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.
- 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
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.
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...
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_t...
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
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.
> 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.
https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
Thanks for making sure I’m secure enough to read your three-paragraph news article…
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!
This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
(So like, 20% as useful, but still...)
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.
https://lemmy.today/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopD...
OR
https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=TopDay
https://piefed.social/ (more or less the same as above)
They're killing themselves the same way Tumblr did. Oh well.
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.
Money and legal compliance pressures are far higher in my view.
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.
I vaguely remember some problems with new reddit initially. But the "new" frontend looks nice to me in all aspects. What am I missing?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet
www.reddit.com##div#configured-xpromo-mweb3x_mid_funnel_blocking_v1_30s.configured-xpromo-bottom-sheet.configured-xpromo.rpl-bottom-sheet
Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login
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...)
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.
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.
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. :).
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.
I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.
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.
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...
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.
"oh sorry. common bug, we didn't notice"
Well FIX IT. But you don't care, because your entire IPO oriented faux-value is around New Reddit and how many fucking ads you can cram in
Was a surefire way?
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.
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.
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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.
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.).
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.
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 !
Also you can scrape Reddit with JSON now, which is 10x better than any HTML, safe or unsafe, whatever that means.
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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"
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I think all major platforms should have an option to disable infinite scroll
Otherwise I look up and its 3 hours later
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
So yeah, I'm in the same boat: if they drop old, they drop me.
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.
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.
It's the year of Our Lord 2026. Good luck discovering forums that you don't already know about!
Hmmm, I remember this from the past, but one of my adblock rules probably catches this one, I haven't experienced it for years.
well, I for one had no idea there was a toggle until just now.
Once it a blue moon it doesn't seem to work and going to old.reddit then back to reddit seems to fix 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 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.
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!
Also, clutter…
These are measurable things, not moody things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[deleted]
....
What do you think a meme is? What function does it serve?
I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
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.
UK, where WhatsApp is absolutely mandatory.
(*That are new of course, used and open-box still come from the seller as I expect.)
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.
("Please drink a verification can.")
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.
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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.
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.
Times change, so does certain expectations.
Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.
All the verification process does is making astroturfing and propaganda campaigns even more desirable.
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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.
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.
Isn't that to reload ads? Each plus sign click could have some sort of SOAP call or whatever to load dynamically.
its spez. It's always spez.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...
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...
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
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.
I spend most of my time on subreddits related to the city where I live, and tax+financial planning forums.
I've read new, valuable-to-me human-written information on Reddit since 2023, so I very much doubt this is true.
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.
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.
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.
Revanced.
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.
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.
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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."
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.
Granted, the voting system was the only thing slashdot did right, but it was good.
Everything else is politics, trolling, ragebait or simple spam. So much spam.
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.
Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly 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.
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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.
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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.
at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.
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.
+ Hey how do you do thing?
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-+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669
Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it is.
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.
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?
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https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
It does create some bad incentives however.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
it was obviously abandoned though
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.
Nothing makes any sense and I hope Reddit crashes as soon as possible with their terrible decisions.
I use this on news sites to get rid of the paywall.
One benefit is my productivity had a temporary boost this week until I find another site to read.
Maybe it's for specific subs?
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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.
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.
Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)
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...
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.'
I miss Reddit-the-communities, personally, whose interests as you observe seem to conflict with those of Reddit-the-company.
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.
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.
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.
But alas, we can't have nice things.
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??
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.
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.
Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd do the same.
* 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.
* 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)
The huge organized celebrity AMAs already felt like a death of reddit on their own.
> the baseline remains
Did it though?
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
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).
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'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.
works also.
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
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.
limited doses
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.
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!
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
> 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.
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
The only winning move now is to start impersonating their app.
Logged in though probably they do have way more data. Maybe you can opt out in some way ?
some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine
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.
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To which you then receive login codes via email and recommendations to Russian subreddits
You are so brave, an true hero.
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.
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.
It seems we both agree, though, that Old Reddit is not long for this world. Which I find regrettable.
That being said definitely curios what user scripts and addons you are using for general use
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.
Half these fucking sites would be shut down instantly
Unless their servers are being hit so hard by scrapers they can't stand up straight...
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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.
Cheap enough for humans and too expensive for bots have a big overlap.
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.
therearedozensofus.gif
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.
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.
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.
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?
If there was an option to use the modern CSS with the old technology that would be the sweet spot for me.
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?
<rpl-tooltip placement="top" appearance="neutral">
<!--?lit$003985561$-->
<span slot="content"><!--?lit$003985561$-->Send a GIF</span>
</rpl-tooltip>
"Addictive business model" is one thing. It's annoying, we should highly discourage it, but - some are worse than others
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.
— Sam Altman
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-- develop the ability to formulate and type accordingly
-- be informed that we have information that the uk administration forbade YT to the minors (while the minors are _mandated_ cultivation, and YT is unavoidable - it is importantly there). This within a non noted resistance of the people and a non noted qualification of the satanic perpetrators. It is one of the most critical events of the century. Hence, the british is an ex-civilization.
GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.
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 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!
the fact this is something to be distinguished says a lot about where we are now and none of what it says is good
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".
Grot I've never heard of in terms of buying stuff. Grot to me just implies something dirty
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.
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.
Starting with the premise that it's impossible won't improve society.
You've pointed out something real, but it does not appear to be within the scope of our discussion.
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I guess the $2B is hallucination. 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.
It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.
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
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
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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.
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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’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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
So you're actually censoring opinions, not fighting spam, just like every other reddit mod.
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.
If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.
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 :)
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.
Forget where I saw that one but it’s Reddit now.
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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?
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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.
Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had accounts.
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.
I'm sorry, is that something that happen recently? Because when I had an account there, subscriptions were permanent
So I deleted all my content. If people can’t view my content, why have it online?
More common is seeing "tumble cup and he ran flew tree" due to users using anonymizing apps to remove their old data.
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.
The day I can no longer use Old Reddit is the day I stop using Reddit.
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.
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.
Where to allow them to do this with posts outside of their subreddit is an implementation detail.
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.
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.
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Yes, those required moderation too.
Again, solved problem for community sites.
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.
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.
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'.
But holy moly yes how user hostile.
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
Obviously not, when you ban them immediately just for participating in another subreddit, regardless of what they wrote there.
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).
I don't really care if someone feels "icky" about non-cis or non-hetero people. That's your personal problem to work out.
My problem is I've never met someone who both ranted about trans people and gives a damn about the corruption of the current administration. I've never seen someone rant about traditional family values and excluding certain groups from society who also supports the rule of law or talks about reforms to improve democracy.
I pity the person who is so enraged about a minor casting decision.
It is so unimportant in comparison to the degradation of government, food and healthcare issues, social media addiction, AI instability. The "gotcha" bitterness about trans people here makes me wonder what values a person actually claims to hold.
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The politically religious have no perspective of what they’re doing to these places. If you really pin them down, they think it’s everyone else that has changed. Wild.
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.