social media sites hit the mainstream.
Even if we look away from its more controversial aspects, at the root of the issue is a simple truth that all successful social media sites become their own worst enemy.
You and I can exchange arguments about whether Reddit 2008 was or wasn’t better than Reddit 2014, but fundamentally, I suspect we agree that “dilution” has a certain effect on culture.
The flip side of that, of course, is “Who are we to scoff at the newcomers?” I am not a more valuable user than someone who joined yesterday, and there is nothing wrong with a social media site evolving to serve newcomers with new tastes and interests.
My son loves exchanging Star Wars and other memes on Reddit. I love that HN doesn’t do memes. C’est la vie.
I remember the thing that really struck me about the Reddit community back then, even on some of the larger subreddits, was that people generally thought of themselves as a community of people helping each other. Lots of "I live in town Foo, I can donate Bar to you" type of stuff. I distinctly remember how that felt like a novel thing for a (relatively at the time) large community. Sure, there was some trolling, but absolutely nowhere near the level of toxicity that is just much more common now.
In some ways that mirrors online discourse at large, but in other ways you're right, just feels like whenever I community reaches a certain size it just starts to suck by definition.
I remember having a deep sense of fear in choosing to give up my digg account, knowing I was going to get banned for posting the AACS key. It was like I was losing a vital part of my identity online.
After a while with my reddit account I felt the same way (it being a vital part of my identity online), but, in recent years I care less and less about the platform. My account is now dead. I just checked and it's almost 2 years since I posted anything.
I have created a few alt accounts which I use for discussing some specific niche things on some niche subreddits which I enjoy, but, the site as a whole has no appeal to me anymore. If I couldn't unsubscribe from the default subs, I would leave the site and never return.
There are some cool communities I enjoy. I spent time (on an alt) in /r/thelastofus discussing the game after I finished playing TLOU2. I spent time on /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa reading about CHAZ/CHOP and events there.
I enjoy HN a lot, but, it's very focused which has an effect of myopia.
When the redesign becomes mandatory and old reddit goes away (and don't kid yourself, it will), I will probably leave and never return, but, unlike digg in 2007 I'm not going to feel like I'm losing anything when I do.
HN has 3? moderators. Number of moderators isn't the issue it's whether they're operating with ulterior motives, particularly hidden motives. Here, I think you can assume promoting Ycombinator and other pg associations are a motive that's not explicit.
People who only stick to the image-posting part of Reddit seem to like it. Not that it speaks highly of it.
Is looking at images profane all of a sudden?
Thankfully there is respite in third party apps. I use Apollo, but there are many good options that push the new "features" to the side or omit them entirely.
Feels like a lifetime ago...
Had to look that up, fancy pants.
I don’t think there is an near tangent approach plan at all, more like what seems a clear intention.
Add in their beta-ing a pay to win karma system right now... it’s like they want the worst of everything.
Next they’ll make a “Reddit award” that is just a loot box, trying to edge a n the worst part of gaming.
I still use Reddit rather often, don't get me wrong, but my interest has been dwindling.
Same here, really.
I guess I don't understand how to browse reddit correctly. Say there is a thread and it has replies. Now I want to read the replies. Via "old.reddit.com", the replies are listed below.
In the new reddit, most replies are hidden. If I click on "continue thread etc.", then again a window opens where some replies are shown, but not all - neither in the branch of the thread nor generally. If I scroll down, I end up in a different reddit thread altogether.
I have to frantically click several links to find all replies, or alternatively I switch to the old layout.
I am convinced I am just dumb, but I just don't get the interface. So let me genuinely ask: How does one browse reddit correctly nowadays? There must be some logic behind the redesign that I don't get.
It helps to realize that you’re not really their target audience. The goal is to keep reddit users on reddit for as long as possible. Counterintuitively, one way to do that is to stuff the screen full of seemingly unrelated stuff, because most people are there to see unrelated stuff. They’re not there to read a comment thread in full. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that 90% of traffic doesn’t read comments at all, most of the time.
I don't think so. Askreddit is one of the most popular subreddits.
Not sure how long they will keep old.reddit.com around though...
Why would you need a plugin? You just set it in your preferences and it will switch to that as soon as you log on, isn't it...? At least that's what happens to me.
