While your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future and 'drink verification' copypasta[1].
My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future.
I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
Would it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.
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.
As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit".
While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot?
No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node...
The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting).
I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in.
And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol
So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit.
PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.
Well Reddit would have a lot less scraper traffic if it hadn't shut down the feed API 3 years ago in an attempt to keep its data closed and only distributed to Google (which paid money for it). Self-inflicted. No sympathy.
I don't understand why sites like reddit need to do any work on (unauthd) GET. They are not instant messaging platforms, they are forums. You can live with a ~1-2-5 minute delay on forums. So POSTs (from logged in users) append to a queue, and a worker does work at regular intervals, creates the HTML and that gets sent to a cache + distributed to a CDN if needed. There's no need to do work on unauthd GETs for a forum.
Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
I assume they are being screen scraped by LLMs even though you can find exports of reddit posts elsewhere. I can't blame them for trying to charge for API usage, it was never a cheap cost to them to begin with.
There's a third theory of why they're doing this that I don't see discussed too much.
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
I noticed they logged me out when I happened on a link recently. I don't think this change will make me log back in. The value of the site has already crashed, now the only question is which site will manage to capture the mainstream link/image discussion next.
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
This hasn't been true for a while now. A lot of what you find on reddit these days feels incredibly fake. It's like there should be a variant of Goodhart's law: Once a forum becomes known for genuine human writing it stops being a forum for genuine human writing.
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.
I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open reddit clients there is no alternative.
I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a useful asynchronous human interaction.
I think reddit lost the useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that drama.
I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic.
If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it?
Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help.
But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility)
The problem isn't "Is this human or AI?" it's "Do we trust the entity with this identity or not?" meaning it's entirely possible to be anonymous but use a web-of-trust style system to promote/demote stories.
Part of the problem with that suggestion is everyone likes to tell everyone else who it is they should and shouldn't be trusting, so that dataset and acting on it would become a huge hot potato.
I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations / guides?
Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for niches you're newly learning about.
Discord is it's own problem.
I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while.
Do we have to find an old dump of reddit html, and self host a snapshot of days before the front page of the Internet went behind a login page?
What niche are you looking for? I usually append "forum" to topic searches when I am looking for humans with similar interests. I have found communities for all the niche topics I have looked for so far.
I spent my whole childhood without computers and a good chunk of my teenage years without stable internet connection. Now, I have both, but due to the state of the internet, I'm returning to my old routine: A load of books to learn from and hopefully finding some time to apply the knowledge.
“Safety” is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new front end doesn’t seem safer for end users. It probably does make it safer for Reddit in that it’s harder for scrapers to do their thing.
There is a Nitter for Reddit, called Redlib, correct?
Best to treat Reddit archives as read-only and modern Reddit as a marketing slopfarm. It mostly consists of bots trying to get their brands into AI training data.
For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).
The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.
to give some examples of mod abuse:
- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power
- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company
- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)
- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed
- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)
> For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit
> to give some examples of mod abuse
You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/sass 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.
You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.
This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied.
It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.
Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results. Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you could expect mostly humans participating.
It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.
The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.
Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.
Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid for by the highest bidders.
I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.
I think it's not so much a problem with social media itself, but rather a phenomenon that occurs when consumption points converge. Anger is great for grabbing attention, and for newcomers trying to get noticed at a converged consumption point, generating anger or outrage is just the easiest way.
At first I thought it might be a problem with social media, but it seems more like a problem that arises when groups converge in one place. So these days, I just write my thoughts on my own homepage. That way I can write my own thoughts without getting angry at other people's posts.
Personally, if you need a moderate level of connection, there's something called the IndieWeb. Of course, sometimes you just need your own world without any connection at all.
Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)
Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.
YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community".
I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).
I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a legal identity.
This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
The new interface is filled with dark patterns meant to make you waste as much time on the site. The huge amount of wasted white space making you having to scroll more and constant clicks ensures you spend more time on site and this watch more ads.
> Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs.
For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.
Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems.
In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass.
https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...
While your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future and 'drink verification' copypasta[1].
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...
(13 years ago)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future.
I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
I would view a website that requires users to go through a lengthy verification process.
Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.
Would it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.
That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.
That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.
It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.
> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly
If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.
The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.
The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.
Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.
Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely trying to keep other AI companies out
https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are allowed to see.
Of course not, are you crazy?
that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI
It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit data makes LLM stronger or weaker.
Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.
Someone did a finetune w/ data from 4chan and found improvements on several popular benchmarks, so ... maybe?
As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit".
While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot?
No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node...
The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting).
I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in.
And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol
So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit.
PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.
Well Reddit would have a lot less scraper traffic if it hadn't shut down the feed API 3 years ago in an attempt to keep its data closed and only distributed to Google (which paid money for it). Self-inflicted. No sympathy.
I doubt it. The scraper botnets aren't going to bother with niceties like APIs, they just come in over HTTPS and grab anything they can.
