So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe | Hacker News Reader

So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

cole-k.com

610 pointsmontroser645 comments

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

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.

the big click of reddit like yahoo forums and other earlier things is that each 'sub' reddit can have its own rules culture, etc. its like facebook groups in a way. Unfortunately with how bad reddit is, I see mostly my interest niche hobbies moving to facebook.

Forms are sadly dead. They cost a lot to operate and maintain security updates for so without a critical mass of users they are dead

Just like with VR, you can keep on claiming forums are "dead" all you like. Me and all my friends will keep on using them daily.

therearedozensofus.gif

"Good thing you're the majority of people, then." - samplatt [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002685

I was a hypocrite even writing that comment; my latest phone ALSO has an FM radio. Guess that reddit-quippiness infected me too much that day, sorry.

I wish my phone had FM radio.

They are dead the same way newsgroups are dead. Some local communities survive some might even thrive but in aggregate more are lost than created

Cost a lot to operate? apt-get install forum-software. All security updates with apt-get updates. Use something like Debian, and you keep the same forum software for years with zero config changes, but with security updates.

I know endless local groups. Bike clubs. Hobby groups. They still all run on forums and mailing lists. No ads. No tracking. No doom-scrolling or this and that. Cost?

For many of them, a $5/month VM.

You have to moderate it

Reddit mods are volunteers as well.

Reddit's system ends up giving them enough dopamine (somehow, probably related to how users get it) to do it for a while. Forums aren't as addictive.

My forum mods loved the power they had as well seemed to work well. The real problem is money. Forums cost time and money to administer, Reddit is “free”. Those of us that ran the forums grew up and have better shit to do and spend money on

Seeing as people have been self-moderating some of these forums for more than 20 years, it's a solved, non-issue. Just because you're not familiar with this, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's worked since the 70s with bulletin board systems.

Yes, those required moderation too.

Again, solved problem for community sites.

They are cheap to operate now. This is something governments and big tech will fix.

As I said in another comment they are no longer as cheap to operate in the UK because of regulatory requirements, and this sort of regulation tends to get copied and extended around the world. All for the sake of the children, of course.

How much will it cost with UGC requires age verification and round the clock moderation? When its a risk to do it without a company to shield you from liability?

Someone is always hungry and willing to ignore international norms for a greenback. Vanuatu will sell citizenship to any hoodwinking criminal for a paltry sum. Comoros will sell internet "gaming licenses" to any money launderer with some change rolling around. Some other shithole island will happily not pass the law so that whatever warlord is in charge can buy enough coconuts for the plebs not to overthrow him, by selling pirate internet services. Then all the forums will be hosted there.

Those thing will be priced to be affordable by the right, not normal people.

Selling pirate services will not solve the problem for someone running something like a community forum for their area, or a national forum for their hobby, or similar. You are still within the reach of your own country.

Local bike clubs and hobby groups presumably know their members, so age verification and moderation aren't issues. Despite computers theoretically being able to connect to anyone in the world, you don't have to use them that way.

Its fine for some groups, but its extra work (you cannot just let people sign up, the admins will have to add each user individually) and for many things you want people to join. A very local hobby group might be OK, but anything broader is a problem. A hobby group for a city? A community forum for a village?

You don't need a centralized approver; you could give any member invite privileges or have a shared password or QR code that members can give out, or that can be shared at in-person meetups, etc. That should work fine still for a city-scale group (which in practice is still going to be maybe a few dozen members). Community forum like for a PTO is also the exact type of thing I had in mind. Print a QR code with embedded password on flyers.

Its still going to create extra costs and risks. What happens if a member over-shares a QR code? What happens if you trust the wrong people? Children can scan flyers too. Governments will move to close loopholes and get ISPs to block sites. Technical solutions do not fix social and political problems.

This is certainly an American perspective, but I wouldn't worry at all about such things. The government has no legitimate interest in regulating your local bicycle club's discussion forum so you should be about as worried as you'd be not going to church if a law were passed saying everyone must be Christian.

Some are alive, eg. LowEndTalk. They are not as general as Reddit.

They do not need to be.

They are one of those things that governments and big tech do not like. They are too easy for just anyone to operate, so I think we can see more legislation aimed at making running forums harder or more expensive, like the Online Safety Act in the UK.

As programmers we assume we have to preemptively comply with every possible rule, which is a heavy burden, but I think in every case that isn't completely egregious (like 4chan) the government asks you nicely first. When I look at people with successful projects they only seem to be concerned with following the most obvious laws and the ones they have been warned about following.

An exception is copyright law. Because of massive corporate pressure, you can go to jail quickly for sharing a copyrighted work. Fortunately there's still section 230 which immunizes intermediaries.

And yet here we all are.

Subaru forums are all somehow going strong

How did vBulletin/phpBB came to dominate the forum space in the English internet? To me, that seem like the source of a lot of problems for the forum culture and centralization into Reddit.

I used to run a few forums. Did some work for SMF 1.x back in the day too.

The thing that got vBulletin to succeed over UBB was themes and customizations/hooks.

The thing that made phpBB popular was it didn’t require a license like vBulletin.

Honorable mention is SMF. It replaced YaBB SE, was also free, but had an amazing mod system that didn’t require any manual file editing. And [Unknown] and his team did a great job on the database keeping it way more performant than phpBB was in the free space.

vBulletin Did a better job with security. PHPbb kept getting trashed by spammers but they were the primary tools at the time for self hosting. The ease of customization and the availability of skins made it a big selling point

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.

So, is it back to Digg, circle around to Slashdot, or is there a new kid on the block?

If the “protocols not platforms” philosophy is the right track, usenet/nntp.

nntp was built on horribly naive assumptions that do not carry to the present day internet. nostr is a better option.

Fark hasn’t gone anywhere.

That solo dev who developed RES could have forked it and "stolen" the whole site if he wanted to. That would have been so epic.

I'm mostly just here now... More forums for other stuff would be nice though.

Digg tried to make a comeback, but was quickly smothered in the crib by AI bots.

Lemmy is pretty good.

I used to use infinity for reddit, after the api saga, I was able to patch it with my own api key since personal ones were still free. I lost the key since, and had to re-install Infinity, so when I go to the reddit api page, turns out they don't give you keys any more, and instead you need to sign up to their developer platform, which I requires a lot of hoops to get a key for free, and from what I understand, that's a big if.

Anyway, needless to say I've stopped using it for the past 3 months or so. I still open old.reddit on my computer every now and then, but I use reddit so much less because of this.

They started revoking the old personal api keys anyway.

I've almost stopped using it because 3rd party apps finally died a couple months ago. Old.reddit isnt too ergonomic on mobile and new is just awful. Seems like a lot of that sentiment here, they might just kill a big part of their userbase before IPO!

It's also like the only place left on the internet to reliably find real people reviewing things with real opinions.

With AI posts and karma farming -not to mention good old-fashioned astroturfing ...how reliable is that, really?

and yet, it remains, in many subreddits.

>Back to old school forums

It's the year of Our Lord 2026. Good luck discovering forums that you don't already know about!

> 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

Hmmm, I remember this from the past, but one of my adblock rules probably catches this one, I haven't experienced it for years.

I always surf in anon windows that forget all cookies. Works since 2010 without any plugins. :)

Works a treat, I reckon -until the moment comes when you actually want to interact and/or post.

I can't use new reddit - old reddit lets me disable infinite scroll

I think all major platforms should have an option to disable infinite scroll

Otherwise I look up and its 3 hours later

> the purpose of the system is what is does

New reddit is more annoying (to me as human, but also to scrapers) in two very important ways:

- old reddit shows more or less the raw comment tree, sorted, like HN. New reddit does aggressive folding. You get a couple comments for each branch and have to click "show more" to see more

- new reddit forces you to log in to view anything tagged NSFW, including entire subreddits. Old reddit does not enforce this, along with not enforcing some other restrictions reddit has introduced over time

Of course none of this stops a scraper. And there is still the API. But these things make it easier to detect scrapers because they have to make a lot more requests and have to handle user sessions that make them easier to track

As I understand it, anything publicly viewable is free to be scraped without issue.

If you scrape stuff behind a sign-up, you potentially open yourself up to being sued for breach of ToS.

Now I'm sure the Chinese labs don't give a rats arse about that threat, but I imagine it stops the likes of Google, OAI, Anthropic from scraping and instead forces them to purchase the data.

Not how it works ... Anything public viewable is still subject to a TOS. And the whole copyright or whatever still applies.

If your argument was valid, we can scrape news websites and show their content freely. No ... You get sued and lose the case.

See Google News that got their behinds in court and lost. Short summaries are allowed / transformative, but you can not just take content (even without a login). Not without getting into civil court if somebody wants to press the matter.

Now, if you scrap and never make that data public or transform it (LLMs). Then it becomes a harder matter to deal with.

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...

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.

What is a tat?

“Tat” means miscellaneous junk.

That said, the anecdote is made up or important details have been elided to make it sound more interesting than it is. Amazon doesn’t depend on whatsapp for 2fa. You can configure amazon 2fa to send an SMS and it’s possible that the poster’s mother has misconfigured her phone to claim that it needs whatsapp to read the sms 2fa message but I highly doubt even that. When I look on amazon it allows passkeys, regular TOTP like with DUO authenticator or google authenticator or whatever or SMS with a backup of sending the TOTP code to the registered email on the account. Whatsapp isn’t even an option.

How does "tat" differ from "grot"?

Grot is usually intentionally and always utterly unfit for purpose.

Grot is from grotesque and implies dirty or primal, as in grotto, a cave. Sans-serif fonts were called grotesque because they looked primitive. The word grot appears in various 19th century poems as a noun meaning a grotto, where it was supposed to be a lovely place full of fairies. But that meaning wore off and now something grotty is something you'd find in a gutter. The US equivalent is grody.

Tat meanwhile, like gunny, refers to a kind of sackcloth. These words are both from Hindi. The concept is of some cheap filler material. If you want to rush something out, you can wrap it in sackcloth, bag it up in sackcloth, sell it to them in sackcloth, make it quickly out of sackcloth. Or maybe it was left over and has been sitting in a corner for years, at the bottom of a sack. That is "some old tat".

