How to access Reddit without ads and tracking | Hacker News Reader

How to access Reddit without ads and tracking

privacytools.io

57 pointslysergia56 comments

Reddit has declined so significantly in quality and (in particular) moderation that it's hard to get much out of it. I used it from the very beginning and now overall quality (both posts and comments) is as low as I can recall. Mods have ridiculous power over any users that actually participate in the comments and, in my opinion, the "weaponization" of moderator ability as well as of reddit's newer mod tools has gotten to the point where you participate at your account's peril.

If you want to graze it on the toilet, fine. If you participate in a niche subreddit where the mods value a lack of censorship, fine. Outside of that it has become a place for reposted content, low quality commentary (literally the opposite of a place like this) and a rapidly increasing moderator tyranny.

Agreed. I'm progressive and try to engage in good faith, but have been banned from a number of subs such as whitepeopletwitter (racist name), politics, latestagecapitalism, and several others because they are safe spaces. They are agitation echo chambers. I get that sometimes, skilled trolls play devil's advocate to take conversations off the rails, but the banhammer falls far too quickly on the large subs. It really is propaganda trash.

Reddit is alright for municipal subs, hobbies, and technical stuff. As well as mindless entertainment, my favorite is idiotsincars and catastrophicfailure. Anything where inside jokes are rampant or memes are allowed is trash (political compass memes, programmer humor). Political subs are good sometimes, only if you find a good highly up oted comment with good sourcing of data. But the bulk is just as simple minded as a fox news comments section.

I was banned from a pro-ccp sub and reported to reddit (and received a warning for this). My comment was literally, "Finding a subreddit like this is like discovering the Upside Down from Stranger Things". That's it. No back and forth, no other comments. Simply those words. For that reddit threatened me (someone active on the site for 14 years, with hundreds of thousands of their "karma", a subreddit moderator and who has "reddit gold") with a ban.

Thanks, it's a helpful reminder that we're just a pair of eyeballs / free content generators for Reddit.

Reddit got a $150 million investment from Tencent.

Right wing strategists must love these "leftist" totalitarian safe-space bullies, successfully alienating everyone from a more centrist/moderate viewpoint, destroying careers of people who said ignorant things 10 years ago, while Roe V. Wade and Miranda rights get overturned. They'd be happily winning internet points as democracy fails around them.

They're just as responsible for the issues in America as the extreme right.

Why are you complaining about morons on Reddit who have no effect on real world politics when moderate Dems have had political control for most of recent history? Its funny that you’re not blaming “everyone from a more centrist/moderate viewpoint” for their own failure of doing nothing to codify Roe for the last 50 years.

The moderator problem is a tough one, because you want them there to remove spam and illegal content, but that's about it. You can't tell them that, because they personally do it to stroke their ego--like a make-believe New York Times editor, swaying the public.

So how do you continue to trick them into doing their $8/hour broom jobs for free, but prevent them from injecting their dumb politics into everything? I don't think you can.

I moderate a geo sub. I've backed away from it because it is thankless and you see the worst comments all the time. And then comments like this that assign bad faith to any decision you don't like.

I signed up to do it because I didn't want my geo sub to be swamped by spam, trolls and the like, and at the time I was online two or three hours a day.

I do think some subs have terrible mods, and that some larger subs are manipulated and astroturfed by organizations we don't know about by supermods. But give some of the smaller subs some slack.

Separate issue: on the internet, it is near impossible to tell good faith discussion from bad when a comment makes any kind of snarky tone or logical fallacy. And there is so much trash on the internet that it can be easy to delete really shitty low effort comments - you may imagine some young troll getting their kicks on stirring things up. But it may be just as likely they're just someone with some bad ideas who can't do rhetoric well.

And so when you delete their comment, you think "yes, cleaned up a troll" while the person who tried to engage in conversation just sees censorship.

Upvotes and locking comments are better than deleting or banning. Again, Slashdot has the best moderation and filter system.

A moderator must moderate vigorously or the admins will eventually take over the sub or shut it down, or both. Every sub of decent size if you search the mod logs has admin activity at some point, even if it is infrequent. I don't see this trend reversing, Anderson Cooper put fear into Condé Nast, and I would imagine all those who run the site and many who don't believe rightly so.

For me it's the groupthink mentality where anything but the status quo is downvoted to oblivion.

Other than that I don't get much out of the site, because most the subs I would enjoy are so small, I can just visit once or twice a year and sort by best of the year, and stop when the quality drops. That was I never even need an account.

The groupthink mentality has gotten way out of hand.

While you might think a subreddit is a place for fans of X topic to gather, it seems to end up as a place for superfans to gather. This can be a problem since their viewpoints are extreme and niche.

Instead of merely enjoying topic X and thinking of X in generally positive thoughts, the superfans treat topic X as the BEST EVER. Any discussion of X's shortcomings is met with downvotes or negative comments.

So many repost bots too. I don't even browse reddit that much and I see the same posts over and over or videos and images reposted and taken out of context. It's becoming similar to the gutter press tabloids that aim for shock value and reaction.