There was a whole mini-industry around scraping specifically Reddit using the API feed because it was so open.
I don't understand why sites like reddit need to do any work on (unauthd) GET. They are not instant messaging platforms, they are forums. You can live with a ~1-2-5 minute delay on forums. So POSTs (from logged in users) append to a queue, and a worker does work at regular intervals, creates the HTML and that gets sent to a cache + distributed to a CDN if needed. There's no need to do work on unauthd GETs for a forum.
I personally don't like it, but hard to blame them.
Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd do the same.
Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
I assume they are being screen scraped by LLMs even though you can find exports of reddit posts elsewhere. I can't blame them for trying to charge for API usage, it was never a cheap cost to them to begin with.
There's a third theory of why they're doing this that I don't see discussed too much.
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
I noticed they logged me out when I happened on a link recently. I don't think this change will make me log back in. The value of the site has already crashed, now the only question is which site will manage to capture the mainstream link/image discussion next.
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
This hasn't been true for a while now. A lot of what you find on reddit these days feels incredibly fake. It's like there should be a variant of Goodhart's law: Once a forum becomes known for genuine human writing it stops being a forum for genuine human writing.
Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.
You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.
Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread.
I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open reddit clients there is no alternative.
You can still use old.reddit, you just need to be logged in. That said, if old.reddit ever went away altogether I would stop using it too.
For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.
I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right now.
Maybe it's for specific subs?
Not yet, but it's coming to old.reddit.com globally soon: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...
[dead]
I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a useful asynchronous human interaction. I think reddit lost the useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that drama.
I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic.
If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it?
Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help.
But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility)
But I may just be a crusty old mind.
The problem isn't "Is this human or AI?" it's "Do we trust the entity with this identity or not?" meaning it's entirely possible to be anonymous but use a web-of-trust style system to promote/demote stories.
Part of the problem with that suggestion is everyone likes to tell everyone else who it is they should and shouldn't be trusting, so that dataset and acting on it would become a huge hot potato.
I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations / guides? Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for niches you're newly learning about. Discord is it's own problem. I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while. Do we have to find an old dump of reddit html, and self host a snapshot of days before the front page of the Internet went behind a login page?
What niche are you looking for? I usually append "forum" to topic searches when I am looking for humans with similar interests. I have found communities for all the niche topics I have looked for so far.
I spent my whole childhood without computers and a good chunk of my teenage years without stable internet connection. Now, I have both, but due to the state of the internet, I'm returning to my old routine: A load of books to learn from and hopefully finding some time to apply the knowledge.
I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.
Related:
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...)
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
“Safety” is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new front end doesn’t seem safer for end users. It probably does make it safer for Reddit in that it’s harder for scrapers to do their thing.
There is a Nitter for Reddit, called Redlib, correct?
Best to treat Reddit archives as read-only and modern Reddit as a marketing slopfarm. It mostly consists of bots trying to get their brands into AI training data.
An earlier thread:
Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857
Cannot duplicate.
What I'm getting is a temporary/false "You've been blocked by network security" page but refreshing then brings up the reddit page as per usual.
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation
For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).
The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.
to give some examples of mod abuse:
- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power
- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company
- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)
- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed
- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)
> For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.
I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit
> to give some examples of mod abuse
You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/sass 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.
You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.
I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.
They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.
That would be a hard no for me.
> is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans
Was a surefire way?
Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm
I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.
i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense
How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to new reddit.
I assume this is another push to force people onto the terrible "new" UI.
When they eventually remove the old reddit, they'll lose this 18 year reddit veteran. No way in hell am I using that infinite scroll abomination.
This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied.
It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point. That's the first time they tried to block the site from being mirrored.
old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.
Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.
Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results. Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you could expect mostly humans participating.
It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.
The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.
Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.
Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid for by the highest bidders.
I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.
Note that Cloudflare is the least reliable source for who's a bot.
I think it's not so much a problem with social media itself, but rather a phenomenon that occurs when consumption points converge. Anger is great for grabbing attention, and for newcomers trying to get noticed at a converged consumption point, generating anger or outrage is just the easiest way.
At first I thought it might be a problem with social media, but it seems more like a problem that arises when groups converge in one place. So these days, I just write my thoughts on my own homepage. That way I can write my own thoughts without getting angry at other people's posts.
What a lovely idea. Maybe I should try this.
Personally, if you need a moderate level of connection, there's something called the IndieWeb. Of course, sometimes you just need your own world without any connection at all.
Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)
Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.
YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community".
I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).
If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch many YouTube vids embedded
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos
Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.
Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not. I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.
I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a legal identity.
They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.
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This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
The new interface is filled with dark patterns meant to make you waste as much time on the site. The huge amount of wasted white space making you having to scroll more and constant clicks ensures you spend more time on site and this watch more ads.
Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.
> Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs.
For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.
I look forward to New HN.
Name one vulnerability