Tat is general rubbish, but generally implies something a bit old fashioned as well. Those decorative plates and figures that old people love? Tat

Grot I've never heard of in terms of buying stuff. Grot to me just implies something dirty

Thank you all for the explications!

My first encounter with "grot" was a BBC comedy, apparently " The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin", wherein a gentleman suffering a mid-life crisis tries to fail at business. However no matter what he does, everything he touches turns to money! At the end he sets up a series of shops named "GROT" which, of course, sell grot and also become enormously successful.

Perhaps the options vary by region?

tat n.

  anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition:
  * Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat.
  * I'm not spending fifty quid on a piece of tat.

People buy it all the time when they practice retail therapy.

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.

“which she doesn’t have and doesn’t want”

> "WhatsApp on her phone"

GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen an older person that doesn't even know what application they're running, or can't tell the difference between the content of a website inside a browser window and an application that runs natively on their computer. I read what the GP wrote, I'm saying there's a non zero possibility she's misunderstanding something.

It seems like something you have to specifically choose, on the amazon account side.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...

I choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick for being unable to differentiate between apps :)

I also chose their presumed first hand statement than your unrelated experience with unrelated third parties.

Your point re: having to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications, if we're staying in the realm of "what ifs" and looking for the awkward but possible ways to discredit the claims, I can believe that she was enrolled without being asked. I've seen at least one person complaining about that exact scenario.

Cheers!

> I choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick

GP of the post or actual GP.....

It's not about being thick. I had a old person ranting at me once because all these Ukrainian girls were emailing him wanting dates, and didn't they realise he was too old for them.

> GP

The one recalling an event with their mother.

Your experience with a old person is not their experience with their mother.

Can you not project your own experiences on someone's else's?

You claim someone's else's reasoning is wrong based on *your* opinion and past, without anything that would support the relevance in *their* case.

Your experience is valid but irrelevant in that case. Don't project.

We generalise about non technical users all the time. Why is it unfair to generalise a subset of those users? What you term 'projecting' is my own experience, where I am supporting backing the experience of someone else. Yes we may be wrong, the op hasn't clarified as far as I'm aware, but I don't think that invalidates the greater point.

How should I engage with young children? Should I talk to a 2 year old like an adult? Or should I use my experience other 2 year old to inform how I should engage with other 2 year olds?

Older people can be surprisingly tech illiterate to a degree many would be surprised by. That is my experience, that is others experience. Yes there will be exceptions. But I don't think that invalidates the generalisation.

Personally I would hope that people would make an extra effort to educate those needing extra help in spotting potential fraud, rather than doing nothing to avoid 'projecting'.

No, my Microsoft Azure 2FA sends codes to WhatsApp, not SMS.

UK, where WhatsApp is absolutely mandatory.

WhatsApp is not in any way mandatory in the UK. I say this as someone who lived in the UK and does not use and has never installed WhatsApp.

but then amazon would not tell her that she should find the code in whatsapp, because amazon would still be sending send an sms. it should not have any awareness of whatsapp hijacking the sms function, and therefore the amazon message should reference the SMS. if it references whatsapp then it means amazon wants to send to whatsapp directly.

If I forget to pause my VPN before going to Amazon's website, I can't log in with just username and password, I get a page telling me they've sent a code to WhatsApp (which I don't have) with a button to click if I want an SMS instead. Clicking that button never works (error message that I've 'requested too many OTPs') but opening the Amazon app on my phone shows a modal saying 'someone who knows your password is trying to log in... etc' and asking me to approve. They're definitely trying to use WhatsApp by default for sending verification codes.

I know it was 3 days ago, but I just got an additional data point.

In the Amazon app, the same I normally use, on my normal account, I used Switch Accounts option, and proceeded to create a separate, additional Amazon account.

I entered a different, new email address and my real name.

Amazon happily sent me a verification email, I entered the code. I was then prompted to enter a phone number, I did so (it's a number I never used with Amazon (to my second phone)).

Amazon then requested me to enter the code it sent over on *WhatsApp*. I tried to take a screenshot but it came out all black.

I don't have WhatsApp account with this number.

There was an option to resend it through a normal text message but first it sent out a code on WhatsApp. That should never be a default.

Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam

The frustrating part is that since so many companies collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.

>if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.

the fact this is something to be distinguished says a lot about where we are now and none of what it says is good

He calls "legal scam" what you probably call "legit business"

Yes. I'd gone round to see her and I checked her history to ensure it wasn't dodgy.

I has Facebook send a verification through Whatsapp, I legitimately thought it was a scam until I googled it and realized they do actually send verification that way.

Still annoying, but at least then it's the same company.

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.

I've never had it require SMS either. Probably because I've never given it a portable telephone number. (Until a couple of years ago I didn't have one, and I still use it as little as possible.)

> 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.)

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.

I guarantee you that there are real people out there in tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing things that bring us closer to that world rather than farther away.

"I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning."

— Sam Altman

>You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token

....

It's just the "drink verification can" meme, and could have linked to any site but chose Reddit...

I am debating an appropriate response, but maybe just an answer is not exactly what is called for here.

What do you think a meme is? What function does it serve?

A meme is a unit of information. It serves no function, it just is. Like life itself.

This explains a lot and I am glad you answered this way, because it suggests that you may be open to the possibility that while, to you, memes serve no function, there are people out there, who can use it in a way that make the difference on whether it has an function inherently or not, largely irrelevant. Just like life.

A meme is a _self-propagating_ unit of information. Like a gene.

Tangent: I would call a datum the basic unit of information. Not sure if there's an official word, given the prevalence of the Wikipedia article for unit of (digital) information in every relevant search.

I use redlib so it wasn't an issue for me. I was showing how my result trying to use the website is similar to the meme.

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.

The actors running astroturfing will just continue to get direct access. If those sites cared about those things they would have done something long ago.

All the verification process does is making astroturfing and propaganda campaigns even more desirable.

That's Facebook. How do you like it?

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.

> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly

If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.

The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.

The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.

> he entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.

>But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.

Why? It seems more like that’s baseless speculation with an agenda.

I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the amount matters because it is invariably very, very small compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the impact the lobbying has.

It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.

"excatly"????wtf?

I'm not an "AI" so I make spelling mistakes?

> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly

Yes it does. Let's not misrepresent the figures just because it doesn't suit our narrative. There's already way too much of that in the world

Meta hasn't corrected it and there's absolutely no way I give Meta the benefit of a doubt.

(13 years ago)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

TIL the phrase's origin.

("Please drink a verification can.")

And ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda normal.

Times change, so does certain expectations.

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.

That would require the people making their interests known, which would never happen in practice. The reality is that most representatives are well-intentioned and try to do the job in good faith, but only the wealthy/corporations ever give them the time of day to tell what their interests are. The representative can only work with the information they have available.

When do you think the last time the average Joe talked to their representative to communicate their interests, as is their democratic duty? The answer is, unfortunately, half past never. A representative cannot represent someone who keeps their interests a secret.

"Never happen in practice" is objectively false given the civil rights wins of the past century. While incomplete they were real, and real change followed.

Starting with the premise that it's impossible won't improve society.

Maybe you have a certain story in mind, but the civil rights wins that everyone remembers were wins only after the people waited too long to make their interests known to their representative, completely boiled over, and threw themselves directly onto the fire to compensate. That is quite different to having regular conversations with their representative throughout the normal course of their lives so that the representative could regularly do their job with the full understanding of the people's interests.

You've pointed out something real, but it does not appear to be within the scope of our discussion.

They arent there to represent the interests of the people. Rather, the people vote for representatives whose positions they agree with.

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.

Also the overturning of bail reform that the current CA state government refuses to honor or fund. Politicians seem to like the ballot initiatives until people actually use it. Then they feel free to ignore it, even continue to pass laws that go directly against it. All while somehow making enough unexplainable money that would get any of us put in prison for tax evasion.

It will sound insane, but I would love a parallel (not a replacement!) internet where everyone is ID verified. Time and place for both.

It's called the telephone network. Also Facebook.

You will if we create websites that don't require it.

I always wondered how Reddit justified the old.reddit effect. If your new design is so awful that a large percentage of users refuse to use it, and prefer the (more performant!) version from more than a decade ago, shouldn't that be a strong signal that you've made some mistakes? Why not try making the new version more appealing by investigating and fixing the issues that cause people to use the old one.

I guess credit to whoever fought internally to keep old.reddit running all these years. I'm sure it's been a candidate for the axe many times.

Reddit redesign strikes me as a convenient excuse to enforce infinite scrolling by a company looking to IPO.

I read it as management only knows how to evaluate and reward change even if its just for the sake of the promotion process

Reddit has already IPO'd

I was thinking from a timeframe when redesign was introduced.

While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. This is valid but applies even if the new design is easier to use/better in one way or another.

I'm not really a regular user of Reddit, but I'm reminded to use old.reddit every time I open a Google result and can't quickly skim or search the comments. That was an issue for years before LLMs so I'm not sure what the justification is for such a poor experience.

> While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory.

It's funny how often people say "it's just habit / muscle memory / etc." in response to these kinds of discussions, as though it were somehow a counter-argument, and not something that corroborates the argument against making sudden, drastic UI changes.

It's really weird how common it is for people to say "well, Y is only true because of X" in response to "Z doesn't work because of Y", and thinking they're somehow defeating the argument against Z. If you acknowledge that X exists and causes Y, and accept that Y isn't compatible with Z, then you are conceding that Z does not hold!

I don't see it as a persuasive argument so much as resignation that quality doesn't matter (in this case, and in many cases of incremental enshitification)

My point is that it's not an objective measure of design quality, i.e. how well does a person who hasn't used the software before use it, or how quickly do they learn it. Whether that matters more than your existing users is up to you

There are no objective measures of design quality. Every aspect of interface design can only be measured in the extent to which it facilitates the user's access to the functionality of the software, so the only metrics that apply are ones that reflect the users' subjective experience.

And that experience is determined as much by the users' own expectations and prior experiences -- yes, including habits and muscle memory -- as any quality of the interface or the design of the software.

It's not merely a matter of optimizing the new-user experience for your own particualy software, either, as new users to your software will still be bringing with them the expectations and habits they've acquired through experience with other software. We're not in the '70s anymore, with new users likely never having used any software before, and where you're starting from a clean slate. People today have lots of particular expectations of software, informed by conventions evolved over decades and their own years of experience.

