7 ms·

Well, with SO, at least you can search on Google and view the version cached by Google just fine. With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locke

by oefrha 5y ago

Well, with SO, at least you can search on Google and view the version cached by Google just fine. With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread”s and nothing else. What a joke.

ornornor 5y ago
Try “site:old.Reddit.com”
- oefrha 5y ago
  That's not going to work. $ curl https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt User-Agent: * Disallow: / Also, even if search engines are allowed, old.reddit.com pages are not canonical (<link rel="canonical"> points to the www.reddit.com version, which is actually reasonable behavior), so pages there would not be crawled as often or at all.
  - linuxfan2021 5y ago
    we need a search engine that doesn't parse robots.txt. NOW!
southerntofu 5y ago
Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.
- gpm 5y ago
  > only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad. Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection. As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Well technically everything is possible. But Javascript was precisely designed to encourage this kind of patterns. > As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech. So true..
  - peq 5y ago
    How would you make the button send a request without js and without navigating to another page? Maybe css to load an image on :active or is there some better way?
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      Here are two robust techniques that I haven’t seen actually employed in production for maybe fifteen years: ① A submit button or link targeting an iframe which is visually hidden. (Or even don’t hide it. If only seamless iframes had happened, or any other way of auto-resizing an iframe: relevant spec issues are https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 and https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771 https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771.) ② A submit button or link to a URL that returns status 204 No Content. (CSS image loading in any form is not as robust because some clients will have images disabled. background-image is probably (unverified claim!) less robust than pseudoelement content as accessibility modes (like high contrast) are more likely to strip background images, though I’m not sure if they are skipped outright or load and aren’t shown. :active is neither robust nor correct: it doesn’t respond to keyboard activation, and it’s triggered on mouse down rather than mouse up. Little tip here for a thing that people often get wrong: mouse things activate on mouseup, keyboard things on keydown.)
      - the_gipsy 5y ago
        Mhhh, iframes all the way down. Could make a nice experiment.
    - cmg 5y ago
      Yep: .button:active { background-image: url('/some-reference-thats-actually-a-tracker'); }
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  “Continue this thread” links don’t depend on JavaScript at all. “View entire discussion” couldn’t be implemented perfectly with <details> in its present form, but you can get quite close to it with a couple of different approaches. I think the infinite scrolling of subreddits is about the only thing that would really be lost by shedding JavaScript. Even inline replies can be implemented quite successfully with <details> if you really want.
- driminicus 5y ago
  When it goes away you can try teddit.net
  - ilikepi 5y ago
    Why wait? Teddit has been a great substitute for reading in a mobile browser, and making an iOS shortcut for transforming Reddit links was pretty straightforward.
- metalforever 5y ago
  Yeah I’m going to stop using the platform when they get rid of this . Not interested
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    Why wait? You are wasting your life away.
    - account42 5y ago
      And commenting on HN is any more productive?
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Impossible? Man, it's crazy how fast people forget things like good old fashioned <form> GETs and POSTs. It would obviously be a full page refresh, but other than that the same awful UX could still be implemented.
tomrod 5y ago
Reddit's attempts at dark patterns are embarrassing from all perspectives. If you use dark patterns it's a laughably abysmal implementation. If you abhor dark patterns, it's a frustration.
- stevewodil 5y ago
  It's just enough to annoy you but not enough to make everyone leave the platform
  - Zetaphor 5y ago
    Not _yet_, the same was said about Digg once.
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    The mobile version is literally unusable. Half the subs show an error and you can't load most comments.
  - dandellion 5y ago
    I think it's because there haven't been any interesting alternatives. I know if I ever see one I'll probably switch in a femtosecond.
  - charonn0 5y ago
    On the same day that old.reddit.com stops working I'll leave.
    - lhousa 5y ago
      Preach!
    - petepete 5y ago
      That and third party access to their API. Sync is so much better than the official app it's not even funny.
  - marvin 5y ago
comboy 5y ago
I wanted to suggest site:old.reddit.com since I use that version with automatic redirect, but this: https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt is very different from this: https://reddit.com/robots.txt https://reddit.com/robots.txt I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known. I'm not sure how far are we from being able to do full text internet search. Or rather even quote search, preferably some fuzziness options. That would be cool, Google's quotation marks were really neat back when they were working.
- oefrha 5y ago
  > I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known. That’s not going to happen before Cloudflare is dethroned. See this recent thread for some perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603 And even if there’s no Cloudflare, large sites that people want to search will always find ways to block bad bots. The only thing I can think of that might work is using crowd-sourced data, with all the problems that come with crowdsourcing.
  - comboy 5y ago
    Sadness. There is a solution for all this mess and I'm blocking HN and a few different domains until I implement at least the first step after which I can share it here.
- utf_8x 5y ago
  Wonder what the story is behind these two... User-Agent: bender Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass User-Agent: Gort Disallow: /earth
Siira 5y ago
I am archiving subreddits on Github in plain-text org-mode. If you have some subreddit in mind, open an issue, and I'll create an archive repo for it. - https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction - https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational

by oefrha 5y ago

ornornor 5y ago

Try “site:old.Reddit.com”

oefrha 5y ago
That's not going to work. $ curl https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt User-Agent: * Disallow: / Also, even if search engines are allowed, old.reddit.com pages are not canonical (<link rel="canonical"> points to the www.reddit.com version, which is actually reasonable behavior), so pages there would not be crawled as often or at all.
- linuxfan2021 5y ago
  we need a search engine that doesn't parse robots.txt. NOW!

