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Comment by f0e4c2f7 | Hacker News Reader

I almost hesitate to share these because I too found that Reddit's dark patterns were a large part of what helped me break that habit.

I recently discovered teddit.net which is a frontend for reddit with all dark patterns removed.

There is also an alternative front end for twitter called nitter.net that you can use the same way to avoid the app / login.

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For reddit, IMO the simplest things you can do to improve the experience is to force the old reddit design (old.reddit.com) when on desktop, and use any app except the official app when on mobile.

The old mobile interface (i.reddit.com) works well too

You have changed my life.

Thank you.

That's the one I use. The downside is you can't see pictures or gifs in comments nor the rules of a sub-reddit if you want to submit something. Also submit doesn't work correctly sometimes, especially when you need to tag a submission with flair.

I use old.reddit on mobile as well. Personally I prefer panning & zooming on the desktop version of a site to the mobile design in general

You might like i.reddit.com

Yeah, heartily recommend the Apollo app and you don't have to sign in.

I've been using red reader for the better part of a decade. Its far from the flashiest but its clean, easy to read and performant. Its also FOSS. Since my reddit experience revolves mostly around special interest subs with text heavy discussion, it suits my needs well. If you wanted something to scroll through the media heavy meme subs or the front page there are better options.

I'm speculating but recently they added a gdpr/cookie popup that forces you to got on non-old reddit to opt-in/out.. they're trying hard.

The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.

With Teddit, AFAIU the rewrites will keep you on Teddit rather than bouncing from old (or i) to www.reddit.com.

Mind, Reddit shoud GDIAF. The growth hacking crap has also broken my own usage habit. I'll check in periodically, but quite infrequently. I've long since stopped adding new substantive content to my own subreddit(s) there.

With RES I've never seen new reddit, everything always goes to old.reddit.com

Not all browsers support extensions. Even those that do may support only a subset.

(Mobile most especially.)

I'd be amazed if many people are using reddit via browser on mobile, when there are so many good open source reddit apps out there.

> The problem with old.reddit.com (as opposed to teddit) is that numerous links on Reddit will redirect you to the New experience. Absent DNS hacks, you'll find yourself consistently frustrated by this.

I have found that keeping the "Use new Reddit as my default experience" box unchecked on reddit.com/prefs results in almost never being redirected to the "new" site. The only exception is when someone uploaded a gallery - you have click on the "comments" link to see the gallery photos in oldreddit style.

This solution works for me on both mobile browser and desktop browser.

Are you using "old.reddit.com" to visit, or "www.reddit.com" and relying on JS for the old-site experience?

I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.

Personally, I do the latter.

I never type "old.reddit.com". I'm always on www.reddit.com, and I'm always on the old site experience.

Of course, I don't know how much of that has to do with the fact that I use RES.

I don't use RES but otherwise have the same experience as you. I never end up in new reddit.

uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop.

> I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.

in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, other than having to re-set the flag in settings now and again. Like I said, the only time i've seen an issue is the odd time someone posts an image gallery - I can't see it in oldreddit style unless I click on comments.

That's a significant difference.

I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.

And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.

With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.

Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/<username> or /r/<subname>). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.

Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.

Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.

I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.

Curious, do you stay logged into reddit?

Logging out is the only thing I can think of that would cause you to keep seeing the new layout.

It occurs regardless of status.

there are browser addons to auto-redirect to old.reddit.com

Unfortunately, I think they are going to decommission that version eventually.

Something that irritated me, for instance, was how they decided to remove the account activity panel, making revisiting recent links waaay harder. That coupled with the fact that they also remove a link from the front page too quickly is also making me to use the site less. So much for the dark patterns, heh.

I don't care, because as soon as they do that I'll be quitting.

Thanks. I broke my reddit habit when I realized that most of the communities on reddit are just ideological echo chambers where you get banned for saying anything the community doesn't agree with. It lost most of it's value when honest conversations couldn't take place anymore. Now the only time I use reddit is when the only search results with the answer to a question I have point to reddit, and I've grown very weary of their tracking and harassing me to use their spyware app. Teddit is a nice way to get the information I'm looking for without being jerked around by those stalkers at reddit. We'll see how long it lasts before being blocked.

the hive-mind propaganda circle jerk took over, and many dont even realize they are still jerkin'

I'd argue that any site with like/dislike functions which influence the visibility of posts end up this way.

A lot of it has to do with being able to see the points. People think “it has a lot of points so it must be right”, which is rarely true, especially on Reddit. HN hides the points on comments and has a bit of unpredictability to the sorting to allow things to float up provided they haven’t been flagged/downvote bombed. I think it is the largest reason HN is still healthy, other than the great moderation.

While HN definitely becomes a bit of an echochamber at times too, at least you can still voice opinions that go against it without people going through your history to attack you rather than your arguments. Occasionally you get downvoted/flagged enough that people can't reply anymore, but again: That stays with just that comment/thread.

Android has a client called RedReader that makes Reddit highly tolerable: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/

Part of me wishes there was something as nice as this for the desktop, the other part of me thinks I already waste too much time on Reddit. (The signal-to-noise ratio is just largely not worth it compared to my hand-curated list of blogs I follow via RSS.)

I second red reader. To you SNR point, I think that is entirely due to the communities you join and how you manage it. Unsub from all of the default subs. They are all garbage. And any that gets beyond a certain size will inevitably fall to low effort reposts and click bait.

Reddit is best as a platform for effortlessly making focused special interest forums. In the past these would have required a PHBB instance and hosting, would have nonexistent SEO and would be almost impossible to find. But they would have some of the best content the internet had to offer.

Second teddit

Will mention though that I’ve had wholly uncontroversial HN accounts, with positive karma, deleted after suggesting teddit.net, only stating a link to the about page, in a thread.

I am mostly unbothered by it since the bar of entry for creating an account on HN is so low, and you can read it without one, but am still confused.

Perhaps there is auto moderation that deletes an account if it posts a comment with only a link?

New accounts that post links often get auto-flagged, because they're mostly spammers. You can probably recover your account by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

+1 for teddit.net, I discovered it because it’s a default Insight Browser extension, as is old.reddit.net.

Using a 3rd party mobile client also does the trick - no ads either. Apollo on iOS is awesome.

I always saw some comments of people saying "RIP Inbox" after one of their posts became popular in Reddit. I kid you not, it was not until earlier today that I found out that the reason for those comments is that apparenlty Reddit sends replies to your post to your email inbox. My reddit account is so old that it doesn't have a linked email, so I never realized that.

This is the same reason I don’t tell people how I get around HN’s “noprocrast.”

Just log out, I guess? I don't comment very frequently, the links are what keeps me coming back.

My trick for getting around noprocrast is being too dumb to set it up correctly.

Is there no similar frontend for facebook? It seems like its impossible to view facebook posts and timelines without an account.

There’s also libredd.it

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