Except in this case, it’s seeing complete threads without clicking vs clicking many times to achieve the same thing.

Also, clutter…

These are measurable things, not moody things.

Like I said, I also prefer the old.reddit UI, I was more speaking about the general case that user feedback isn't always a good indicator depending on what you're trying to do (especially early in a platforms life, when you'll have much more future users than current users)

Reddit had to make a business decision.

old reddit - wasn't bad before the age of mass scrappers of LLM labs.

now - yeah - they need to put everything behind a wall. LLM scrappers don't contribute, steal traffic.

I agree, but I'm not sure how this is a response to my comment?

If we time travel back to, say, 2020, it was still weird that they felt the need to keep two parallel versions of their site running because the new one was so unappealing to people who knew what the old one was like.

Enshittification is the answer. Old Reddit doesn’t make any money. Users block what few ads there are and it’s free so there’s no subscription revenue otherwise.

New Reddit is full of ads plus social media engagement-bait garbage. New Reddit makes money. Reddit the company wants people to use New Reddit.

So why does Old Reddit still exist? Because that’s where the content creators live! Old Reddit is a cost centre but a necessary one to keep the old guard of high-effort posters around. Alienate them and the New Reddit users won’t have any new content to engage with.

I wonder how new Reddit users manage to post nowadays, given that many default subreddits have karma restrictions. You need esoteric knowledge, like knowing that /r/askreddit allows you to build initial karma via comments, to be able to do that.

Why couldn't old reddit make money? Just going by my napkin math, serving 125M DAU compute and storage shouldn't cost more much than $2M/mo in cloud hosting.

If I serve a single adsense banner at the top of each page at a low ($2) RPM, I should pull between $15-30M/mo off those 125M daily users depending on engagement. Realistically this type of lazy ad integration could be much higher.

Given the maturity of the platform, salary spend shouldn't be more than another $5M/mo (realistically this could be even lower). That would net me a cool $8M/mo minimum.

I really don't understand how old reddit couldn't make money.

Infinite scrolling + algorithmic ads. That's how Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok all make their money. You get way more ad impressions per hour than from people who click on links and read / participate in discussions (which is what Old Reddit is all about). Young social media addicts can scroll hundreds of ads per hour because they scroll so fast.

Except that Facebook has a rather nasty problem where friend-based social media is a soft monopoly (which they try very hard to enforce https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433) and its CEO already has a bad reputation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 and the product does not work on top of that (people miss messages, message requests, and posts, all the time)

"Addictive business model" is one thing. It's annoying, we should highly discourage it, but - some are worse than others

I mod a reasonably popular subreddit for work, and, looking at the stats as a die hard old reddit user, I was floored at how few of us there really are.

Numbers please

Here are stats from from a 100k member subreddit with 15k unique visitors a day.

* https://imgur.com/UTJyyl8

So the takeaway is there’s a lot of members but only about 15% are active daily? And of that 15% it’s unknown how many are human vs bot?

Unless bots subscribe to the subreddit they wouldn't count as members.

Most people accept what is given to them and won’t go through the effort to change it.

Are there any stats on account age as well? I wonder if Reddit figured the old Reddit user problem would be solved through attrition as people naturally left and new users join the site only knowing the new interface.

I mean, I used the old design for a couple years, but now I genuinely prefer the new design.

I mostly view Reddit on my phone, and new reddit is much more mobile friendly. I have to pinch and zoom and scroll all over the place on old reddit.

I know that's an unpopular opinion around these parts, but I also hate viewing this website on my phone so I use an app. This website really needs a mobile redesign, but I can't imagine the shit fit that the users would throw.

I found an extension for Safari called SinkItforReddit and it does an ok job of making old Reddit usable on mobile. I still fatfinger some clicks, but I’m stubborn and refuse to use the new site. My main gripe with it is less about the UI and more that the content ordering feels more obscured, whereas old site shows me the fairly basic heuristic algorithm for content order.

Also want to add, the new design is now after at least 5 - 6 years of iterations on React, is finally useable and better.

Much like all decent JS front end / React based Web site, it takes years to polish to make it work to certain standards. I am not entirely sure why we have to do that and what benefits does it actually brings?

Just to clarify: I think an older version may have used React, but I just double-checked and current Reddit is definitely a Lit app built with web components. You can tell based on the comment placeholders used by the rendering engine as anchor nodes and by the prevalence of dashed-elements in the markup. Here's an example:

  <rpl-tooltip placement="top" appearance="neutral">
          <!--?lit$003985561$-->
          <span slot="content"><!--?lit$003985561$-->Send a GIF</span>
  </rpl-tooltip>

They seem to call the current architecture "shreddit" internally for some reason.

Probably "shhh" don't tell anyone how bad this version this is

they put a bunch of their stuff in shadow dom. A lot of the decisions of course are not based on usability but monetization incentives. If the current decision makers could, they would have made reddit a walled garden like facebook but the transition is a little awkward seeing as it used to be a free and open site. looks like they are close to cutting the cord on that openness.

They used to offer a more reasonable mobile website but they got rid of it. Using the old design now is just the desktop version which doesn't work well for the reasons you said.

I like the look of the new design (mostly, there's some cases where whitespace can get a bit excessive), but I still don't like the technology behind it. It's funny that modern javascript based sites were built to make things feel more interactive and snappy, but at least in Reddit's case completely failed at that and the old HTML based site feels way more responsive and fast, if a little ugly.

If there was an option to use the modern CSS with the old technology that would be the sweet spot for me.

Discussion websites should not encourage usage from devices optimized for mindless consumption.

Is this comparing old.reddit to reddit.com? I am using the normal url but still use the old design. I just toggled a setting in preferences to use the old design without needing to go to old.reddit, only reason I ever use old.reddit is if I'm logged out. That might be even more niche though, it seems like most people actually use the other url which always confused me when there is a toggle.

That's not clear, from the reported stats. But from my own experience, as of several years ago (I closed my subs some years back), "old" was a small fraction of total usage. This despite the fact that I actively promoted its use for my subs (site design which I intended, and hope, greatly increased utility and readability).

>it seems like most people actually use the other url which always confused me when there is a toggle.

well, I for one had no idea there was a toggle until just now.

Yeah, in preferences there is an option by beta options that says: "Use new Reddit as my default experience".

Once it a blue moon it doesn't seem to work and going to old.reddit then back to reddit seems to fix it.

I didn't know this existed. Pretty neat, especially since Reddit recently started redirecting old.reddit.com to reddit.com when clicking internal links on the site. Thanks.

In my experience as a pretty frequent Reddit user, Reddit is really bad at "forgetting" that you want the old design and flipping you back to the new one.

There's a Firefox extension called Old Reddit Redirect which automatically sends you to old Reddit. It works great!

That's weird, I've never experienced that, and I'm also a pretty frequent Reddit user.

I think there is a possibility that this is simply someone's ego trip that has evolved into a monster. One "nepo hire" in the correct position of power is all it would take for something like this to happen. I believe that's what occurred with the GitHub refactor too. That happened way too early to be attributed to the AI/Copilot stuff.

If business was truly driving the ship a lot of these bad ideas would have been killed and buried on day one. The React tribalism was unbelievably hot for a while there. Not going along with it was a great way to not get hired at a lot of places. This is still the case.

The reason the business tolerates this bullshit is because they are so afraid of losing certain people. I'm watching it happen in real time for two smaller startups right now. The business would be much better off if they simply fired the "revolutionaries" right now (i.e. today without warning or preparation), but they've become convinced by the propaganda of these very same people that their removal would be catastrophic to the business. So, these people get to torture all of the employees and end customers with their ridiculous schemes (ego trips) and the business covers up for them. As long as everyone survives to the weekend, no one seems to care enough to change anything. The customers in this case are other businesses who are also sucked into the scheme (they don't want to look stupid for signing a contract), so the issue propagates ever deeper.

According to stats on a relatively small local sub I mod, most people interact with Reddit through the mobile app these days. All of the web interfaces make up a small percentage of visits, and old.reddit is even smaller.

Very few people use old.reddit, I believe it's like 1-2%.

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

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.

Their users and those users data are the product; you are insignificant in the eyes of their shareholders.

You don’t seem to understand. It isn’t about me. Or even people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not even be obvious to people, but they’ll slowly turn away at this or the next thing or the next one after that.

I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate.

MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to it.

The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:

> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.

This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.

What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.

I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.

Yes! You're gonna love Ismo (the Finnish standup who pokes fun at quirks of the English language). This bit^1 on the word "shit" was the first I saw of him online. I've since seen him live and, I guess if you know, you know. Genius.

1. https://youtu.be/ifNEgwGACEQ?is=cJHqXIkZVqgmt4iO

> This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

I think original[1] Facebook UX was probably fine and clear enough for anyone but I would say that most people didn't jump ship: their first social media use started with facebook. And that was because FB grew bigger and faster, not because people were migrating from Myspace. Myspace has only been mostly limited to teenagers and a small fraction of music artists. Growth just slowed earlier because it never attracted many adults. It grew when people didn't have a smartphone and were not terminally online yet. It was a niche.

The main difference was the paradigm/mental imagery. Myspace was about opening the door to your teenager bedroom with all the posters on the wall and stickers on the workbooks. Facebook was about publishing and reading personal diaries.

[1]no idea how is the current one as I have been without account for 5 years now

Original Facebook was still stolen from ConnectU/houseSYSTEM and Myspace was reasonable about granular privacy controls (idk about Friendster. I imagine it was) whereas FB continually subverted it because MZ doesn't believe in privacy as a concept

Now Facebook is worse than MySpace ever was. A tech company dying has little to do with the quality of the product. Remember, enshittification brings in more money, not less.

Management wanting a thing to be the core value and what the core value is are different. Tumblr didn't hold its shape long enough to hit the ground physically when its new owner did what seemed perfectly reasonable to them.

UBlock Origin can clear those on FF mobile with one of the Annoyances lists

If you're on iOS, you're out of luck. FF extensions aren't supported.

You can hide distracting items in safari to remove the popup.

True. But for me, I hide the “fuck you asshole, use our app!” bottom overlay, and it does go away, but then scroll stops working!