The moderator issue has been a problem for a long time. You yourself may have only recently discovered it, but it's been a problem since subreddits have existed.

- There are groups of moderators that maintain lists and if you get on that list you're banned from umpteen different subreddits as a result. For example... I once had an /r/The_Donald post pop up in my main feed and I posted on it not even realizing what subreddit it was. Next thing I know I'm getting messaged from a dozen or more moderators of other subreddits telling me I've been banned for posting on /r/The_Donald. The sad part is I was disagreeing with what someone said, so I was effectively probably more in-line with these moderators than /r/The_Donald in particular.

- I've had moderators send me messages telling me I was getting put on such and such list and then watching myself get ban message after ban message from subreddits I didn't even know existed.

__REDDIT MODERATORS SHOULD GET BANNED FOR DOING THIS__ But they never will. This is what the reddit admin's are for (cross subreddit moderation). But having said that...

- I once had someone on /r/emulation start using other accounts to start responding to me in ways that strongly implied I was harassing them across subreddits. It was a _COMPLETE_ fabrication but that didn't stop a reddit admin from contacting me directly and threatening to give me a sitewide ban. There's no way this person did that randomly, I guarantee you it works and the only reason I avoided it was by contacting the general reddit admin team and pointing it out with all the evidence that I had had no interaction with these accounts in the past.

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There are also plenty of subreddits I've chosen not to frequent anymore due to either treatment of myself, treatment of others, or just general policy changes. Those include, but are not limited to:

/r/patientgamers /r/rpg_gamers /r/fitness /r/books

In particular, /r/patientgamers and /r/fitness make me sad. I enjoyed them until the moderators decided there needed to be a "woke agenda".

The /r/patientgamers moderator decided it was a good idea to declare to everyone how they would be banned unequivocally for discussions around LBTQ+ issues. I think it was around the broujaja of the Baldurs Gate 3 trans character, but I could be misremembering.

/r/fitness at one point decided they had to have a female moderator. The moderator absolutely had to be female and the sole reason this moderator was to enforce womens rights issues because men can't do it.

I left both w/i days and haven't been back to either. I understand a policy of banning people who step over a line, I don't understand a policy of hiring a moderator whose sole purpose is to look for and preemptively ban behavior that the person being responded to doesn't even think is problematic. And I've seen that happen, I've found myself defending someone who got moderatored for their response to me. If I'm the target of that response and even I don't think it's a problem, where's the problem?

/r/rpg_gamers brought on a mod who is just a dickhead, full stop.

/r/bedbugs banned me for posting a link to amazon, I posted it as a response to a someone giving a recommendation of a strategy to use. Another moderator contacted me a few months later to tell me that mod was a problem and they removed him.

There absolutely NEEDS to be a way for the community to protect itself from moderators.

Nowadays I don't really visit or post on reddit much. Too much noise anyway. I posted this mostly to point out that this isn't nearly a new problem.

I'm only an occasional reddit user so have not looked for such clients yet my guess is most heavy users are already using such tricks as it's unbearable to put up with the magnitude of advertising on reddit

Note to reddit: rethink your advertising strategy as it's unforgiving to be pummeled by ads incessantly

>without [...] tracking

of the ios apps they listed:

apollo: has anonymous analytics

narwhal: has "Usage Data Advertising Data" under "Data Used to Track You" and "Data Linked to You", has anonymous analytics/usage/crash logs, and uses your device id

not exactly escaping much tracking here.

Personally I use old.reddit.com with an AD blocker. Surprisingly this article doesn’t mention it

Apollo can have analytics disabled. Any 3rd party client defeats ad engagement tracking. You can curl their API yourself and you have defeated tracking. If the client isn't serving ads, like Apollo and Tweetbot, there isn't any engagement to track. It's limited to what you interact with while logged in. This is how every service works. The analytics for 3rd party clients are purely for the developer to improve their app, they don't care about what you do on it, that information isn't relevant to building a 3rd party client.

Security/Privacy all depends on your threat model and what compromises you are willing to make.

Can you please explain how to turn off Apollo analytics? Thanks.

Looking at the privacy policy, i only noticed "anonymous crash reporting and analytics".

That's easily switched off via Settings > About > Crash Reporting & Analytics.

Edit: looking at the explanation below the On/Off switch, it seems this does provide analytics - "most commonly used features". So, turn it off...

That was very helpful; thanks.

When Reddit goes public and everyone EXCEPT the subreddit moderators make millions/billions, I wonder how long Reddit will stay around for?

It’s the subreddits and the moderators that make what Reddit is today, and they are the ones that do all the hard work and yet somehow they are the only ones that won’t profit from an IPO.

Well, users upload content to FB /TickTock which are then monetized and the users don't get any money. So it is like that for almost all web 2.0 companies

Yes they can definitely monetize their followers.

gopher://gopherddit.com from Lynx.

How about teddit.net?

Unless the post has been updated since your comment, teddit is the first option mentioned.

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