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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic.

It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.

If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage now pops a modal you can't dismiss.

This is on mobile browsers, of course both sites are pushing their apps.

I am sure it doesn't align with their incentives so they don't care, I will never have an account and never install the app, but why block me from viewing the site if I am still seeing the ads? Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?

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> It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.

That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.

When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.

> every social media site uses

It's not only social media anymore, many mainstream websites have started doing it.

For example on IMDB, you used to be able to read the comments, now they locked them behind a signup box.. it's only a matter of time until they lock the whole site down.

I wish we had the old internet, with simple html forms, texts and pictures.

The peek was really Web 2.0 design, it introduced just enough styles and interactivity to get rid of TABLES but no more than that.

The imdb move was truly stupid of Amazon, imo. I use to go there all the time for movie info but now its wikipedia and other alternatives and don't even bother with imdb.

That's not quite what I meant sorry, I meant Reddit handles it differently to Imgur (one blocks the homepage and one blocks deeper links but not thr homepage. I agree with what you're saying though

Exactly, and it also proves that it is not about limiting bot access.

I remember using old.reddit to bypass login requirements and quite often it would let me read with VPN on (otherwise it kicks you out if you are not logged in with VPN on). Only recently did they introduce the same authentication blocks to the old.reddit, so I am assuming everyone was taking advantage of it

You have to log in to use old and new reddit now. The only way I can view reddit is through the mobile app without logging in.

They already AI shadowbanned me and nuke all of my accounts for participating in historical discussions that mentioned violent upheaval of power, thats why I can't login. I appreciate them helping me ween off using the site completely.

Thank you reddit, never thought I'd quit you. And I'm missing nothing but the exact same conversations over and over again.

This exactly, reddit and X can be good places to stay informed about what is going on in the world, but the constant negativity, astro-turfing and misinformation is quite unhealthy. I'm a fair bit more relaxed since 'reading reddit' isn't my morning ritual anymore.

I dropped Reddit after the Apollo/API fiasco and came here, and it's been a good change. I still skim Facebook occasionally for niche group stuff, by and large I just don't consider Reddit save for searches that take me there but the constant flood of interstitials has me avoiding it more and more even then

FYI web extension "Old Reddit Redirect" was just updated. Restores anonymous access and old reddit. I looked under the hood and it's just setting a "redesign_optout" cookie, so I'd say our days are numbered regardless.

> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?

Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.

And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.

This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.

> these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely

With the shuttering of nitter if this is what twitter wants then the least they could do is let you create an account. You need apple or google for that. It seems like they shut the front door some time ago and now drew the curtains so people couldn't peer in.

They managed to make it enticing enough for me just to see one person's posts to enter my email but said "fuck off and get the app". I'll have to make do with the 5 posts they show without login

> the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.

I don't believe it.

Imgur is 80% posts of text for people trying to post political messages vs what it used to be, interesting or funny pictures

I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.

I discovered recently that a big part of this is that sites weight photos of text higher than text.

I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.

And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.

If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.

And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.

I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.

> I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link

Twitter is just the same. It honestly sucks.

What imgur used to be was just an image host for reddit. Then they tried to make it into a separate community thing and reddit added their own image/video hosting.

I remember when Imgur tried to become a self-contained community.

Reddit users would post an image in Imgur and the "community" would reply complaining about the lack of context, judging appearances or just being mean in general. The nicest ones would ask users (that would never read anything) to make the images private.

It was a very strange alternate universe.

Bots are the noisy excuse they can scream and point to. You look at the mobile reddit app or the new reddit interface and you think these javascript “devs” are capable of forming any valid opinion on these things?

This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.

They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.

I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.

> I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.

If you truly believe this, then you should probably seek therapy.

I was forced to abandon Imgur in September 2025.

https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...

― Imgur access in the United Kingdom – imgur

Hide distracting items is great on the iPhone to delete elements on the page intuitively and it remembers what you hid.

Actually you can discard those annoying popups on reddit using some HTML element blocker (e.g. “hide distracting element” on safari or the picker tool from uBlock origin)

I had some success with these for logged-out browsing ever since old.reddit was locked down completely

Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile.

Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).

There's a chrome plugin called 'MirrorImage'[1] that basically rewrites all imgur links/embeds to use a proxy service, it seems to work pretty well to get around it.

I dare say something similar also exists for Firefox

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mirrorimage/mglldpk...

I recently deleted all of my Reddit accounts. The website had been unusable on mobile for a good while, with the constant and ever-more-aggressive nagging about switching to the app. Old Reddit was the one thing that made the site still usable. And now that requires a login.

So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.

Same, the few communities that are worthwhile I still lurk through photon-reddit. It's a pity how the site went down, I only hope their stock value goes down in the same way.

It's been real annoying to no longer be able to visit reddit posts for search results as it has been the de-facto public forum where recommendations and solutions to issues get posted for a while now. Never going to login there again though and I think I will follow your example and have them delete my account.

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