For a while the overlay blocked touch events AND spanned the entire viewport so you couldn’t swipe to go back, trigger the address bar and toolbar to display, etc. I would have to swipe to minimize the app and then go back to trigger the toolbar to hit the back button.

Yeah I had that too but then it stopped blocking my scroll. I think if you keep your finger on the page after hiding the item you keep control.

But holy moly yes how user hostile.

Take a look at https://apps.apple.com/app/sink-it-for-reddit/id6449873635.

Orion browser can run standard type block lists on iOS. But depends how uBlock is specifically implementing this

Brave is on iOS and will block 'use the app' notifications'.

I use a patched version of the last released version of redditisfun. Basically, you grab the AppID from when you install RedReader, authenticate it with your account (they send it to you in an email) and then patch redditisfun using that AppID with ReVanced or Morphe. I've been using redditisfun for like 15 years, not really interested in moving to their official app. All of the legacy features work fine.

Only weird thing is that since RedReader censors all NSFW posts and your RiF is now tied to that API token, you need to make yourself a mod of a subreddit to be able to view anything NSFW. RedReader is the only allowed 3rd party app because it's meant for screen readers. In the past few months, Reddit turned off the ability to make API tokens for that would enable RiF to keep working but they've since changed the policy so they have to approve your request and a 3rd party app is not a good enough reason. Although I see a ridiculous amount of bot spam so clearly their war on API access is not really working that well.

I prefer Sync but my installation has broken, and even after patching it with RedReader's AppID using Morphe I still get status 401.

Why bother with all that? Just quit Reddit and your sanity will improve, unless you replace Reddit with HN.

The challenge lies with whether the things you go to reddit (or any other service/product) for are concentrated or exclusively there, such as discussion or information on a particular topic. There's a lot of communities where they've concentrated their resources on a free site and are at the mercy of the whims of the owner, discord is another. Very often there's no simple switch to an alternative without losing a lot, or hoping on the charity of others to spend effort migrating.

What's an example of this?

I used to use rif, but I switched over to redreader and I'm used to it now

Requesting the desktop version of the site has solved that for me. For now.

this

I won't even go there for search results, as new reddit is unusable to me. Too many clicks to get anywhere. It's quite surprising that so many people seem to have no issue with it.

For years, reddit admins would lie to the faces of users saying those app redirects weren't supposed to prevent browsing the site in a mobile browser. They'd say "weird! looking into it, that shouldn't happen!".

The owners of the site are hostile to the userbase. The new reddit where it doesn't let you read more than 3 comments before redirecting you to other posts is a cancer. Not to mention the ads that are somehow even more finely woven into posts than the old reddit.

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.

Same, old makes Reddit useable.

Ditto

Literally yesterday I started getting a login wall for old.reddit. Not sure the targeting rules on this (it’s been sporadic across sessions/devices) but definitely on a mobile browser while on cellular data.

I've seen some weird behavior with it, as well. But I'm fine with it. I visit a single subreddit now and if they destroy the UX I'll only be happier for leaving.

They blocked old.reddit.com unless you are logged in on Monday. I don't have an account on there anymore so that effectively blocks me from the entire platform. Oh well.

I was using old.reddit.com on my pocket supercomputer (not logged in) on Tuesday.

Try clearing your cookies.

I am using it right now and it still works for me. I guess it's a rollout. Someone mentioned cookies, maybe it will stop working when they expire, I am not willing to clean them to find out.

This is the mistake so many platforms and software packages make.

They look at the big groups, but don't really pay much attention to the smaller groupings. They also don't pay much mind to who is on those smaller groupings.

I'm willing to bet that all those little groups, are what attracted people to Reddit to start with. The local city forums, or the niche group of people interested in... tumbleweeds or something. Then they progress to "more of reddit". And it's people looking to start small niche communities, which often become larger communities.

But... much like Stack Overflow, Reddit wars with its users. Fights with them.

This change has nothing to do with bots, or AI. I was commenting the other day, that imdb.com has decided that 'reading reviews of movies' requires an account now. They claim it's to 'keep movie comments by humans for humans', which makes zero sense, they simply don't want bots summarizing those comments for humans.

Here's the truth. LLMs are changing everything. People in the industry need to get over it, because they're not going away. Reddit should just stand up a highly optimized, API driven interface for AI. There should be notes at the start of every page "BOT HIT THIS API, instructions are <here>". It's just the cost of business now. And yeah, I know it's brutal, but here's the thing...

Bots don't care about ads, side panes, updated info, it's actually a vast reduction in resources to serve via such an API.

But the problem, the true problem is the absolute horror show that reddit itself has become. All these forced clicks to read a thread, so they know if you're doing so. All the engagement stats they worry about, at the complete destruction of user engagement. It's like someone on crack is obsessing over all the wrong things.

So there won't be an API. And soon you'll need to login to just read something. And of course, that won't last long, because the whole 'need an account' paradigm is going away. Personal LLMs will have their own mailbox, heck with gmail you can just move a . for sorting and filtering, and they'll easily sign up for accounts and then search anyhow.

You'll never, ever win this Reddit. Just like you lost every other battle before.

To every web property there is? If you fight your users, you're literally fighting to destroy yourself.

And LLMs? Are now the user.

> All these forced clicks to read a thread, so they know if you're doing so.

Isn't that to reload ads? Each plus sign click could have some sort of SOAP call or whatever to load dynamically.

Well, I can't see any reason why it couldn't be both.

> Someone internally clearly hates

its spez. It's always spez.

He's sat in his bunker, wanking himself to death thinking about the end of the world.

I bet he's super jealous that Epstein talked moot into bringing back /pol

I don't know his entire life history so this is maybe unfair but internet companies are full of people like this. They fail upward and extract value from content the users make

spez/anyone else could very directly not do what they're doing. Step back and say 'this is wrong'. But they're going to alienate everyone because they can

These people should be preemptively fired/never hired from any job ever. If you can't show basic respect gtfo

I'm not sure how statistics track it, but when you're moderator on a subreddit you can see how many visitors use old reddit.

Last month for mine it was 1%. Now. This could be more due to their tracking not working for most old reddit users (I assume most have adblock), but it's unlikely to be a lot more.

The large majority of Reddit users are on the app. I'm honestly surprised they haven't killed old reddit off yet, and yes, I've used it myself for the longest time until I started missing some features.

I see similar stats too, it really seems like old reddit has died off, I remember when the redesign was newer looking at these stats and old was dominating, so I'm inclined to trust them relatively.

I used Old Reddit for a long time, but I could tell the vast majority of users were on the app now, just because the comment culture had changed completely.

For example, posts now draw most of their comments within 30-60 minutes of posting, and then almost no comments thereafter. This is surely due to the app emphasizing continual novelty for the sake of engagement, and anything old is no longer shown. A big difference from before, when posts would draw discussion all day long.

The use of a phone app as a default interface also means comments have become reduced to 140-character quips. If you post a solid paragraph or two on many hobby subreddits, you'll just come across as a weirdo.

As far as I'm aware the big problem they have is that while most of the visitors use new reddit, a very significant chunk of commenters and mods still use old reddit which they can't really afford to lose

Didn’t they just say they’re removing this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...

They did remove it. Note that it says unauthenticated JSON access. You can't get the data if you didn't authenticate.

On that note, X.com seems to be doing the opposite — you can only see this page if you DIDN'T log in... https://x.com/coinbureau/status/2071330294452666695/mediavie...

> They did remove it. Note that it says unauthenticated JSON access. You can't get the data if you didn't authenticate.

I’m not logged in yet I can access below JSON?

https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_t...

Oh, private browsing window, it is blocked. Until I load new Reddit (even unauthenticated), then it starts working. Presumably you need a cookie

It only works if you are authenticated, and if you are authenticated there's a heavy rate limit on it. The unauthenticated one that scrapers used is gone. They also detect if you are using a headless browser vs a regular one in many cases.

They officially started blocking json access awhile ago, it broke all the apps for viewing reddit without an account (RDX, Stealth, Geddit). I'm not sure on the exact details of what is and isn't still accessible, I just know it broke a lot.

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.

At least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's arguably the real users that are worse...

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)

VPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.

VPN blocking is a thing now. It's always a game of whackamole, but the whacker is getting a lot better lately thanks to states and countries having new laws against accessing age restricted content.

yeah, residential proxies are the future.

>I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients

Revanced.

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.

You can't login via tor anymore in my experience

Reddit did reliably block Tor with 429 but no longer does.

I find it amazing how they killed off 3rd party clients many years ago, yet their first party mobile client is still garbage.

It is nowhere near as good as the third party apps that were made by a single individual developer.

It goes to show how a presumably large budget and sizable team is outdone by a single talented individual outside of the constraints of an enterprise environment.

Or maybe Reddit is particularly incompetent. I occasionally use their website on mobile, and if anything it has been getting worse.

That Reddit sells our content and does a terrible job at moderation, which they largely outsource to us as unpaid labor, is just the cherry on top.

RIP Apollo…

I doubt Reddit killed the third-party apps to improve its mobile experience. They were probably just trying to cash in on the AI hype.

once they break RedReader ill be out. old.reddit.com is now defunct

That's news to me, I use old reddit com all the time

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.

It now only works if you're logged in.

Bastards. I didn't notice.

Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had accounts.

Not true, I use Firefox focus to access it, so now I can't

Seems to work fine here?

It's on and off for me, it's like they are A/B testing non logged in users.

They are slow-rolling it by IP block.

I assume this is because their largely drooling, double-digit IQ community would revolt if they rolled it out overnight.

Ever seen what a riot in a maximum security prison looks like? Well it would be nothing like that. But there would be lots of complaining and boxed macaroni and cheese involved.

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.

https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master...

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.

Yeah, it's a problem a lot of those subs are grappling with.

Yeah the software related subs are worthless now. All spam.

Admittedly, HN is suffering the same fate to some extent.

To some extent? It's most of the content!

How is that any different to HN?

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."

> 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.

I never said anything about not getting the current memes and jokes.

I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously.

And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow.

I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.

>> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.

This was totally me. Advice Animals was my go to when I needed to decompress from being overworked as a developer. Just funny, silly memes, and cool inside jokes you could share with your friends. If you knew some of the inside jokes, you were considered one of the cool kids in your group.