I guess it's supposed to increase engagement/addiction, but it does the complete opposite for me. Having to click through 5+ links just to try to read 15 short comments is extremely aggravating. I know about old.reddit but its days are probably numbered so why keep fighting with a site that hates me and my time? I just avoid Reddit whenever possible these days.
i also just open every sub conversation in new tab, on occasions when i can't login to reddit. (since they conveniently forget that you were on old.reddid.com if you are not logged in )
I prefer it, even though they regularly "forget" that you've opted-out of the redesign, on desktop, and "forget" that you don't want the Mobile version of their site on phone.
That's putting it mildly -- I think the "door close" button in elevators is more reliable than the reddit opt-out.
Has this been fixed? I was relying on a workaround, but forgot to set it up again when I reinstalled Windows a few months ago. I only realised that just now, when I went to check the details in order to recommend it. (I'm being vague because I'm unsure what it was; I think it was a Firefox extension.) I wouldn't have lasted this long if I was still frequently being sent back to new reddit.
If I go to the old design and hover over somebody's username, a popover with their avatar appears. Tested on desktop safari. I find it very annoying.
It sold for a lot, and suddenly the new owners are eager to get returns on that investment.
And here we are.
A new Reddit, that somehow does not get sold, would run just fine without all the BS and people would love it and do damn near anything for it.
I consider Reddit a great example of why a public utility type model could work and serve users much better than what exists right now.
Or... some other ownership model that does not include a billion dollar exit would do the same and mean a very nice living for whoever does it.
Reddit launched in June 2005, sold to Condé Nast in October 2006, and was spun off as an independent company with Advanced Publications (Condé Nast's parent) maintaining a majority interest in 2011. So it's only actually been sold once, back in 2006, and that was not for a lot of money -- under $20M. Maybe there's a billion dollar exit in the company's future, but there definitely hasn't been one in its past.
(N.B.: I doubt there's one in its future, either.)
Thanks for the data.
"Billion" was not intended literally. "Large" would make as much sense.
The point being the current parent expects more than may make sense and appears willing to devalue what they have to get there.
Likely does not understand and or care what they have.
They generate a good life for their owners, although less than billions, are self sustaining, are privately owned, and often times the brands are known for quality, uniqueness, or exceptional user experiences.
Wolfram Research, author of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, is a great example of this type of business as a software company.
Could be any of the following:
User owned
Public entity
Lifestyle
Non profit with a charter to maintain value to users
I remain unconvinced discussion requires the increasing messes thrown at it.
I really hope we will have an alternative or some 3rd party client because reddit is still a great way to get information or "socialize" with same minded people.
The new design is literally unusable.
Its a shame because I got to briefly meet Alexis Ohanian in person and he's a great guy. I remember when redditors used to speak of the hivemind, but you don't hear about it anymore.
I was one of the Digg refugees from 2007.
But it's still a dumpster fire of hate, bots and/or paid-for responses, for any sub that reaches critical mass.
Given how far they're willing to go with dark patterns to con people into installing an app I'm actually amazed that they still bother to maintain this legacy versions. Seems like it would've been easy to let them bitrot into being unusable.
According to my traffic stats (moderating ~400k subscribers), old + mobile web frontends make up about twice the traffic of new frontend. Apps are by far the most popular, about ~3x of all web frontends combined.
I do not know a single person that moderates a 100k+ subreddit using the redesign, everyone still seems to be using old + modtools + enhancement suite. Personally, I believe this is the only reason they didn't kill it already.
Edit to add: The new frontend is the default for logged-out users, and it still makes up half of old. If that isn't a failed redesign project, I don't know what is.
e: I just realised, you may need old.reddit.com if you don't sign in.
There are a few extensions around for each browser that fix this, but every time it happens it makes me angry at whatever person thought this was a good idea.
If they rely on metrics for old vs. new this 'feature' obviously distorts the reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
* Waste of real estate with redesign
* pushing users towards more social features
* Increasing ad presence in feeds instead of just the sidebar
* Taking no steps to stop the hategroups that flocked to it in 2015.
> … this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg
Couldn't make this more ironic if I tried.
I still go there for content of smaller subs, but not nearly as often as before.
