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- Hacker News
- 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.
by Klonoar - > 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.
by cole-k - 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?
- IRCby opengrass
- I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.by yesmens
- 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.by tastyfreeze
- Let’s bring Stack Exchanges back!by NetMageSCW
- Context drift. You're basically talking about asking questions to MMAcevedo in the year 2500. He doesn't know what's going on, because he's from 2046. Most answers from 2011 are not applicable now.by inigyou
- 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.by skydhash
- 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.
by jdw64 - 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.by inigyou
- > 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...
by cole-k - 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.
by Gareth321 - 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.by msny
- I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.by dax_
- This isn't sad at all, this will help me break my reddit addiction splendidly.by ambicapter
- 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.by IrishTechie
- Actually plain html is what IS safe.
It is javascript that allows corporate interests to pop up and nag screen you, and otherwise control your web browsing experience to their favor.
I have an app in my browser that allows me to toggle off javascript and vanquish most pop ups and nag screens.
- Here is the recommend app for this, used primarily by the Tor browser.
I use this on news sites to get rid of the paywall.
- Plain HTML is unsafe for Reddit, which is a company, and needs a safe revenue stream.by inigyou
- 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...
by khurs - that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AIby hathym
- Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?by willis936
- 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.
by account42 - When you do log in you will probably see that accounts all but require a verified email now, if you didn't set one up your account will be frozen until you do a password reset FoR sEcURiTy which necessitates adding an email lmao.by benoau
- > The value of the site has already crashed
Reddit, the site whose CEO edited the comments of other users, autobans people for saying "fuck spez" (it's fun, try it), and claims the right to all content posted by users and sells it for AI training?
by Razengan - 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.
by Klonoar - I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM.
And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.
- I left Reddit years ago and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve never come close to wishing to participating there again, and everything I hear from people who still hang on seems to reinforce my decision.by EA-3167
- The discussion quality is unbelievably shallow in most of the subreddits.
Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed.
For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said.
It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing.
There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that.
So these comments were hidden by default.
This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion.
This happens ALL the time.
I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes.
EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."
by ksd482