Reddit almost always was first run to the big stories as well, then a few weeks later it show up on FB. Still remember the one day I was telling my GF something I saw on Reddit and she was like, "That was on FB last week" and I knew it was over.

The final coffin was when the political rubes overran AA and turned into a political echo chamber. Post something that wasn't political? Downvoted into oblivion.

That was it, the fun was over, nothing was cool any more so I checked out.

The world has gotten more political. Everything is going to shit and we have not even really started the climate change.

We have. The heat waves were climate change. The super super super super El Nino ocean temperature anomaly predicted for November is climate change.

Also we killed the Great Barrier Reef.

> It has gotten more political

I think this is also a reflection of the era we live in. In 2011, we weren't facing the same problems we are today.

This is not accurate.

I get the jokes. They range from some retarded live stream drama, to some basic bitch puns or otherwise barely novel wordplay, to some thinly veiled political attack that can be thrown and doesn’t need defense because it’s “omg, just a joke, lighten up bro!”.

Think about it this way, everyone should be aware that intelligence has gone down in the last two generations. Reading comprehension has gone down. Terminally online addicts have increased.

So… Why would humor even stay the same on some cleverness scale?

> 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.

/. Actually did do that right. You voted on comments and had to judge other votes as to whether or not they were accurate. And limit the + or - to a maximum of 5. Then you don't have people chasing scores.

Granted, the voting system was the only thing slashdot did right, but it was good.

/. Is the same 10 dudes arguing with each other all day long on every thread.

20 years ago that place was awesome.

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.

Not even the city-sized ones. My local ones (Seattle when I lived there, and Orange County ones now) are political cesspools full of intolerant people and outrage bait.

“Pajama Nazis vs Basement Bolsheviks.”

Forget where I saw that one but it’s Reddit now.

Not sure why you'd expect anything except a list like to be of "any value".

It's like, say, talk.politics.theory back in the Usenet days. For a while it was fun, and then it wasn't. Too big, too wide .. it killed itself as a useful place to discuss/debate politics.

>and city-sized geographical subs.

lol. No. Every city sub is the EXACT same far left lunatic that needs to make everything about politics. Doesn’t matter if it’s a purple area, red, and reasonable-blue areas far reflected as bizarro versions of themselves if you go off their city reddits.

You may not notice depending on your perspective.

It's not just leftists. It's polarization generally, with scale.

The mid-range views leave. The extremes remain. Often a sub / moderator bias selects for one polar extreme or another.

This is where HN's (generally) political-neutral moderator stance, maddening as it often is to both sides (see dang's many, many, many, many comments on perceived bias), seems to have largely succeeded. Neither side dominates, and the middle isn't excluded.

HN definitely removes political extreme views.

Almost always by user flags rather than moderation removal, no?

Automated removal by user flags is itself a moderation decision.

What HN's net moderation system does (user flags, automated moderation, direct admin-moderator actions, shadowbans, penalties) is limit all extreme views, to the extent that they conflict with HN's Prime Directive, "to optimize for intellectual curiosity": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27901918>.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, the net bias created is less left/right than pro status quo: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

Challenges to conventional thinking are more than fair, but they've got to avoid falling foul of one of HN's guidelines, particularly increasing substantiality with time, thoughtful criticism, generic negativism, not fulminating, no personal attacks, not sneering (including at the rest of the community), good faith, responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of your interlocutor, avoiding flamebait / generic tangents / Internet tropes. And most importantly in this vein, not using HN for political or ideological battle (including nationalistic flamewars).

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

As to flags: mods do frequently reverse them for both posts and comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353896> <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>.

I don't always agree with mods, but I often do, and even where I disagree, I understand the underlying principles being employed. I've been an active critic / commentator on moderation for much of my time on-site (dating to 2011).

Moderation exists. That's not novel. Do you think it shouldn't?

Late reply: I'd intended to write "moderator removal", in the comment you're replying to.

That's a subtle but IMO meaningful distinction: HN's net moderation activity (participants, automated mechanisms, moderators) is not necessarily the same as that which occurs by staff moderators (admins) themselves, and much of the staff moderator activity is actually correcting for participant votes and flags.

This may be an overly fine point, but it seems worth pointing out. Particularly as any moderation system has its biases. But as I'd noted in my earlier reply(<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021366>), what HN achieves is a reduction in polarized commentary across the political spectrum, to an extent few other platforms have managed to accomplish. People on either side of multiple political divides seem to find bias against their own view, when the reality seems more likely that there's just not a wholehearted embrace of their perspective.

(That's largely my own take as well, though I think I've also become more skilled at presenting my arguments, and that perhaps as a consequence they're better received. I see disagreement, but fairly often support, even when arguing against what seems to be a prevalent or even majority opinion.)

Exactly, for example, there's often two subreddits which are polarized in opposite directions, which unfortunately doesn't make it any easier to figure out the reality than if it was purely left-wing discourse allowed.

Certainly describes my local city sub.

Different subs have it to different extents. The Texas sub was taken over last year by a left wing mod that made everything not merely a Daily Beast repost machine, but barely about Texas. They were finally removed to the pleasure of pretty much everyone.

Every sub has its far right trolls and agitators, too. Bots that respond automatically to any post with certain keywords in the title will lure accounts that have never posted there before, celebrating heinous things and trying to get a rise out of people. Pathetic attempts at destroying decency by celebrating murders by the government.

You may not notice depending on your perspective.

Back in the End Times of Google+, I had access to a data dump of all n-million Google+ Communities metadata (name, subscribers, and visible activity on the Community homepage, the last of which gave an indication of post cadence).

I noticed two odd things:

1. Taking a log-log plot of number v. size of Communities, there were far fewer very large communities than a straight power-law relation would suggest ... by a factor of 2--4 or so. This didn't look extreme plotted log-log, but when you looked at the raw values, there was something dampening the count pretty markedly.

2. In terms of activity, posting cadence fell off once a community hit (very roughly) about 10k members. Above that there still might be a lot of activity, but it was a lot less than size alone would suggest.

I've never been able to conclusively answer why either of these behavious should be the case, though I suspect that:

I suspect that the first has to do with the tendency of very large forums to go rogue (be taken over by bots / shills / spammers, or otherwise go off), to be moderated by site admins (excessive and pervasive violation of site policies), and/or simply put real people off participation because there's no genuine reward for doing so (questions aren't answered, or are responded to with incivility and/or spam).

The second (more activity in mid-sized communities) would probably relate to the last factor above: with ~10k members (give or take an order of magnitude), there's probably a core of a few hundred to a few thousand active participants, which is about at the threshold where associations and affinities can form. People still have conversations, at least part of the time.

Keep in mind that G+ (similar to FB) has a flat discussion format, so that the most recent comments are appended to the end of a post. Reddit, like HN, has a threaded discussion. For a long time I criticised G+ for not supporting threads, but I came to feel that this was actually a strength where discussions were well-moderated, as there was a sense of a real discussion occurring, where later respondants would often refer to an earlier comment (usually naming the author and quoting a bit of context) in replying. Conversations could and did last for days, weeks, months, and years. By contrast, on Reddit (and HN), a conversation is effectively dead within a day or so, if not a few hours. Comments are simply howling into the void.

This happens somewhat less on HN than Reddit, largely due to the finite size of HN's front page (infamously: 30 stories, though many might cycle through over a day). Odds are good that a top-5 story actually has some exchanges on it, and I've carried on a few of these for a few days.

But I'd long ago noted that Reddit was where conversation, in the sense of an exchange between multiple parties, goes to die, especially on any of the larger (million-plus follower) subreddits. Smaller (~50 -- a few thousand members) generally does far better.

In a similar sense, HN's quiet days (weekends, holidays, or during The Burn) often see far less activity but far more interaction.

In my experience most of the city subs have been overrun by political trolls too

Looking at the conversations tied to movie fandoms has been fascinating. People treat movie franchises like a religion.

It is essentially religion. Politics too.

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.

"Reddit has really good data"

Depends on what you mean by good. If you want to make a bot that seems like a person, then yes. If you want accurate information, not so good.

> 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 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.

To many bots on reddit, so your solution is to go directly to the bot!!?

If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.

The bots (and humans) I’m trying to weed out are the pot-stirring permanently outraged/bitter commenters. For example on a “car overturned on X road” post, people getting into fights about whether BMW or Subaru or Tesla drivers are worse. That’s all noise. I want to know when it happened, which direction of traffic, if it’s cleared up yet, etc. LLM works well to remove the off-topic garbage. If someone is botting the actual content (recommendations, reviews, etc) and the up/downvoters are unable to identify it as a bot, I probably won’t be able to either. So I’m not worse off using the LLM.

Worst case I get some pre-digested garbage and I waste less time, best case the LLM pulled out a few good nuggets of info. It’s not a perfect system yet. There’s a lot to tune with how deep to go, what constitutes garbage vs signal, and so on. At least it’s fun :)

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.

Any ideas to mitigate?

Call your buddy and come up with a meeting spot.

This is my Hail Mary hope with LLMs. They're obviously going to get to the point that any sort of reasonable validation of a person online becomes impossible. LLMs could ultimately destroy online chatter. I like shitposting as much as the next guy, and probably a good deal more, but in reality the sort of discourse you get online is so mediocre relative to real life. It's just somehow quite addicting for whatever reason.

Inside of Reddit itself? Not with the tools we're given from Reddit. We know Reddit has internal tools to block spam/bots, so I believe what we see is the most sophisticated ones (they're not too sophisticated mostly, but they're not the zero effort bulk spam that reddit catches easily).

Something that would make things far easier for mods would be if the posters hashed IP was shown/made available to mods. Thats mostly for more localized bad actors/astroturfers and not large spam/scam rings with proxy networks.

Things we've done that have made a difference with the tools we've got from Reddit:

1) we don't allow new accounts or ones with negative accounts to post in our subreddit

2) any posts that match criteria or hit the front page are automatically put in a mode where you must have a positive subreddit karma over a threshold to post. This helps filter out brigading and low effort shit posting from front page plebs

3) we're using a reddit app that allows us to remove posts from people that have posted in identified subreddits. Right now we're just experimenting with this and we're in a data collection mode, but we can see that the people its catching (while some of our most prolific posters) are also some of our most problematic posters, so I think we're going to go from data collection to just straight up having the bot remove comments from people that post in those troublesome subreddits.