From Wikipedia:
> Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings
This circle jerking can also be seen on reddit. People have suggested that moderators should be restricted to a few subs, but that didn't happen. They actually removed diversity they so often proclaim to champion.
Say what you want about astroturfing and power-users but most of the content is user submissions still.
Are you aware of Lemmy as a federated replacement for Reddit, which is under development?
There’s a lot more to the Internet than the karma-farming thieves, astroturfing shills and larpy activists on reddit. Broaden your horizons and you might be pleasantly surprised!
Yes but you should do it anyway for the good of humanity, if you don't want to feel defeated then help to build the alternatives like Lemmy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664067
Sometimes things need to be scrapped and started over, largely because of mistakes in the foundation. That's not being defeatist, it's just refusing to try to fix something that is almost certainly easier to rebuild (even if that's a lot of work).
Reddit's goal is to make money. They sell flashy badges and other worthless items and make ridiculous cash from things with literally zero value in addition to their ad money. Any activity there boosts their numbers and just makes them look better on paper.
Unless you're the type of person who solely posts about how horrible reddit is and how everyone needs to leave it (in which case you'll just annoy 90% of the users while the other 10% agrees and buys you a useless badge, fueling the problem more), there's nothing you can do. Ceasing activity is the best action to take. Boycotting is an old and proven method.
I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in late 2016, largely because of the direction the site was starting to go even then. They've taken $500 million in venture capital in the last 3 years, so it's only going to keep getting worse as the pressure builds to create a return for those investors.
A few months after leaving, I decided to start a non-profit so I could work on building a community site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality non-fluff content, etc. There's more info about the site and its goals in the original announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here, but note that it was completely private at the time and you couldn't even view it without getting an invite first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's still invite-only for registration, but it's relatively active and consistently gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else here) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled while we continue to get the site culture built up.
I've already paid that opportunity cost to get most of the basic functionality built, so if you're interested in helping with development on Tildes itself or even adapting it for your own similar site, it might be worth taking a look at the code as well. This is probably the best place to start: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
+dumpsterfire would like to upvote you
Personally, I want to see Usenet come back. The idea of pulling down content and reading them later offline appeals to me.
I agree. Though our perception of usenet from the compuserve era is probably tinted by nostalgic fondness.
Once the internet took off - as I recall - usenet started to become a cesspool of trolls and advertisements.
But, Gopher is growing again, and unlike Usenet, there is no (minimal..) noise, only signal.
The best internet communities are ones that don't need to be a "company".
HN is a great example. HN is run by a rich guy as a hobby. There will never be ads, there will never be a board of directors, the UI will basically never change, there will never be consultants hired to figure out how to make money off of us posting. Yeah you probably could put ads on HN or data mine and make some money, but it won't be enough money for Paul Graham to get out of bed for.
Twitter is also like this. Jack makes his real money from Square. He can run Twitter like his hobby. That's what makes it so great.
Don't kid yourself that it's anyone's hobby. If it were, they wouldn't constantly ask VCs for money, wouldn't run ads, and wouldn't have quarterly earnings calls about how they can grow revenue.
Twitter is just a less successful Facebook.
Just out of curiosity, when did you first come across Reddit? Prior to the Digg exodus 10 years ago it was a super solid community, and if my memory serves correct, it didn't really start going downhill until somewhere between 2012 and 2014.
Definitely agree, it's a long and challenging journey to build any new product, and more so with no guarantee anyone will use it. I'm working on a new hybrid discussion site after being exhausted from using reddit and other sites for the past decade. There will _never_ be animated avatars on this site. Still in active dev but feel free to check it out! https://sqwok.im
Advertising is one of the biggest factors for wealth disparity. What used to be thousands of people handling marketing now consists of millions of people gambling away their life savings on ads in hopes of making it big.
I speak to at least 20 sellers a week and some of them have acos of more than 60% taking in a loss for months in hope of making it big. Most of them go bankrupt.
The house always wins.
> I suppose Reddit's new userbase may
> not even know what that means.
I immediately set mine to a nausea-inducing (or worse, apologies) red-green-blue strobe. In protest.
That was ... eventually ... fixed. But yes, gratuitous user-specifiable animations are horrible.
Reddit decidedly has problems.
Much better signal to noise ratio.
I agree with everything else you’ve stated.
