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Comment by chrysoprace | Hacker News Reader

Old Reddit is now completely unusable without an account. Maybe it's time for me to finally stop using it.

New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few years, this just feels like a final reminder that it's time to move on.

Cynically, I think the purpose is to inflate page view counts. You refresh 10x to read the comments, they report 10x user engagement, and high five each other over successfully meeting their KPIs.

Do database dumps of it still exist?

Maybe it’s time to just download it and Wikipedia, then point an LLM / vectordb at it.

See if https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool works, the readme enumerates the data sources it pulls from.

Perhaps the way to solve for X is having a scraper serve the data via torrent and/or IPFS vs centralized systems like nitter and xcancel.

Yes they do, there are archives that are up to date for the month.

Interesting--I'm still using old.reddit.com with no problem, without an account. Maybe the change is not broadly rolled out?

Could be regional - however it's odd that it pops up on old.reddit.com but not reddit.com.

It happens to me on not old reddit as well

They’ve been rolling it out gradually. There was a thread on HN about it a couple of weeks ago, it just started affecting my IPs a few days ago.

It’s managed to do what years of self-imposed content blockers etc. on my own side have failed to do - finally broke my Reddit addiction!

I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.

That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...

Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.

A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.

I got it last week sometime. Now I can't browse reddit at work and on my tablet, where I'm not logged in.

You may want to check out Libredirect: https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

Use a LibReddit/Redlib/Teddit/etc. instance.

To what end? We're discussing this on a post about the equivalent for another platform being (hopefully temporarily) shutdown so this will never be a reliable long term solution.

Until we finally overcome this inevitable enshittification by migrating everyone to decentralized communication platforms?

Old reddit on the tor onion domain still works for me.

All the time? It wasn't working for me using tor-browser, nor Brave. I was only a reader of Reddit. I'm on fediverse/Lemmy, mainly https://old.lemmy.world which feels very familiar!

I've not taken the effort to understand fediverse yet, but it feels very old-internet.

The changes to old.reddit mean I've started using redlib.catsarch for simple browsing.

It was time for that a long time ago lol.

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