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An impersonator issued a fake Reddit take down notice against SaveVideo

584 points by nixass 5y ago

fouc 5y ago
> Aaron Swartz is rolling so hard in his grave that if we attached a dynamo to him we could power humanity for the next few billion years An apropos comment from that thread
okdjnfweonfe 5y ago
just by sticking a watermark on their videos, making some unique authorship tools, and make their content relatively easy to mirror, tiktok has taken a massive chunk of video thoughtshare with comparatively little effort. I really don't understand reddit adding features that are just enough to kill off competition la video hosting, but not enough to be usable... OK maybe I'm starting to understand now.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > but not enough to be usable I actually don't understand this part. Trying to remove their external dependencies seems reasonable, but how would making them bad help? A part of it is surely dark patterns to keep users engaged (i.e. the limited comment depth), but some of it just looks incompetent to me.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    If they were truly unusable, people would stop using reddit. The fact that reddit has more traffic than ever proves the initial assumption incorrect.
mr_gibbins 5y ago
Users saving videos is a commercial problem for the owners of those videos. And we can't be having users enjoy videos without ads now, can we? The Reddit 'gods' may have decreed that this bot must die, but of course the real god of Reddit - and of all social media - is, of course, Mammon.
- arcturus17 5y ago
  > Users saving videos is a commercial problem for the owners of those videos. 99.9% of videos uploaded on Reddit are not original content, they have been lifted from other platforms, very often by downloading them on said platforms then reuploading them on Reddit. The hypocrisy displayed by some tech companies is revolting.
  - TheRealSteel 5y ago
    Exactly. Meanwhile, TikTok includes an official "save video" button...
    - remirk 5y ago
      But adds a clearly visible and annoying animated watermark.
      - nathancahill 5y ago
        So does Reddit for images.
      - theshrike79 5y ago
        It's really smart, the location changes randomly so you can't use automated tools to crop it out. Newer clients add an end credit display too, maybe 1-2 seconds that shows the original creator's username. I'll take a watermark over having to jump through hoops to get stuff downloaded any day. Ability to directly link to said media would be better, but this is the world we live in...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kawsper 5y ago
  Youtube-dl works just fine on Reddit, but for all the non-technical users this will work fine to prevent them from spreading the content and sharing a link instead.
nicbou 5y ago
When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat. They tend to vertically integrate and keep anyone from using their data.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  "When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat." Pretty much everything that helps a company grow is seen like a threat when "it helped us yesterday, but now can help others". Just like the competition hypocrisy: small companies love competition and fully support it, then they grow and do whatever they can to destroy it.
- toxik 5y ago
  Not entirely dissimilar to what is happening to the Chinese market right now. Interesting observation.
  - diegoperini 5y ago
    I don't live in China. Can you give an example and educate me/us a little?
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    What is this referring to, as someone with little exposure to the Chinese market?
- piva00 5y ago
  Exactly, Twitter went through the same process, locking down its API, introducing usage quotas and getting increasingly more hostile towards Twitter clients that circumvented the ad-serving side of it. I remember it was a shitshow at the time, probably around 2012, I worked for a company that was leveraging Twitter's API for a product and we got quite nervous about the hostility.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
nhinck 5y ago
It's quite funny for a content aggregation site to get all high and mighty about tools that make it easier to share and aggregate content.
- uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
  Since the redesign Reddit has been putting a huge amount of effort into keeping people on their platform. They've went out of their way to make it impossible to send a link directly to a video without external tools like the savevideo bot, any link to click will load the entire thread and they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests and merge them client-side so you can't just open dev tools to get the video link as the video link has no audio.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Should have put all that development effort into making a video player that, you know, actually can play a video.
    - uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
      If I could get more than 40% the way through a video before it drops to 144p quality I would be so happy.
      - switch007 5y ago
        No need to brag about being able to watch 40%
  - Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
    > they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, many video sites do this (YT being the biggest). It allows you to change the video source on the fly (changing the bitrate for example) without effecting the audio playback so preventing any audio glitches during the swap. People are a lot more forgiving of video artifacts then they are of audio glitches. It also allows you to have a lower bitrate copy of the original video for mobile playback without having duplicate copies of the audio. So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video (Tools like youtube-dl will happily merge the video and audio into a single container after downloading both pieces of the puzzle). Although, I don't use reddit anymore, I gave it up a few years ago, so maybe they have gone completely evil and the video/video track splitting is simply to annoy hotlinkers (I know they have been throwing more and more dark patterns in to their redesign, the redesign was basically the kick I needed to quit that habbit). Just giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one for now as there are legit reasons to do it. EDIT: 1) My ref to youtube-dl is about how it will merge the 2 after giving it a single YT URL. No idea if it works on reddit, but as it works on a number of sites I wouldn't be surprised if it also works on reddit (its been years since I've been on reddit in any meaningful way, so never had the urge to try). 2) ffmpeg and avconv will merge pretty much any audio track with any video track you throw at it into a single container without the need re-encode the video. In fact iirc I think those are the tools youtube-dl will use to merge the tracks after downloading content from YT. 3) as for annoying hotlinkers, there are (imo) better ways to annoy hotlinkers then spliting the audio/video tracks. Personally my fav way is to replace the video being served to the client with a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up serverside after the hotlinking is detected - but serving the orig video when its not hotlinked, but I'm a dick :-P (a more sane and polite way would be to simpy not serve any video at all, saves wasting bandwidth).