That would just leave labour of love sites, institutional sites or sites you are on because you want to buy things. This covers all the sites I actually like.
A hot streaming mess....
But fundamentally it's just more proof that a centralised internet only ever turns to rot.
https://saidit.net/s/whatever/comments/55v1/since_hate_speec...
Helped me stop using the site impulsively anyway.
Old Reddit wouldn't have cared if you left the site to read an interesting linked article. The new one does everything it can do get you to stay on the site, or better, install and never leave the app.
Judge this through the lens of the bigger picture. See their endgame and how it may not be in line with your expectations.
There are alternatives, I tried notabug.io for a few weeks, but realized the racist brigade is already infesting that corner of the web.
I'm having a lot less fun on the internet lately than I had 20 years ago.
This might seem like a small difference, but reason activists hate DRM is that it enables service providers to go a step beyond traditional fingerprinting and gain a truly unique identifier.
Some may suggest that web services should just give up on bot detection, open up all of their private APIs, and accept bots and third-party clients as facts of life. But this idealism is out of touch with the reality of running an expensive, large-scale web service and a customer-facing business.
> but reason activists hate DRM is that it enables service providers to go a step beyond traditional fingerprinting and gain a truly unique identifier.
The reason is that in some places on Earth you can be sentenced for violation of special computer laws prohibiting you to even look at such code and disclose what it does, you just run it and see what happens
You couldn't in this case, no license object is served. It literally just asks the browser which systems it supports.
Currently. Do we know that? Is that in their privacy policy? If it works well enough technically, will they use it for other things?
... asking for a friend.
For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.
It's happened more than once already.
Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt.
Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.
It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.
On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported.
I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.
+1. They learned how to boil the frog much better. Note how the top comments are recommending old.reddit as a valid option. While old is specifically there as an A/B test of sorts to prevent the most vocal people from leaving.
It's all quite amazing in a way...
I guess the plan is that enough people will have started with the new UI and have never known the old one that even with the old people leaving, the site may still remain alive?
That was a decade ago, and tech has become a lot more normalized since. Today's Reddit gets visibility on MM possibly more often than any site other than Google. Its users span the political spectrum, treat it as a utility, and for the most part never chose to come to Reddit, never critiqued it, and wouldn't notice if anything about it changed much. It's easy to imagine many modern users never make it off the front page.
I don't think Reddit will die like Digg did. It's the megaphone of the Internet, and could probably commit much worse transgressions than some random DRM technobabble before the common user would take notice.
At present there isn’t an obvious choice for where to migrate. Maybe more specialized boards like Hacker News will be the thriving suburbs outside of a dystopian reddit metropolis.
But it's a pretty shit site now anyway compared to how it used to be. It's the law of forums it seems to be.
But I agree with the user hostile notion. They are terrible nowadays
To be honest, as a whole the content has slowly decreased in quality. Now I finally understand that a lot of content on reddit is just farming karma for bots, so those bots can be sold for astroturfers. So I have a lot of distrust for reddit in general.
I'm feeling more and more frustrated, and I tell myself more and more that I have little interest going to reddit.
I've been using Reddit - reading a lot, commenting quite a bit, posting a little - since I read about it in the Joel on Software blog in 2006. It has been fascinating and fun but I've made no lasting friendships or connections. I'd move to something better with no regrets, but the site owners are probably never going to annoy me enough to move to something worse out of principle.
IMHO Digg was a success despite itself. Run more like a sophomoric Animal House [i] than a facebook or twitter. It was only a matter of time until it imploded.
There's nothing more user hostile than going bankrupt due to advertising fraud.
If the old one didn't do this, there's yet another reason to use it...
I still believe that part of the reason a lot of sites are moving to JS-only SPAs and the like is that it becomes much harder to block things like this. Regardless of sandboxing, the idea of letting a site execute Turing-complete computations on its visitor's computers, just to display what could be done without, is quite repulsive.
I'll admit that I have never been keen on the "browse with Javascript disabled" idea, but after my digging around yesterday to figure out why Reddit kept asking me to enable DRM [which I totally should've blogged about but oh well....] it shocked me to see just how much JS code was being loaded on each pageview.
Now I'm seriously considering taking the NoScript plunge.
The problem is that a light sprinkling of Javascript really can go a long way towards making HTML more usable -- how can we find a way to permit the "good" uses of Javascript while prohibiting all of the "bad"?
By imposing resource limits? I know browsers already have time limits on script execution, but perhaps a memory limit would help too. A "light sprinkling of Javascript" would probably need KBs or a few MB at most to do what it needs to. The problem is that none of the mainstream browsers nor web developers (and especially not Google's) will want to do that --- compare new vs (unfortunately, quickly disappearing) old YouTube, for example; the latter is a mostly-static site with JS enhancements, and the former is basically a SPA. Despite the reduction in functionality of the former, the most common complaints are about how slow it is, and it uses a huge amount of RAM too.
I always thought HTML could've been gradually extended with new elements for capturing and replacing UI techniques which Javascript is essential for, but that hasn't happened. Instead, HTML is stuck with what was envisioned in 2008 or earlier (coming from a hierarchical document structure for casual academic publishing), and everything else in the browser (CSS, Javascript) evolved to work around it. Today, we have CSS with it's absurd ninja powers to completely change and reinterpret the HTML DOM with a secondary document structure in the name of "semantic" HTML, locked to a 1990's idea of how a generic document should look like. It seems the evolution of HTML as a markup language suffered from being organizationally fossilized, after W3C ventured into an unrealistic XHTML2 moonshot, thus giving HTML language extensions a bad name, and the proponents of CSS believing their own "separation of concerns" story after the fact when it just started out as a hack to overcome HTML's limitations (it being in the hands of W3C and W3C focussing on a ten-year roll to replace HTML with XHTML and other XML vocabularies). HTML/SGML always had all the power you could want to define new vocabulary, even ways to define new elements in terms of fragments/combinations of existing ones for vocabulary evolution.
To be fair, though, during most of the web's existence, a visual language had to evolve as there simply was no blueprint available for how we'd use hypertext on a massive scale, especially with mobile devices. Unfortunately, the mechanisms HTML5 today has for vocabulary evolution (ie. custom elements and maybe template elements and web components) all require tons of Javascript as well.
FWIW, there's GNU's LibreJS initiative to block all but F/OSS or "trivial" JavaScript, but I don't believe it has had any impact (and it focuses solely on the licensing aspect).
It's quite a bit easier to see what's going on, toggle scripts and other assets from multiple sources, and you can change the defaults to do things like allow first-party scripts by default if you don't want to go all the way to full blocking.
It takes a while to get used to using a script-blocker like it, but it's pretty straightforward most of the time, and once you get your most commonly-used sites set up you don't need to mess around with it very often.
I set the defaults to load only the main site, and load no javascript. Then per-site I turn things on until it's workable.
basically start with:
* * * block
* * frame block
* * script block
* 1st-party * allow
* 1st-party frame allow
that + reader mode makes even horrendous sites pleasant.
When you encounter a site (usually news sites) where the article looks wonky, just use Firefox's "reader view" which pulls out the text and puts it into a nicely formatted, clean tab.
If I can restrict certain sites to different browser APIs, it would make it so much easier to get rid of annoying browsing behaviour. For example, there is no good reason to allow websites to sniff my clipboard or to play multimedia without my consent.
The reason the web could and can never end up being a read only protocol is people like the little features that make it exactly not that. People like that a page can not load images until they are needed, people like that their food delivery status can update without constantly reloading the page, people like the "cool" page that has some wizz bang interactive graphic, people like interactive content with the stream, people like live web chat like discord or twitch. Plenty of people don't have any interest in those things, they just want a book with the occasional image, but that's not what the majority get pulled in by on the web.
And once you have those things someone will always take advantage of it. If they didn't have these things they would take advantage of whatever they could. Even now there are tracking pixels and a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with JS being in the browser.
The solution isn't to try to say a page shouldn't be able to do "complicated" (for lack of a better term) things. Most people don't find a page running code repulsive. Maybe ads, bad actors, tracking. Even then a surprising number of people don't mind. But the problem wasn't that the browser has Turing complete interfaces.
What is the solution for these bad actors and use cases? Don't know. I don't think anyone knows. What I do know is if all people want are books with pictures the web isn't the medium to try to find that content in and hasn't ever really been intended as such (i.e. it's not a new development it's just easier to make and/or abuse dynamic content now).