southerntofu 5y ago

Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.

gpm 5y ago
> only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad. Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection. As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Well technically everything is possible. But Javascript was precisely designed to encourage this kind of patterns. > As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech. So true..
- peq 5y ago
  How would you make the button send a request without js and without navigating to another page? Maybe css to load an image on :active or is there some better way?
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    Here are two robust techniques that I haven’t seen actually employed in production for maybe fifteen years: ① A submit button or link targeting an iframe which is visually hidden. (Or even don’t hide it. If only seamless iframes had happened, or any other way of auto-resizing an iframe: relevant spec issues are https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 and https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771 https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771.) ② A submit button or link to a URL that returns status 204 No Content. (CSS image loading in any form is not as robust because some clients will have images disabled. background-image is probably (unverified claim!) less robust than pseudoelement content as accessibility modes (like high contrast) are more likely to strip background images, though I’m not sure if they are skipped outright or load and aren’t shown. :active is neither robust nor correct: it doesn’t respond to keyboard activation, and it’s triggered on mouse down rather than mouse up. Little tip here for a thing that people often get wrong: mouse things activate on mouseup, keyboard things on keydown.)
    - the_gipsy 5y ago
      Mhhh, iframes all the way down. Could make a nice experiment.
  - cmg 5y ago
    Yep: .button:active { background-image: url('/some-reference-thats-actually-a-tracker'); }
chrismorgan 5y ago
“Continue this thread” links don’t depend on JavaScript at all. “View entire discussion” couldn’t be implemented perfectly with <details> in its present form, but you can get quite close to it with a couple of different approaches. I think the infinite scrolling of subreddits is about the only thing that would really be lost by shedding JavaScript. Even inline replies can be implemented quite successfully with <details> if you really want.
driminicus 5y ago
When it goes away you can try teddit.net
- ilikepi 5y ago
  Why wait? Teddit has been a great substitute for reading in a mobile browser, and making an iOS shortcut for transforming Reddit links was pretty straightforward.
metalforever 5y ago
Yeah I’m going to stop using the platform when they get rid of this . Not interested
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Why wait? You are wasting your life away.
  - account42 5y ago
    And commenting on HN is any more productive?
jaywalk 5y ago
Impossible? Man, it's crazy how fast people forget things like good old fashioned <form> GETs and POSTs. It would obviously be a full page refresh, but other than that the same awful UX could still be implemented.

tomrod 5y ago

Reddit's attempts at dark patterns are embarrassing from all perspectives. If you use dark patterns it's a laughably abysmal implementation. If you abhor dark patterns, it's a frustration.

stevewodil 5y ago
It's just enough to annoy you but not enough to make everyone leave the platform
- Zetaphor 5y ago
  Not _yet_, the same was said about Digg once.
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  The mobile version is literally unusable. Half the subs show an error and you can't load most comments.
- dandellion 5y ago
  I think it's because there haven't been any interesting alternatives. I know if I ever see one I'll probably switch in a femtosecond.
- charonn0 5y ago
  On the same day that old.reddit.com stops working I'll leave.
  - lhousa 5y ago
    Preach!
  - petepete 5y ago
    That and third party access to their API. Sync is so much better than the official app it's not even funny.
- marvin 5y ago

comboy 5y ago

I wanted to suggest site:old.reddit.com since I use that version with automatic redirect, but this: https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt is very different from this: https://reddit.com/robots.txt https://reddit.com/robots.txt I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known. I'm not sure how far are we from being able to do full text internet search. Or rather even quote search, preferably some fuzziness options. That would be cool, Google's quotation marks were really neat back when they were working.

oefrha 5y ago
> I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known. That’s not going to happen before Cloudflare is dethroned. See this recent thread for some perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603 And even if there’s no Cloudflare, large sites that people want to search will always find ways to block bad bots. The only thing I can think of that might work is using crowd-sourced data, with all the problems that come with crowdsourcing.
- comboy 5y ago
  Sadness. There is a solution for all this mess and I'm blocking HN and a few different domains until I implement at least the first step after which I can share it here.
utf_8x 5y ago
Wonder what the story is behind these two... User-Agent: bender Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass User-Agent: Gort Disallow: /earth

Siira 5y ago

I am archiving subreddits on Github in plain-text org-mode. If you have some subreddit in mind, open an issue, and I'll create an archive repo for it. - https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction - https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational