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].
I guarantee you that there are real people out there in tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing things that bring us closer to that world rather than farther away.
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.
Which country was this? I’ve never known Amazon requiring WhatsApp. It uses SMS a lot.
The only service I’ve used which does offer WhatsApp as a form of identification is PayPal. But even that is just one of many different authorisation options.
I don’t have WhatsApp either and never once found that to be a limiting. So I wonder if the experience your relative was having is more nuanced than suggested.
Are you sure it was actually via whatsapp, and not just a six digit code sent via regular SMS to the phone number on record for her account? It's possible whatsapp on her phone has simply hijacked the SMS client functionality and set itself as the default.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen an older person that doesn't even know what application they're running, or can't tell the difference between the content of a website inside a browser window and an application that runs natively on their computer. I read what the GP wrote, I'm saying there's a non zero possibility she's misunderstanding something.
It seems like something you have to specifically choose, on the amazon account side.
I choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick for being unable to differentiate between apps :)
I also chose their presumed first hand statement than your unrelated experience with unrelated third parties.
Your point re: having to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications, if we're staying in the realm of "what ifs" and looking for the awkward but possible ways to discredit the claims, I can believe that she was enrolled without being asked. I've seen at least one person complaining about that exact scenario.
but then amazon would not tell her that she should find the code in whatsapp, because amazon would still be sending send an sms. it should not have any awareness of whatsapp hijacking the sms function, and therefore the amazon message should reference the SMS. if it references whatsapp then it means amazon wants to send to whatsapp directly.
The frustrating part is that since so many companies collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.
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.
anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition:
* Like most souvenir shops, it sells a lot of old tat.
* I'm not spending fifty quid on a piece of tat.
People buy it all the time when they practice retail therapy.
I really wish there was a way for the electorate to preempt the votes of their representatives, so this kind of lobbying would be less effective. Sure, they might try carpet bombing the airwaves with PSA campaigns, but if the people really really don’t want what the lobbyist is selling, they would still be able to rip the ballot out of their congress critter’s hands and change the vote.
Ballot initiative. Californians tried that to stop "gay marriage" (Prop 8) so the courts just told the people to fuck themselves and overturned it. Again in South Dakota for legalizing marijuana, the voters voted in favor by special initiative so the state just overturned it.
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.
I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the amount matters because it is invariably very, very small compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the impact the lobbying has.
It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.
Would it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
Wasn't twitter/x meant to be that? Pay and verify to enter members club. Didn't quite take off all while destroying goodwill that blue badge used to have.
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.
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
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.
Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.
Reddit HAD almost 20 years of comments, until about three years ago when they started to lock down APIs, remove moderators, and make poor choices. Users reacted accordingly and now you will just see a whole lot of [deleted] or comment content replaced with garbage data. It's no longer an archive or wealth of information it once was.
For years before LLMs got big a comment I would often see was, "Google search is worthless now. I basically solve all my problems by searching reddit."
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 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.
There was a whole mini-industry around scraping specifically Reddit using the API feed because it was so open. AI companies first trained on Pushshift, which is like Common Crawl for Reddit, which is why Reddit shut down Pushshift (with legal threats IIRC) at the same time.
If there were a well-known URL that retrieved all content added to a site after a given date, and a meaningful number of sites implemented it, I bet the biggest scrapers would use it.
Except, of course, that then sites would start lying and sending abridged, poisoned, or nonexistent data.
Nice things cannot be had, no matter how many levels you go down.
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 know I'm not arguing with you personally here since it seems we both have a bone to pick with Reddit, but I don't understand why they can't use Anubis or whatever captcha thing I may or may not have seen on New Reddit. It irks me that they've decided they will keep hosting it (for now), but they're just going to close the gate.
And dang it, I swear to god they put in a 2s rate-limit on the page, which it seems they have left in after the transition (perhaps because it's being rolled out still, although they could be so kind as to not rate-limit me now that I've logged in). Was that all they tried??
Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
The response to that should be to restrict the events calendar and similar dynamic functionality, not to restrict the 99% of users who are accessing what should be 100% staticly cached HTML.
Good idea; I'll make sure we have all random ?date=1970-01-01, ?date=1970-01-02, all the way to ?date=2026-07-22 URLs cached, even the ones that are 404s but the crawlers still try anyways. Thank you!
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 read the author's post and many of the comments and decided that I was finished with reddit, finally. I have always used old reddit to surf the subs and have never used new reddit.
I did my normal morning routine of checking 8-10 subs that still have interesting content and did not see any nag screen for logins at all. Everything worked on my end just as it always has worked. I read comments and post titles with no issues and no login prompts.
I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices. I surf entirely from a desktop using Firefox or Librewolf and a couple of extensions. I never log in to reddit unless there is some issue that I can help with. I avoid most of the popular subs and focus on things that I have direct experience doing or using. If I do post I leave it up for a day or two and then edit it a bit like Yossarian-style censoring - death to all modifiers!
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/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.
You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
I tried this for a while. My local subs have been taken over by ideologues and the niche subs still get political/outrage bait flare-ups regularly. I've decided that the best way to consume reddit is through an intermediary, whether it's Google or an LLM that I ask to crawl through subs for recent posts, remove emotional/political content, and summarize for me. Ironically that's exactly what Reddit is trying to prevent, but when push comes to shove I'm happy to miss out on the 5% of useful stuff rather than have to wade through the memes, outrage, and bots.
Powertripping mods have always been a problem with Reddit ever since they had user-created subreddits. The real problem is that Reddit has been very two-faced with what their expectations on moderators are. If we take "the purpose of a system is what it does[0]" then Reddit moderators exist primarily as unpaid volunteer employees, paid in control over the narrative of certain communities.
The flipside of powertripping mods is that Reddit does not support their moderation teams properly. Actually, that big stink people made over killing third-party Reddit client access was all powermods, because doing your job as a moderator is nigh-impossible with the standard Reddit tools. That's why we had so many subs get blacked out in protest, and why Reddit's response was to start deposing moderators until they caved.
As an example of what I mean by "do not support moderation teams", Reddit still has no good tools to prevent brigading. That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[1]. You generally can't stop someone from voting in your subreddit. But if they comment, you can scrutinize their post history and ban them from commenting if they're from the other sub that's brigading you.
There's also that video[2] that did the rounds a while ago of a Reddit mod trying to explain how them promoting a scam is really Reddit's fault for not paying mods. Despite the fact that this person is incredibly cringe, I actually do think he's grasping at an actual problem - it's just not one that exonerates him in any way. Reddit wants it both ways, and as a result, they get the worst people.
And they've been doing this since they were a start-up. Remember when one of Reddit's most popular subs was /r/jailbait, a forum dedicated to trading suggestive pictures of young women around? That forum was kept around because its top mod, /u/violentacrez, was doing basically all of Reddit's CSAM compliance. That's the business model of Reddit in a nutshell: find the scummiest people who are still capable of doing the job and give them total power over their domain so they don't question the lack of pay. The IPO was only tangentially related to this, in that it's when a lot of less power-trippy mods jumped ship.
[0] This is a big part of systems theory but it equally applies to critical theory
[1] The pattern is generally always "small group of people holding heretical opinions joins forum with orthodox opinion to agendapost", I've never seen the other way around - i.e. I haven't seen militantly "pro-vax" people going on anti-vaxxer subs to downvote everything.
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 closed all my Reddit accounts after they instantly shadow-banned my 8+y main account after I shared a single gdrive link to reply to a user with actual data.
I've been appreciated as contributor in various places for being helpful, thorough and precise, but Reddit doesn't care to have good content. It's simply not a good discussion platform (and the UI sucks).
There's a third theory of why they're doing this that I don't see discussed too much.
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
> They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
I neglected to editorialize this part, but I suspect this is because *they don't have to*. I don't doubt that there are some new things on Reddit that people like, but Reddit was functionally complete as a place to interact with other people when it was launched.
I'm not an internet historian, but sites akin to Reddit have existed for a long time, and my understanding is that it happened to take over when the last forum aggregator died for whatever reason.
“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.
Old reddit still works for me even without login though. I'm too lazy to figure out which from the multiple of userscripts and addons I use allows it, but apparently the block is done half-assedly and easy to circumvent.
It still works for me too (I have no account on Reddit and have no intention to have an account, even if they try to insist), and it is also possible to add .json on the end of the URL for JSON data (although, so far, I only use this feature to view pictures at the original size that are too small if I do not do this).
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.
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.
> The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
A failure in what sense? That they can't pay the bills or that they can't see the VC-desired 10X ROI? Because my impression (as a layperson) is that the Reddit of yore could have stayed afloat from ad revenue + user donations, but it wasn't turning a huge profit. Anyone else remember the sidebar with the quota for Reddit gold for server costs? I don't remember it being short that often...
hmmmm, what I mean is this. There's been backlash about Reddit's ecosystem, but fundamentally they've transitioned into a business model that monetizes proprietary data for AI training. From that perspective, it's been successful. The problem, though, is that the quality of that data continues to decline. So it looks successful now, but I question whether that will hold in the future.
In other words, if openness and user experience are compromised, the real experts who provide deep, professional insights will disappear. Most experts have a desire for recognition. In Korea, we have a saying: 'Plankton and whales' meaning whales can only exist when there's enough plankton.
Anyway, I think Reddit itself is a successful exit. They sold their past data at a high price. But I question whether this is sustainable in the long run.
It's a difficult trade off: short term profit versus long term sustainability. Given the AI era, the timing seems right in terms of value. But separate from that, any new communities that emerge will likely suffer from long term value depreciation because of this precedent
Maybe I'm just caught up in the illusion of 'sustainability.'
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.
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).
> 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 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.
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.
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 feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too idealistic back then, but it’s clear that the modern internet needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole eyeball scanning thing though?
New reddit has a literally worse user experience. No comments display more than maybe 1 reply and if you click to view more, it takes you to a dedicated page for just that reply. If you click the back button it completely forgets where you were in the original comment thread. Basically impossible to peruse comment sections like on askreddit posts, etc.
IF you're an actual user of the site, like, logging in and what not, you can still just set your preferences to use the old design. Never need to go to old.reddit
I 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.
I feel like this is a deliberately obtuse response to a real and irritating change.
Old reddit is going to be MUCH, MUCH easier to scrape. Scraping has the potential to bring down the site. Gating old reddit to logged in users will massively mitigate that.
I don't like it either. But it's not hard to see a good reason why doing so helps "keep reddit safe"
Even if it also coincidentally makes it easier for them to make more money. Grr.
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.
Then they should nuke Old Reddit rather than offer a wishy-washy "we're being scraped" explanation. My beef is that under all of the layers of PR this ultimately comes down to an engineering liability --- which is not my problem. If they can't deal with *their* problem, don't pretend like it's *my* problem.
I'm even fine with them saying "because old.reddit.com is used by scrapers, we're locking it down" which I would still contest the need to do when other sites can use e.g. Anubis, but I probably wouldn't write a rant about it.
> Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
To be pedantic, it is accurate, but missing context. Please forgive me for doing the same thing the Reddit PR team has done, I am not so morally just.
Arguments aside, this is a touchy spot for me because I really do view my time spent on Reddit positively, and seeing where it has gone makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.
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...
That is funny, sad & scary at the same time.
I guarantee you that there are real people out there in tech who think getting to a "Drink verification can" world would be great for corporate profit, and are actively doing things that bring us closer to that world rather than farther away.
>You've been blocked by network security. To continue, log in to your Reddit account or use your developer token
....
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.
Which country was this? I’ve never known Amazon requiring WhatsApp. It uses SMS a lot.
The only service I’ve used which does offer WhatsApp as a form of identification is PayPal. But even that is just one of many different authorisation options.
I don’t have WhatsApp either and never once found that to be a limiting. So I wonder if the experience your relative was having is more nuanced than suggested.
Are you sure it was actually via whatsapp, and not just a six digit code sent via regular SMS to the phone number on record for her account? It's possible whatsapp on her phone has simply hijacked the SMS client functionality and set itself as the default.
> "WhatsApp on her phone"
GP clearly said she doesn't have WhatsApp.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen an older person that doesn't even know what application they're running, or can't tell the difference between the content of a website inside a browser window and an application that runs natively on their computer. I read what the GP wrote, I'm saying there's a non zero possibility she's misunderstanding something.
It seems like something you have to specifically choose, on the amazon account side.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeI...
I choose to not call a GP a liar or too thick for being unable to differentiate between apps :)
I also chose their presumed first hand statement than your unrelated experience with unrelated third parties.
Your point re: having to subscribe to WhatsApp notifications, if we're staying in the realm of "what ifs" and looking for the awkward but possible ways to discredit the claims, I can believe that she was enrolled without being asked. I've seen at least one person complaining about that exact scenario.
Cheers!
but then amazon would not tell her that she should find the code in whatsapp, because amazon would still be sending send an sms. it should not have any awareness of whatsapp hijacking the sms function, and therefore the amazon message should reference the SMS. if it references whatsapp then it means amazon wants to send to whatsapp directly.
No, my Microsoft Azure 2FA sends codes to WhatsApp, not SMS.
UK, where WhatsApp is absolutely mandatory.
“which she doesn’t have and doesn’t want”
Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
The frustrating part is that since so many companies collect PII under the guise of security (and then use it for advertising) it's harder to tell if this is a legal scam or illegal scam.
Yes. I'd gone round to see her and I checked her history to ensure it wasn't dodgy.
What is a tat?
“Tat” means miscellaneous junk.
That said, the anecdote is made up or important details have been elided to make it sound more interesting than it is. Amazon doesn’t depend on whatsapp for 2fa. You can configure amazon 2fa to send an SMS and it’s possible that the poster’s mother has misconfigured her phone to claim that it needs whatsapp to read the sms 2fa message but I highly doubt even that. When I look on amazon it allows passkeys, regular TOTP like with DUO authenticator or google authenticator or whatever or SMS with a backup of sending the TOTP code to the registered email on the account. Whatsapp isn’t even an option.
How does "tat" differ from "grot"?
tat n.
People buy it all the time when they practice retail therapy.Sure it was Amazon? Sounds like a scam
(13 years ago)
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
I really wish there was a way for the electorate to preempt the votes of their representatives, so this kind of lobbying would be less effective. Sure, they might try carpet bombing the airwaves with PSA campaigns, but if the people really really don’t want what the lobbyist is selling, they would still be able to rip the ballot out of their congress critter’s hands and change the vote.
I would settle for representatives that actually represented the interests of the people rather than those of the wealthiest and their corporations.
Ballot initiative. Californians tried that to stop "gay marriage" (Prop 8) so the courts just told the people to fuck themselves and overturned it. Again in South Dakota for legalizing marijuana, the voters voted in favor by special initiative so the state just overturned it.
Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.
That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.
That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.
It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.
> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly
If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.
The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.
The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.
Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.
> he entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.
I guess the $2B is hallucination. But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.
>But it makes sense for them to do the "think of the children" lobby.
Why? It seems more like that’s baseless speculation with an agenda.
I disagree a little bit, but only for this reason: the amount matters because it is invariably very, very small compared to the revenue/profit of the company and the impact the lobbying has.
It is shocking what politicians will do for just five or six figure donations to their campaigns.
"excatly"????wtf?
Meta hasn't corrected it and there's absolutely no way I give Meta the benefit of a doubt.
And ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda normal.
Times change, so does certain expectations.
I would view a website that requires users to go through a lengthy verification process.
Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.
Would it? Or would it just open up another revenue stream for websites? Verified corporate accounts sure, but with prices set per number of usernames per account, billed monthly.
Wasn't twitter/x meant to be that? Pay and verify to enter members club. Didn't quite take off all while destroying goodwill that blue badge used to have.
As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit".
While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot?
No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node...
The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting).
I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in.
And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol
So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit.
PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
> "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit"
the second old.reddit goes is the second I stop using that site
it's already very obviously chock full of slop and AI bullshit, with some subs having long unavoidable lists of "your post was removed because you did not verify" trails that imply that automated posters found a thread and went hard
but add in privacy crushing bs -- no reason to be there anymore. Back to old school forums
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.
Some of that was a reaction to Reddit closing the APIs and blocking apps.
Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.
https://github.com/Tryhard-cs/reddit-download-tool
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48951669
Treat Reddit as the temporary object storage system that it is.
Reddit HAD almost 20 years of comments, until about three years ago when they started to lock down APIs, remove moderators, and make poor choices. Users reacted accordingly and now you will just see a whole lot of [deleted] or comment content replaced with garbage data. It's no longer an archive or wealth of information it once was.
That redacted amount is absolutely miniscule and blown out of proportion.
More than 20 years
Put a fork in me, I'm done.
Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely trying to keep other AI companies out
https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
Of course not, are you crazy?
91.5% Gross margin :)
https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
yishan had such plans, to distribute 10% of company shares to reddit users
https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/
it was obviously abandoned though
Those little virtual stickers isn't enough? What else could you possibly want as compensation?
ideally? blowjobs. i ain't shitposting for karma, dammit
The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are allowed to see.
Thanks for the gold kind stranger!
that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI
It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit data makes LLM stronger or weaker.
Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.
For years before LLMs got big a comment I would often see was, "Google search is worthless now. I basically solve all my problems by searching reddit."
Someone did a finetune w/ data from 4chan and found improvements on several popular benchmarks, so ... maybe?
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.
Maybe RES (or other extension) should gain a mode where new reddit is rendered in the style of old reddit?
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-...
For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.
I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.
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. AI companies first trained on Pushshift, which is like Common Crawl for Reddit, which is why Reddit shut down Pushshift (with legal threats IIRC) at the same time.
If there were a well-known URL that retrieved all content added to a site after a given date, and a meaningful number of sites implemented it, I bet the biggest scrapers would use it.
Except, of course, that then sites would start lying and sending abridged, poisoned, or nonexistent data.
Nice things cannot be had, no matter how many levels you go down.
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 know I'm not arguing with you personally here since it seems we both have a bone to pick with Reddit, but I don't understand why they can't use Anubis or whatever captcha thing I may or may not have seen on New Reddit. It irks me that they've decided they will keep hosting it (for now), but they're just going to close the gate.
And dang it, I swear to god they put in a 2s rate-limit on the page, which it seems they have left in after the transition (perhaps because it's being rolled out still, although they could be so kind as to not rate-limit me now that I've logged in). Was that all they tried??
Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
The response to that should be to restrict the events calendar and similar dynamic functionality, not to restrict the 99% of users who are accessing what should be 100% staticly cached HTML.
Good idea; I'll make sure we have all random ?date=1970-01-01, ?date=1970-01-02, all the way to ?date=2026-07-22 URLs cached, even the ones that are 404s but the crawlers still try anyways. Thank you!
It's always entertaining when people proudly display their lack reading comprehension.
That's very true.
Of course, the _actual_ response to that should be to make the AI companies somehow liable for the massive disruption they caused (and still cause).
But alas, we can't have nice things.
I personally don't like it, but hard to blame them.
Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd do the same.
I don't 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.
Let’s bring Stack Exchanges back!
IRC
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.
I read the author's post and many of the comments and decided that I was finished with reddit, finally. I have always used old reddit to surf the subs and have never used new reddit.
I did my normal morning routine of checking 8-10 subs that still have interesting content and did not see any nag screen for logins at all. Everything worked on my end just as it always has worked. I read comments and post titles with no issues and no login prompts.
I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices. I surf entirely from a desktop using Firefox or Librewolf and a couple of extensions. I never log in to reddit unless there is some issue that I can help with. I avoid most of the popular subs and focus on things that I have direct experience doing or using. If I do post I leave it up for a day or two and then edit it a bit like Yossarian-style censoring - death to all modifiers!
It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). I neglected to mention/link to this news article.
I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.
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/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.
i like lemmy but the idea that it's not astroturfed just ain't there, plus the number of dubious phishing links and images is offputting
limited doses
https://old.lemmy.world/
works also.
You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
I tried this for a while. My local subs have been taken over by ideologues and the niche subs still get political/outrage bait flare-ups regularly. I've decided that the best way to consume reddit is through an intermediary, whether it's Google or an LLM that I ask to crawl through subs for recent posts, remove emotional/political content, and summarize for me. Ironically that's exactly what Reddit is trying to prevent, but when push comes to shove I'm happy to miss out on the 5% of useful stuff rather than have to wade through the memes, outrage, and bots.
Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.
Powertripping mods have always been a problem with Reddit ever since they had user-created subreddits. The real problem is that Reddit has been very two-faced with what their expectations on moderators are. If we take "the purpose of a system is what it does[0]" then Reddit moderators exist primarily as unpaid volunteer employees, paid in control over the narrative of certain communities.
The flipside of powertripping mods is that Reddit does not support their moderation teams properly. Actually, that big stink people made over killing third-party Reddit client access was all powermods, because doing your job as a moderator is nigh-impossible with the standard Reddit tools. That's why we had so many subs get blacked out in protest, and why Reddit's response was to start deposing moderators until they caved.
As an example of what I mean by "do not support moderation teams", Reddit still has no good tools to prevent brigading. That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[1]. You generally can't stop someone from voting in your subreddit. But if they comment, you can scrutinize their post history and ban them from commenting if they're from the other sub that's brigading you.
There's also that video[2] that did the rounds a while ago of a Reddit mod trying to explain how them promoting a scam is really Reddit's fault for not paying mods. Despite the fact that this person is incredibly cringe, I actually do think he's grasping at an actual problem - it's just not one that exonerates him in any way. Reddit wants it both ways, and as a result, they get the worst people.
And they've been doing this since they were a start-up. Remember when one of Reddit's most popular subs was /r/jailbait, a forum dedicated to trading suggestive pictures of young women around? That forum was kept around because its top mod, /u/violentacrez, was doing basically all of Reddit's CSAM compliance. That's the business model of Reddit in a nutshell: find the scummiest people who are still capable of doing the job and give them total power over their domain so they don't question the lack of pay. The IPO was only tangentially related to this, in that it's when a lot of less power-trippy mods jumped ship.
[0] This is a big part of systems theory but it equally applies to critical theory
[1] The pattern is generally always "small group of people holding heretical opinions joins forum with orthodox opinion to agendapost", I've never seen the other way around - i.e. I haven't seen militantly "pro-vax" people going on anti-vaxxer subs to downvote everything.
[1] https://youtu.be/67CXV4o4dYM
> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
Still works as long as you don't care about recent results and are okay with filtering for pre-2023 answers.
(So like, 20% as useful, but still...)
at least with pre-2023 those shillbot accounts were run by people directly!
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 closed all my Reddit accounts after they instantly shadow-banned my 8+y main account after I shared a single gdrive link to reply to a user with actual data. I've been appreciated as contributor in various places for being helpful, thorough and precise, but Reddit doesn't care to have good content. It's simply not a good discussion platform (and the UI sucks).
Old Reddit is the only way to read text there for me so if that's login-walled or gone I am done with them as well.
There's a third theory of why they're doing this that I don't see discussed too much.
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
> They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
I neglected to editorialize this part, but I suspect this is because *they don't have to*. I don't doubt that there are some new things on Reddit that people like, but Reddit was functionally complete as a place to interact with other people when it was launched.
I'm not an internet historian, but sites akin to Reddit have existed for a long time, and my understanding is that it happened to take over when the last forum aggregator died for whatever reason.
“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.
Almost. NYSE:RDDT has decided that plain HTML is unprofitable. That is the entire premise in one sentence.
Old reddit still works for me even without login though. I'm too lazy to figure out which from the multiple of userscripts and addons I use allows it, but apparently the block is done half-assedly and easy to circumvent.
It still works for me too (I have no account on Reddit and have no intention to have an account, even if they try to insist), and it is also possible to add .json on the end of the URL for JSON data (although, so far, I only use this feature to view pictures at the original size that are too small if I do not do this).
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.
> is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans
Was a surefire way?
Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm
It 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.
> The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
A failure in what sense? That they can't pay the bills or that they can't see the VC-desired 10X ROI? Because my impression (as a layperson) is that the Reddit of yore could have stayed afloat from ad revenue + user donations, but it wasn't turning a huge profit. Anyone else remember the sidebar with the quota for Reddit gold for server costs? I don't remember it being short that often...
hmmmm, what I mean is this. There's been backlash about Reddit's ecosystem, but fundamentally they've transitioned into a business model that monetizes proprietary data for AI training. From that perspective, it's been successful. The problem, though, is that the quality of that data continues to decline. So it looks successful now, but I question whether that will hold in the future.
In other words, if openness and user experience are compromised, the real experts who provide deep, professional insights will disappear. Most experts have a desire for recognition. In Korea, we have a saying: 'Plankton and whales' meaning whales can only exist when there's enough plankton.
Anyway, I think Reddit itself is a successful exit. They sold their past data at a high price. But I question whether this is sustainable in the long run.
It's a difficult trade off: short term profit versus long term sustainability. Given the AI era, the timing seems right in terms of value. But separate from that, any new communities that emerge will likely suffer from long term value depreciation because of this precedent
Maybe I'm just caught up in the illusion of 'sustainability.'
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.
Who will pay for these “actual communities”?
This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children
new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied.
It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
June 10 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/10/reddit-ba...
> The move frustrated some commenters on the initial post. “Why is /r/fatpeoplehate banned, but /r/coontown get to exist?” asked redditor CrackheadControl. “That’s bullshit.” “Because the admins are fat, not black,” replied The_Wizard_of_Wang.
I've been on there too long, it feels like they died several times over:
* CEO changes
* Creation of new / infinite scrolling UI (and app)
* Restricting content (banning racist subreddits, hiding NSFW from /all)
* Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
* introduction of paid APIs / "fuck spez" campaign
I'm sure there's many more but my point is it's "died" many times over yet still it exists; the drama passed, the baseline remains.
> * Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)
The huge organized celebrity AMAs already felt like a death of reddit on their own.
> the baseline remains
Did it though?
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.
If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation
I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.
They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.
That would be a hard no for me.
I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.
i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense
The 2s delay before response smells of rate-limiting to me! I don't remember it ever being so slow before, but then again I don't use Reddit anymore.
Unless their servers are being hit so hard by scrapers they can't stand up straight...
How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to new reddit.
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.
YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community".
I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).
If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch many YouTube vids embedded
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos
Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.
Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not. I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.
It's particularly sad when its institutions doing that who should really have the capability to host their own videos.
hey, it's working again!
old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.
I feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too idealistic back then, but it’s clear that the modern internet needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole eyeball scanning thing though?
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 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.
New reddit has a literally worse user experience. No comments display more than maybe 1 reply and if you click to view more, it takes you to a dedicated page for just that reply. If you click the back button it completely forgets where you were in the original comment thread. Basically impossible to peruse comment sections like on askreddit posts, etc.
IF you're an actual user of the site, like, logging in and what not, you can still just set your preferences to use the old design. Never need to go to old.reddit
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...)
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...
It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). Sorry, I neglected to mention/link to this news article.
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.
I can't think of many things I'd less like to verify with Persona than NSFW reddit. They should just ban NSFW content altogether at that point.
Email and phone, or email or phone?
I feel like this is a deliberately obtuse response to a real and irritating change.
Old reddit is going to be MUCH, MUCH easier to scrape. Scraping has the potential to bring down the site. Gating old reddit to logged in users will massively mitigate that.
I don't like it either. But it's not hard to see a good reason why doing so helps "keep reddit safe"
Even if it also coincidentally makes it easier for them to make more money. Grr.
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.
Then they should nuke Old Reddit rather than offer a wishy-washy "we're being scraped" explanation. My beef is that under all of the layers of PR this ultimately comes down to an engineering liability --- which is not my problem. If they can't deal with *their* problem, don't pretend like it's *my* problem.
I'm even fine with them saying "because old.reddit.com is used by scrapers, we're locking it down" which I would still contest the need to do when other sites can use e.g. Anubis, but I probably wouldn't write a rant about it.
> Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
To be pedantic, it is accurate, but missing context. Please forgive me for doing the same thing the Reddit PR team has done, I am not so morally just.
Arguments aside, this is a touchy spot for me because I really do view my time spent on Reddit positively, and seeing where it has gone makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.
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.
I look forward to New HN.
Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.
Name one vulnerability