A model of paying for resources not based on serving ads and selling data? If you're not paying for a service, you are the product, not the customer.
Long story short, eventually you're going to want some user interaction beyond submitting forms, and if you've built your site as anything other than a js SPA, it's quickly going to become ugly.
That way simple stuff like:
var form = document.forms[0];
document.getElementById('foo').addEventListener('change',
function (e) {
if (e.target.value == 'xyzzy')
form.elements['bar'].classList.add('show');
}
);
And then, as a bonus, we could dump the entire JIT infrastructure and go back to a simple JS interpreter (a la Duktape) because there just wouldn't be much code left to interpret in the first place.
I believe they used to use a separate domain or endpoint but being a more tech savvy audience this was blocked by a lot of people.
Load a page in old.reddit.com and you'll see a "vote" pop up in the network requests
Why is Turing-completeness the issue here?
Proving the same constraints and having the same trust in a Turing complete language is basically the halting problem, which is not computable.
It's likely that they discovered through A/B testing that they could improve their metrics and monetization strategy this way better than the original UI. Reddit doesn't exist to satisfy us, it exists to make money.
I agree the new design is just awful, but you can switch to the old design in the settings menus (equivalent to browsing https://old.reddit.com ).
In the pretty printed version of https://www.redditstatic.com/desktop2x/Reddit.de2e3f279d82ee... add a breakpoint to the first line of this part of the code.
if (!as(e))
return;
const t = e.user.account ? Jt()(e.user.account.id).toString() : void 0
, s = document.createElement("script");
s.src = Object(es.a)("https://s.udkcrj.com/ag/386183/clear.js", {
dt: "3861831591810830724000",
pd: "acc",
mo: 0,
et: 0,
ti: $t()(),
ui: t,
si: "d2x"
}),
e.runTimeEnvVars.staging=true> Specfically, it looks for Widevine, PlayReady, Clearkey, and Adobe Primetime
Later
[wait, no, I'm wrong about that link]
Later
[wait, no, I was wrong about being wrong; here's the link. Thanks, Pinboard!]
https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....
I wish we had an equivalent for every big website.
The equivalent for websites is probably reader mode supported in various browsers or addons, but that too is probably limited. Pretty sure it doesn't work for Reddit, but for Reddit there may be browser addons that clean up the interface by a lot.
Alternative will happen, there is a pile already being promoted we will see who wins.
That just makes it harder for people trying to see insightful comments from years ago.
Was it this one? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-histor...
If you as a user care about both, perhaps a nuanced opinion is warranted.
I could say it’s defensible but a big reason bots are a problem is the way the entire online ad system is still the Wild West. There is no regulation so I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of the bots were just competitors. It has to be tempting to use that black hat fraud defense knowledge against your competitors, especially if there is so little regulation or transparency.
This would allow sharing posts, and decentralized hosting, because all the real content would be stored on the NNTP host.
(A simpler approach would be to use an IMAP server - a different mailbox for each group, and threads naturally being stored as .. threaded emails.)
Perhaps I should have a stab at actually implementing it!
User Privacy Vs. Troll/Bot Protection
If you want stronger privacy (weaker browser fingerprinting), then you must equal-and-oppositely accept that that allows Trolls and Bots to flourish on the network...
On the other hand, you can have less Trolls and Bots on the network -- but this means that you must give up some of your privacy via stronger browser fingerprinting...
So, the next logical question is, is there a way to have the best of both worlds, that is, more privacy (less browser fingerprinting), and less Trolls and Bots simultaneously?
The answer I come up with at this time is:
"No -- UNLESS Reddit were to call up every single user that registers, and voice verify them and/or make sure they have a credit card or other valid ID on file... and then they'd have to take extra steps to validate those..."
So yes, it could be done... but then Reddit might lose its automated registration process -- and possibly casual users, who didn't want to provide all of that information as well...
It's interesting, because all online user commmunities represent various types of compromises between the different factors I've outlined above (there are more factors, of course)... in the future, I should create a matrix of all of them, and see where other various famous online communities exist as points on it... I think such an exercise would be enlightening in some way or other...