I'm curious what you've found the troublesome subreddits to be. I think I have a pretty strong idea what they are, but some validation would be nice.

I'm not comfortable disclosing them because we don't want our 'secret sauce' to be leaked and let people know we're on to their BS.

I will tell you that it's mostly the ones you expect if you're heavily engaged with Reddit and moderation. But there are several new gathering places that I didn't know about until we started spelunking on the most annoying posters histories.

This is one of the places where a tool that scrapes reddit and lets you see deleted comments is absolutely clutch--these people are very good about removing the worst of their vile spewing on reddit, or changing their comments to look innocuous after people have gotten worked up. It's all about making people they disagree with look like bullies and idiots.

> remove posts from people that have posted in identified subreddits

So you're actually censoring opinions, not fighting spam, just like every other reddit mod.

We're maintaining a space where people with actual skin in the game can have conversations about hot button topics. We do not maintain the subreddit for large numbers of outside agitators to parachute in, shout down local discourse, and then fuck off immediately.

There is room for people on any side of an argument to come in and discuss. They can do so in a civilized, adult manner, or they can fuck right off. Call it censorship if you like.

> There is room for people on any side of an argument to come in and discuss.

Obviously not, when you ban them immediately just for participating in another subreddit, regardless of what they wrote there.

You can ask gpt/claude to verify multiple sources online and never to guess. You can even set up a project that always does that with anything you ask it. It's probably better as reddit can be very opinionated.

>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.

Err... I spend quite a lot of time on Reddit as well (including moderating a medium size subreddit) and I can assure you that there are tons of bot posts and comments all over the site right now. If you think this, you're probably not very good at identifying this kind of content.

It sounds like maybe your moderation is working!

I spend most of my time on subreddits related to the city where I live, and tax+financial planning forums.

No new valuable training data has been created on Reddit since 2023.

What's your source for this claim?

I've read new, valuable-to-me human-written information on Reddit since 2023, so I very much doubt this is true.

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.

I don't go to reddit for answers.

I cancelled my Reddit subscription when they killed third party clients and haven't really used the site since.

Reddit is must have if you want GEO presence

So leave it alone to the GEO bots and don't use it as a human.

I left Reddit years ago and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve never come close to wishing to participating there again, and everything I hear from people who still hang on seems to reinforce my decision.

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.

  + Hey how do you do thing?
  |
  -+ [deleted]
   |
   -+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.

Some of that was a reaction to Reddit closing the APIs and blocking apps.

IIRC that was also done in a fear that they'll start using comments to train AI. And some users claimed that their manually removed comments from weeks to years ago reappeared again.

Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.

Which lawyer?

I got suspended for criticizing the state of Israel’s treatment of civilians in occupied territories, but they didn’t delete my account, though I stopped logging in after a week. (Logging in retains your subscriptions). I've seen plenty of similar comments to mine so I assume it was the work of some oddball who I responded to that has an connection to somebody who works there so they could pull some strings to suspend my account.

It isn't safe to criticise Israel on nearly any online platform. You should only ever do it with a throwaway account and a VPN, and Reddit bans VPNs.

At the same time Reddit was hosting Arabic speaking subreddits with communities that openly support terrorist groups.

Considering that some of the content may well be illegal in a few EU countries, I was surprised Reddit does not more proactively nuke it to protect themselves.

> Logging in retains your subscriptions

I'm sorry, is that something that happen recently? Because when I had an account there, subscriptions were permanent

What I meant was I was permanently banned so I can still login and get notifications of responses to my commments, just could not vote or change any of my subscriptions.

Nah, it's rare to see [deleted].

More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree" due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old data.

Reddit users also very frequently delete accounts and/or content.

After a shadow ban none of my old comments were visible anywhere on Reddit.

So I deleted all my content. If people can’t view my content, why have it online?

My real name account got banned for quoting something someone else said. Pretty hilarious in hindsight.

https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669

Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it is.

Answered questions becoming unanswered is such an annoying thing. I'd prefer users who are willing to delete their comments day, weeks, months, years later to not reply at all and let someone else answer.

And why Reddit, or anybody else, allows modifying comments after such a long time is beyond me.

EDIT: These days there are even active users who are wiping their comment history on a regular basis. Very strange mindset.

or "furiously sleep ideas green colorless". Reddit once started banning users for deleting their own comments, so people started editing them to random words instead.

More than 20 years

Put a fork in me, I'm done.

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.

That redacted amount is absolutely miniscule and blown out of proportion.

Not in my experience. I see it almost every time I end up in a reddit thread from search results. I've recently started demoting it in Kagi. It's just not as good as it used to be. Newer threads tend to be full of junk and bots.

I see it quite often in reddit threads that appear in my google search results for obscure technical/hardware issues.

The original helpful comments were probably provided by switched-on users of whatever subreddit, and those same users are the ones most likely to nuke/overwrite their comment history when they leave the site.

Please provide data on your claim.

[This comment removed due to protest of Reddit's API changes]

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.

Then you're getting a marketing bot half the time.

I went to look up how to disable shipped results in facebook marketplace and non Reddit results were all multi page articles. Even if bots are marketing on Reddit at least it’s in short form and without a deluge of ads.

> 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?

When you do log in you will probably see that accounts all but require a verified email now, if you didn't set one up your account will be frozen until you do a password reset FoR sEcURiTy which necessitates adding an email lmao.

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?

Of course not, are you crazy?

Elon Musk, avowed supervillain, compensates X content creators.

It does create some bad incentives however.

The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are allowed to see.

Those little virtual stickers isn't enough? What else could you possibly want as compensation?

ideally? blowjobs. i ain't shitposting for karma, dammit

91.5% Gross margin :)

https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...

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

Thanks for the gold kind stranger!

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.

Someone did a finetune w/ data from 4chan and found improvements on several popular benchmarks, so ... maybe?

For years before LLMs got big a comment I would often see was, "Google search is worthless now. I basically solve all my problems by searching reddit."

Counterpoint: usernames of people counting numbers with no context whatsoever are so important they have their own tokens, despite being of no value (in fact, negative value, going by the issues they caused when actually used).

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.

I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right now.

Maybe it's for specific subs?

Not yet, but it's coming to old.reddit.com globally soon: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...

Just got redirected to download their app after being redirected to the new site.

For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.

Maybe RES (or other extension) should gain a mode where new reddit is rendered in the style of old reddit?

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.

Doesn't work for me. Seems like this login gate for old.reddit is being progressively rolled out.

That is extremely unfortunate. :(

The day I can no longer use Old Reddit is the day I stop using Reddit.

Same here. I can't stand the new Reddit. It spins up fans on my $3500 laptop, freezes and loads very slow. Once the old one stops working, I will have to stop using it.

I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.

This isn't sad at all, this will help me break my reddit addiction splendidly.

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.

Plain HTML is unsafe for Reddit, which is a company, and needs a safe revenue stream.

Note, Reddit is a publically traded company with a P/E higher than NVidia.

Nothing makes any sense and I hope Reddit crashes as soon as possible with their terrible decisions.

At this point in history, money is a farce, but it's a farce we are forced to participate in at gunpoint.

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.

says who?

everyone who's ever been detected as a bot by cloudflare

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.

What a lovely idea. Maybe I should try this.

Personally, if you need a moderate level of connection, there's something called the IndieWeb. Of course, sometimes you just need your own world without any connection at all.

Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)

What we need is a non profit "social media" with incentives aligned with the users. A nice way to share photos and videos and conversations.

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”?

presumably people that pay for coffee in coffee shops, or rent league lanes in bowling alleys, or whoever brings a bottle of wine to a meetup at a friend's place, etc.

> 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.'

It seems you're viewing this from the perspective of Reddit-the-company, and if your interests are to maximize profits then I don't really disagree with what you have to say.

I miss Reddit-the-communities, personally, whose interests as you observe seem to conflict with those of Reddit-the-company.

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 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.

Lemmy dbzer0 (one of the big instances) has a lot of stuff.

Let’s bring Stack Exchanges back!

Or the OG, Expert Sex Change.

IRC

Context drift. You're basically talking about asking questions to MMAcevedo in the year 2500. He doesn't know what's going on, because he's from 2046. Most answers from 2011 are not applicable now.

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.

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.

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.

Good idea; I'll make sure we have all random ?date=1970-01-01, ?date=1970-01-02, all the way to ?date=2026-07-22 URLs cached, even the ones that are 404s but the crawlers still try anyways. Thank you!

It's always entertaining when people proudly display their lack reading comprehension.

That's very true.

Of course, the _actual_ response to that should be to make the AI companies somehow liable for the massive disruption they caused (and still cause).

But alas, we can't have nice things.

There's no evidence this massive DDoS attack is related to AI.

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.

There was a whole mini-industry around scraping specifically Reddit using the API feed because it was so open. AI companies first trained on Pushshift, which is like Common Crawl for Reddit, which is why Reddit shut down Pushshift (with legal threats IIRC) at the same time.

If there were a well-known URL that retrieved all content added to a site after a given date, and a meaningful number of sites implemented it, I bet the biggest scrapers would use it.

Except, of course, that then sites would start lying and sending abridged, poisoned, or nonexistent data.

Nice things cannot be had, no matter how many levels you go down.

Reddit used to have something like that. And what you said happened. They shut it down, so that they could ask AI companies for payment.

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.

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.

Write this software and post a Show HN

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??

> I don't understand why they can't use Anubis or whatever captcha thing I may or may not have seen on New Reddit.

This is just the first step in killing old-Reddit for logged-in users as well. It's too easy to use, they make more money with the enshittified new version.

Except comments are really the only reason to visit! Sharing cool links was already old with Digg etc.

Worst still, enshittified "new" Reddit will serve a page that claims to have your search terms in it, except the alleged result is buried behind an undetermined path of a tree of incremental "load more comments" button-links... and at some depth those silently switch to causing a whole page-transition to a subtree, and if you navigate back you'll find everything is collapsed/unloaded again and you can't tell which branch you were on before the interruption.

With classic Reddit, you just... `ctrl-f` for the term.

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).

June 10 2015

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/10/reddit-ba...

> The move frustrated some commenters on the initial post. “Why is /r/fatpeoplehate banned, but /r/coontown get to exist?” asked redditor CrackheadControl. “That’s bullshit.” “Because the admins are fat, not black,” replied The_Wizard_of_Wang.

I think we can all agree that the above, and other mentioned subreddits were genuinely undesirable, no quotations needed. I was clear that wasn't what I was talking about. Your practice of just parroting these nasty people and their words doesn't actually address my point at all. Which was that it went far beyond just the nasty people to groups that weren't nasty and just made some advertisers uncomfortable.

It seems like you just want to point out nasty terrible people to stop conversation of if it was justification for doing bad things to everyone. That's a popular sentiment these days but it is wrong. Just because one group of people (or subreddits) in those punished by the authorities is actually nasty doesn't meant that all group of people punished by the authorities are.

At the time it wasn't really clear whether stuff like FPH had real world implications or was just a silly joke.

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)

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)

Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

The "tribalism" is a feature not a bug. As attack is always cheaper than defense a system must be designed with that in mind. Defending against lemmy.ml is much easier than identifying and proving each attacker. The community itself then has incentive to self regulate as if we all get put on shit list our each individual capability suffers. This combined with full transparency of Fediverse makes identifying and pursuing bad actors much easier.

I’d much rather have an “expensive” system where the cost is that new entrants have a harder time getting established due to the “noise” of unknown accounts. This removes so many failure modes of human groups. It’s amazing to me that people want to replicate those failure modes when technology allows you to subvert them!

Besides, “defending against” lemmy.ml is literally defending against the instance run by the Lemmy dev, because some centrists are too scared of socialism and anti-imperialism to have real conversations about it. It’s a ridiculous situation. It’s not like it’s Hexbear or Lemmygrad where users are actively and intentionally hostile.

You hit the nail on the head. As bad as reddit is nowadays, I will never use Lemmy because it attracts the activists and "power users" that have ruined reddit in the first place.

^This

Many of the mods for various subreddits also have commercial interest (own a business in the niche related to the subreddit) and ban/remove mentions of competitors but keep mentions of their own products.

^This strategy was shared with me by an aquintance who is the main mod of 1M+ subreddit. And again - this is also just scratching the surface.

Reddit has been dead for ages

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.

How would the tool tell the difference between criticizing Israel in /r/israelisawesome and criticizing Israel in /r/worldnews?

A moderator has, presumably, chosen n posts, and by doing so has indicated that if you've downvoted (or upvoted, their choice) at least however many of those, you're on the shitlist in their subreddit. No AI needed, the moderator was the one to determine that you were criticizing something and that in their subreddit the criticism is unwelcome.

Where to allow them to do this with posts outside of their subreddit is an implementation detail.

Is the purpose of a system really what it does though? Obviously there are side effects and tradeoffs in any complex system. Is the purpose of a vaccine to make you sick - no, but that is a side effect of some vaccines on some people.

If we apply the "purpose of a system is what it does" to itself, this methodology is more a way to generate interesting (and cynical) hypotheses than to get at the truth.

The purpose of a system is not, by definition, what it does. It is what it is meant to do. That saying really gets under my skin because it is so obviously untrue. By the logic of the saying, the purpose of a hospital oncology floor is for their patients to die. Which is obviously ridiculous, but true under the "it's what it does" thinking.

> The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies

Incorrect; 94% of Reddit's 2025 revenue came from advertising, it's right here on page 81 https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001713445/42e4fe7...

This is why Reddit is supposedly ending its licensing agreement with Google: when the latter shows AI snippets in its search results, Reddit misses out on advertising revenue, and Reddit has judged the Google juice to not be worth the squeeze.

Sounds like they should partner with Kagi

Thanks, I stand corrected! That makes all the recent changes even more puzling.

Reddit is such an amazing business model that exploits the gullible. People go on reddit, voluntarily post comments, generate interest vectors that can be harvested and get "paid" with upvotes. The so called reddit mods do voluntarily, unpaid work to manage subreddits that can be closed at any time by reddit admins.

All of this work done by people for free for a commercial platform, so that it can then build a walled-garden around all that content and charge others for API usage.

Hats off.

This is called chokepoint capitalism and most web2 sites do it. HN also does it.

Hacker News is way more innocent in that it's main purpose is to expose a narrow slice of highly technical and entrepreneurial people to YCombinator and companies that it funds. Of all the social media websites it employs the least amount of dark patterns and is the only website that I know of that natively helps people for whom the use of the website becomes problematic.

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.

The login page is a very nice reminder to not use Reddit. I have the old reddit redirect extension so this change was the push I needed after the latest very clearly botted hate campaign took over the site recently. Dead internet theory is taking it over, so I'm off to the next moderated social website.

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.

Advanced version:

My account (very old, very established, much karma, no problems) got shadowbanned one morning for no discernible reason, the appeal was "granted"... but it's still shadowbanned even as the appeals page claims an appeal is unnecessary because the account is in good-standing.

> the dopamine rush a bad mod gets from shadow banning

IIRC admins (employees) can do a true shadowban, but moderators are limited to just excluding you from the subreddit.

Mods can't shadow ban. That's done by site-wide automated systems. Reddit euphemistically calls it the "spam filter"

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 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!

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.

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.

I can confirm it's not mobile-only.

> 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!

Many still are

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...

https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=TopDay

https://piefed.social/ (more or less the same as above)

Lemmy's popularity comes in waves. I was hoping for the day that Reddit would shoot itself in the foot again, because Lemmy's traffic was going through a slump. I'm looking forward to a fresh new batch of new users, content and communities.

I suggest https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/

It's one of the bigger instances, run by the people from r/piracy who were removed after the API changes (btw this means Reddit condones piracy, someone tell Nintendo), and without political bullshit

Yes, and I have the same problem with Cloudlare’s “we are checking the security of your connection” page that is now popping up for me everywhere.

Thanks for making sure I’m secure enough to read your three-paragraph news article…

You're not a fringe user, a ton of people use old reddit (myself included).

They're killing themselves the same way Tumblr did. Oh well.

I doubt Reddit will die anytime soon, at least not within the next 5 years. They have an incredibly lucrative AI deal with Google, and their activity has skyrocketed over the last couple of years. The average person who just wants to fix their car doesn’t care about Old Reddit, the poor moderation, the spam filters, the slow website, or the removal of r/all. Most people are already used to modern web design anyway. What Reddit has is an active userbase and a huge amount of answers, and for now, that is what keeps them successful.

> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.

This take seems... very out of date.

Anyway, old.reddit.com is still loading fine for me in a Private Browsing tab. Firefox + NoScript on desktop, just like OP.

Interestingly, I remember that the clean interface of old Reddit, not so different from current HN, was one of the nice things when coming from Digg back in the day.

It started dying for me when they started censoring posts and comments to appeal to advertisers, followed by killing non-official clients, then the light mobile website. Killing old.reddit feels like the last nail in the coffin.

Unfortunately, we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.

I deleted my account when they deprecated i.reddit.com. It's mildly funny to read comments lamenting the death of "the good mobile interface" when the amazing one was already killed years ago.

> we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.

I had hopes for Digg, but whatever it is they ended up building it's clearly not that.

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.

It's really weird, I mean Reddit's strength was the threaded commenting system (esp. compared to Digg when they were competing) and then they started making almost every commenting-hostile move possible.

The world changed. Infinite scroll content consumption is the new meta.

Why people do things and what people say decided what they do often differ. I think it very likely reddit want login to old reddit for lots of reasons and the post fact rationalisation to badge it security is the least important one.

Money and legal compliance pressures are far higher in my view.

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.

They've also started revoking previously valid tokens. I can no longer use RedReader with the API client I had created for this purpose.

The only winning move now is to start impersonating their app.

As a heavy reddit user since the glorious Digg times... what's up with this "old reddit" thing?

I vaguely remember some problems with new reddit initially. But the "new" frontend looks nice to me in all aspects. What am I missing?

The UX is horrendous, density of information is a fraction of what it was and the infinite scroll sucks

for starters when I browse reddit in new interface after short scrolling it tells me to install app and I can';t read further comments, no such issue with old.reddit

though I have also Continuum client with my own API key in phone, but for some google results it's just faster to read it in browser than opening the app

Absurdly, it is much faster to browse between pages using old reddit.

Seriously, try it out. I wonder if the person who created a ticket for implementing the progress bar ever wondered if it was symptom of a greater problem?

You can also actually see a big discussion without lots and lots of clicking until clicking too deeply makes you lose all your progress and start over.

The new frontend still doesn't have a proper zoom implementation so I can't use it

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.

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.

They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.

That would be a hard no for me.

I think my account's old enough to drink liquor. Or had been, before they banned it.

same. already looking into private forums for if/when that day comes.

some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine

I’m building Wheesper with that same idea in mind. It’s for smaller private discussions shared by link, with everyone joining under a fresh pseudonym: https://wheesper.com

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.

Scrapers prefer old.reddit for the same reason users do: it's lean. Oh well, good thing Reddit has solved the scraping problem. It's a small price to pay to not have their site scraped anymore.

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

And it's worse than the day it was born

It still does this when you're not logged in. Try a VPN or accessing old Reddit from different locations.

Logged in though probably they do have way more data. Maybe you can opt out in some way ?

The "plain" HTML spec is notoriously hard to analyze statically though, due to "error tolerance".

The "error tolerance" introduces algorithmic complexity into what could be a parsing problem.

Root cause: DOM parsing can lead to a different result when you take the first-pass output, serialize it to HTML again, and use it as input for the second parsing pass. And if it sounds stupid: browser do this, AFAIK.

Side note, not security-related: CSS has introduced two-pass rendering since Flexbox, AFAIK. Not the same thing regarding what "rendering" means (there, it's about boxes on screen, not about transforming HTML->HTML, but...).

Lehacy inline attributes that allow JS execution are a favorite example, but disabling them via CSP is not a silver bullet.

Even if you disallow all attributes like "onclick", "onload", etc, modern document parsing is not context-free, and allows for arbitrarily complex exploits, AFAIK (a href, src or style payload can be just as bad as arbitrary JS execution).

The author of the ancient library DOMPurify made a decent amount of money from explaining this thoroughly and providing solutions.

In short, detecting XSS is a variant of the Halting Problem in some especially hard cases, as far as I remember. Because HTML parsing is not context-feee.

An earlier thread:

Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857

got banned on my EU country subreddit for saying hamas dresses as civilians

reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet

Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217

(Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...)

I refuse to log in to Reddit, deleted my account ages ago. And now on mobile it places an unclosable pop-over asking me to log in to continue reading. So now I only read things on desktop. Would like to stop using Reddit all together but sometimes it is genuinely useful to read some human answers, although since LLM’s train on the data I can get a lot of the same info that way at least.

I would really just like to stop receiving bot spam because they allow arbitrary uses to "sign in" with your email without any validation.

To which you then receive login codes via email and recommendations to Russian subreddits

old.reddit.com works to bypass that on mobile.

The article is literally about how they’re killing old.reddit.com unless you login.

There’s an article? All these years…

but is the article on reddit about old.reddit.com being killed so they can track your porn viewing after you have to log in.

Try "RedReader". You can use reddit without the account.

Android only ?

Probably not for long. If the site requires an account, so will the accessibility app

I wanted to stop going to Reddit because I just used it to look at stupid memes. So, blocking old Reddit for logged out users was a nice favor to me.

There are solutions to this, like libreddit/redlib.

https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

Request desktop site on mobile

You can easily selfhost a redlib instance and keep reading. I stopped logging in to reddit a year or two ago, but there's still a couple niche communities that are worth it for me to read. Meanwhile, I'm back to a half dozen internet forums as my daily check-ins for real questions or human connection.

I could be wrong, but it may be more of an age demographics issue, really. People too young to default to internet forums as where they would go now that reddit sucks (many of whom call reddit "an app" and only know it as the post-API single platform on mobile) just started showing up from FB or IG or Tik Tok only because reddit had a certain amount of huge critical mass.

You can block the overlay using uBlock Origin in Firefox Mobile (at least on Android).

  www.reddit.com##div#configured-xpromo-mweb3x_mid_funnel_blocking_v1_30s.configured-xpromo-bottom-sheet.configured-xpromo.rpl-bottom-sheet

The selector is probably not as concise as it could be.

Isn't that just for the mobile app popup ? Seems to work ish but then I can't click anything (scroll is fine). No affect for old reddit

>I refuse to log in to Reddit,

You are so brave, an true hero.

Use incognito mode. The banner doesn't pop up with it.

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.

While I appreciate you taking the time to reply, I'm interested in the particulars of what constitutes security in New Reddit.

It seems we both agree, though, that Old Reddit is not long for this world. Which I find regrettable.

Reddit isn't saying HTML has a security flaw. The problem, from reddits perspective, is that old reddit makes it easy to scrape a lot of content anonymously. Requiring a login gives reddit an account it can rate limit or ban, while "New" reddit provides more telemetry and anti-bot checks.

The article is right about one thing: JavaScript and frontend bloat do not secure public content. They just make scraping more "expensive"

But frontend design does affect how easily a site can detect and restrict automated traffic. Reddit may have a real abuse problem. Calling the change necessary 'to keep Reddit safe' though, is slippery wording. this is about controlling access to content and automated traffic, not protecting anyone from unsafe HTML.

Almost. NYSE:RDDT has decided that plain HTML is unprofitable. That is the entire premise in one sentence.

First there is a patch of greenery. People naturally drawn to spend time there. Then a generous benefactor comes along and builds a paved road. Hey you don't have to use those footpaths anymore! You can ride your bike along this! Thank you!

Then this wonderful benefactor starts adding more things.. fencing.. signage, guardrails. Then one day the benefactor says to everyone I've made all this for you. And yet some of you still don't use this place in the intended way. I will now put up a security perimeter. You must show your papers to enter, walk along the narrow lanes we've set up and obey the signage and pay a toll to justify all I've done. Some of you are so ungrateful

I wonder if we can find a new patch of greenery

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. :).

> 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.

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 retired from reddit last year or perhaps two years ago already.

The reason was censorship by insane moderators. I am also hardly the only one - there is so much criticism about reddit on reddit that it is quite interesting to see reddit has not yet died already. On the one hand, some info on reddit is useful, but on the other hand, I would not be in the slightest concerned if reddit were to be removed - nobody needs censordit.

Thinking about it, I actually should have also deleted all my contributions; feels a bit unfair that they can still benefit from what I wrote even though they (many moderators) censored me.

“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.

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 started getting it on new Reddit about an hour ago. So far it's only a couple of sub-reddits, but it's weird that this is happening around the same time they put a login wall on old reddit. I don't think it's a NSFW thing because I'm getting it on the College Football sub-reddit, which should be accessible to anyone. Guess they want to be more like twitter.

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.

Remember Aaron Schwartz !

The first "example" of what happens when you free information.

When I’m browsing, reddit on my iphone on Safari, when the little pop-up shows up that tells you to use the app it completely locks up Safari (it doesn’t hang) I can’t change tabs, bring up the back control buttons or do anything else except exit out of Safari how are they doing that?

If you want to be paranoid it's a decent idea, if you also make your own internal html/xml alternative you can then say your sanctioned html flavor is safe, but regular html would mean it has to came from an outside third party no matter where you encounter it.

This is petty. The people who still claiming the old reddit was superior might hold truth, but it's time to move forward. Reddit owes us nothing.

Also you can scrape Reddit with JSON now, which is 10x better than any HTML, safe or unsafe, whatever that means.

old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.

[flagged]

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).

It's rolled out slowly to different people and IP it seems. Not sure on the exact fingerprinting.

That being said definitely curios what user scripts and addons you are using for general use

They're definitely doing it based on IPs. I just hopped to a different VPN endpoint and it works for me again (same browser). For now.

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.

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.

Email and phone, or email or phone?

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.

They learned from the best: Tumblr.

Do old accounts still work?

They're mostly banned or shadowbanned so it doesn't matter much.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

As an opinionated 'power user' type, I've become used to experiencing friction on web 2.0. So for example I sometimes have to make accommodations because my adblocker or user scripts aren't working with a change on a site. I also find myself doing a lot of captchas, because I use a VPN. That's not unexpected: I'm treading an unhappy path, I shouldn't expect my usage to be considered when these changes are made.

But what I find increasingly common is that I run into these kinds of frictions even when I do behave as a normie. So even if I do install the official Reddit app, I'll end up going through the broken flow you've described. Or I'll make an account and be immediately given a shadowban for being a 'bot'. Or I'll see cookie prompts interfere with login prompts interfering with app prompts.

Devs aren't even making things work outside their own setup now.

>But what I find increasingly common is that I run into these kinds of frictions even when I do behave as a normie.

Often, this friction is on purpose. A good example is how websites show the cookie banner:

The least friction will be to disable tracking cookies, and showing an unobtrusive banner asking the user to opt-in. Very few sites do this.

Showing a screen-blocking pop-up where users get to "accept all" or "deny all" adds friction.

The worst is when a site shows that pop-up but removes "deny all", instead forcing the user to reject all cookies one by one.

I think it's the most commonly used dark pattern out there.

The funnest kinds of problems to solve are the pretend ones.

I've pretty much switched to Lemmy. It's one of the few Fediverse systems that actually seems to live up to its private counterpart.

many 'human' generated comments on reddit are very toxic. characteristic of a sort of oneupmanship of shrill accusation and doomer-ism that gets incentivized with karma. Even when the general sentiment is justified I find it unhelpful and harmful for mental health. Yet I still sometimes drift over there. It can be addictive to scroll through.

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.

Yes. There are questionable policies on the website where Ghislaine Maxwell is the top moderator.

BTW old.reddit is still working for me without login when VPNed into Canada (for now)

I've noticed a large uptick in websites being more comfortable blatantly lying to visitors recently, where beforehand they'd say something like "for the best experience" or not state a reason at all to try and get you to do what they want.

A recent example: if you use a VPN and are signed out, YouTube will occasionally claim you need to sign in to "Protect our community", despite signed out users being unable to affect anything in the first place.

Imagine an internet court of law where you can be punished for lying

Half these fucking sites would be shut down instantly

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.

> This is because appending `site: reddit.com` to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.

People share that tip as if it’s some kind of cheat code for the internet, and it baffles me how they can’t see they’re being manipulated. Of course advertisers took notice and there are Reddit posts which are ads disguised as content. That has been happening since before LLMs. After LLMs, of course plenty of posts there are written by them. Not that the human posts are great, either: for sharing opinions it’s of course subjective, but for factual stuff they are just as wrong as anywhere else on the internet, but with the bad results even more upvoted to the top. Reddit is full of propaganda and confidently ignorant people.

they mean keeping their board/investors safe from scraping. that's all.

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?

Never thought of this until now but what if you had some kind of pay system that worked more like an escrow-ish service ?

So initially you have to pay some small sum. Eventually sometime not too long after (Hours? Days?) your money is returned to you. Make it pricey enough to deter large bot spam (some will of course still pay for single bots) and cheap enough to be affordable for most.

Like putting a quarter in a shopping cart !

I want to see a vending-machines in City Hall or Post Offices etc., where you can give $1-5 to a charity of your choice and receive an anonymous "Probably Human or at least has Metaphorical Skin In The Game" token. The token can be spent/burned with any online service to create/upgrade an account.

I'm skipping over many details about privacy and security and anti-resale, but basically it means that the service can extend trust in moderation, since you (A) have something to lose and (B) making lots of accounts has lots of physical friction.

Not a bad idea. Couid be cheap I would guess since it requires physically going

This is similar to X's model, where every reply section is full of bluetick OF bots.

Cheap enough for humans and too expensive for bots have a big overlap.

If old.reddit dies, I leave. It's just another step into the grave.... That's about all that should be said.

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"

There UI tactics are top evil. Does anyone else has the issue of back button action not remembering scroll position of the previous page? I think they did it deliberately for some unknown reason.

hey, it's working again!

...and it looks like it's not working again today. tested firefox-esr, palemoon, and basilisk.

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.

When we spend this much effort picking through their bullshit, whether we prove our case or not, they win.

One more walled garden enshitifying rapidly

A walled garden overrun with weeds. Just leave.

It says to keep Reddit safe, as in their profit. It doesn't say to keep you or your computer safe.

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.

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.

I look forward to New HN.

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.

Name one vulnerability

> 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.

Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.

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.

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