EDIT: their blanket policy I found on the web was what I expected. I donate money to Reddit and I wish that as a perk I had more privacy “We may share information between and among Reddit, and any of our parents, affiliates, subsidiaries, and other companies under common control and ownership.”
Ignoring everything else, this made me chuckle quite a bit. I can only imagine how much funnier it'd be if I actually saw that line while picking apart minified code.
https://gist.github.com/michael-lazar/8c31b9f637c3b9d7fbdcbb...
Google's anti-bot team in St. Petersburg had a lot of positions for such "talent" good at using borderline exploit techniques to detect bots as far back as 2012-2013
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17649371
> You know, mobile ads companies resort to borderline exploits to fight botting, but even they loose out.
> Lockdown is a useless measure, from my experience. Both IOS and Android ad nets croak under 60-70% bot traffic.
It is impossible to understate how much better off this world would be without Reddit.
Old reddit had easy to use features like a built in wiki system that let a lot of communities form with minimal friction.
I'm not sure what a better alternative would be that is also as easy to use.
But at least 4chan was always upfront about its policies: you could always basically post anything as long as it didn't put the site's existence in jeopardy, so effectively as long as the lawyers/cops/fbi didn't come knocking it was free for all.
Reddit is roughly the same thing except they hypocritically attempt to maintain a façade of being "the good guys". I remember in particular how, after having hosted "jail bait" and other very questionable content for years they finally decided to no longer allow it they felt the need to publish a heartfelt message about how "we thought about our daughters" and all that crap instead of saying the truth, which is that it just generated too much bad publicity and made the advertisers go away.
Reddit is 4chan pretending to be Facebook.
you can have meaningful on topic discussions on a forum spanning across months and even years, reddit has the priority and visibility on new threads same as HN. The style of writing seems to be different but that of course depends on the forum or subreddit (I have yet to find the good ones if there are any)
Any big company with ad revenue has their own research and proprietary methods to catch fraudulent ads and TOS violators. It's been happening for years, and as long as browsers "improve", it will continue.
That must have also been around the time the same guy who introduced me to Reddit also asked me to check out a cool game he was playing called Minecraft!
Reading through the comments here is a bit weird for me because it seems like I have a much different experience that most folks here. I suspect this is because a) I use the RES browser extension to filter out a great many useless or unpleasant subreddits and b) most of my time on Reddit is spent moderating.
The redesign however, is a bit of disaster. Even though I don't care for the look I would have used it but when they rolled it out and made it the default experience it lacked the basic functionality for moderators which is where I spend the majority of my time on Reddit. For two years every time the admins released some improvement to it, I would go back and try to use it and couldn't... so I gave up and branded it "worse.Reddit"
Anyway, I suppose it's about time to find an alternative to Reddit but I've yet to find a site where I can create and curate niche communities, like I do on Reddit or where I could somehow transfer the collected data and experience of the larger subreddits I moderate to some other site (which isn't already home to unpleasant extremists who left Reddit).
So far I know about: https://tildes.net/ and https://dev.lemmy.ml/. I sorta lean towards lemmy but I don't have a solid reason for that.
Lastly fingerprinting on Reddit seems like a very useful and very needed solution to problems that have little to do with targetted advertising or selling private user data.
Ohhhh cliffhanger!
Tell us more?
I suspect you're referring to abuse???
The site does a lot of fingerprinting, and the EME module is one of the least useful bits and doesn't really reveal anything the browser user agent string doesn't already.
I've been browsing with off-by-default JS basically since JS was invented, and my list of trusted sites has remained very small (around a dozen) --- the majority of sites I come across on searches that ask me to enable it will simply cause me to go somewhere else. The rare occasion that I can't find the information elsewhere, I will view source and sometimes it's sitting there, or even RE the API, but actually getting me to enable JS is close to a "never", as it's reserved for the very few sites I have far more trust in, e.g. my bank.
Once --- and only once --- I was enticed by a site that doesn't need it to "enable JS for a better experience", and immediately disabled it again when I was bombarded with ads and other distracting, irritating shit (selecting text causes a popup, elements animating around while I'm trying to focus, etc.)
Why can't they just use something like a proof-of-work mechanism to combat spam?
I don't believe there is a level of work that one could do that would both be too expensive for scammers and not grind your battery to a halt.