BoxOfRain 5y ago
I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.
- Theizestooke 5y ago
  The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians
  - haunter 5y ago
    >and r/AskHistorians You mean [deleted]
    - Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
      /r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
  - ansible 5y ago
    Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
These "bots" are spam, pure and simple. By forcing users to visibly name the "service" they want to use in public discussion threads, and the service visibly answering on the same thread, they are basically forcing the users themselves to advertise the service. But it's still spam. You get tens of mentions of the service on each reddit thread. It would be terribly simple and probably even more userfriendly to just privately message the bot in order to activate its action, and/or much more tech-friendly to have a browser extension to do the same action. I'm quite sure youtube-dl already works with more types of "Reddit videos" than "SaveVideo" ever will, and youtube-dl couldn't care less if Reddit approves of them or not. But, of course, thanks to the apparent power of advertising, any such service that does NOT spam everyone like "SaveVideo" and the rest is condemned to obscurity. Net result is tens of annoying SaveVideo (and their even more spammy competitors) messages in every popular reddit thread. How do you call it when someone posts several messages in every single popular thread with the name of their service? I really don't know why the websites (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) put up with those. Yes, Twitter has Threadunrollers and the like which is basically the same thing. Personally I consider these "business models" to be one of these plagues on the WWW that must be eradicated with prejudice. The other one being websites that just grab files that are otherwise publicly available and put them behind a loginwall/paywall (e.g. Pinterest, Scribd, Manualslib, etc.), then SEO the hell out of it so that the original file becomes much harder to find.
- ecmascript 5y ago
  If you work for reddit you should disclose that.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    tl;dr use the damn youtube-dl. You still get your videos downloaded, you don't spam people who is discussing in the same thread, and Reddit "gods" can't do anything to block you. If you don't want to download a python script to your machine (why?), then use any of the million youtube-dl-wrapping websites online or one of the hundred browser extensions. I'm 99% sure "SaveVideo" is just wrapping youtube-dl anyway.
MikeUt 5y ago
They* want to be the only record keepers, and it scares me. Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" (or all the videos of a banned account), it will be as if it never existed. *Nearly every major video host deliberately makes saving videos difficult.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" This is why I'm keeping an offline digital music collection for the first time in over a decade, it's because I'm sick of this kind of behaviour from record labels. Their attitudes of deleting things on a whim as though they never existed pissed me off to the point I don't see streaming services as a viable means of keeping my music any more.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    Yes, this sort of thing has made me quite the data hoarder. It began as a way to save bandwidth for YouTube videos I wanted to watch repeatedly but after I noticed the number of holes in my "liked videos" list I started saving everything I found worthy. Huge swaths of content are being deleted every day. Not only copyright threats but also people who've decided they don't like their old content anymore and therefore nobody should be able to see it. A goodly chunk of my formative years would be lost to me if I didn't have my archive.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    The MPA/RIAA are one of the greatest threats to the internet in general right now. They are constantly pushing for more and more power, making greater and greater demands of ISPs and hosting companies. Even now that a global pandemic has demonstrated how essential internet access has become to our lives courts seem quite happy to insist that ISPs permanently ban people based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement. They've turned the DMCA into an alternative revenue stream where they can shake down people (both the innocent and the naive) who are forced to hand over settlement money for protection because they most often couldn't afford an attorney for advice let alone afford one for a long battle against media giants in courts that have increasingly become pay to win. It's frightening how much they've managed to get away with already. I used to worry about how much of our culture they were taking from us, now I worry about them taking things much more fundamental.
megablast 5y ago
It must be such a small percentage point of people who use this service, why bother??
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
willis936 5y ago
Friendly reminder that old.reddit.com is still up. I deleted the app this morning. Maybe old.reddit.com will be a nicotine patch.
- _archon_ 5y ago
  While old. is an improvement, mobile accessibility is horrendous by design. It increasingly seems like the site has entered a profit-driven tailspin.
  - _hao 5y ago
    What about i.reddit.com for mobile?
- Ashanmaril 5y ago
  There are decent (free and paid) third-party clients that make Reddit a much nicer experience on mobile. On Android I was a big fan of Sync for Reddit, and on iOS I've been using Apollo. Every once in a while I'll open up the official client and I'm just blown away at how bad it is. It's constantly trying to get me to watch livestreams of people doing random things unrelated to my interests. Why would I ever want to watch a livestream on reddit?
  - willis936 5y ago
    Apollo is attractive, but being closed source and giving all permissions to a social media account makes me a little nervous. It seems relatively time-tested, but even if the developer is benevolent it increases attack surface area.
  - ecshafer 5y ago
    It is honestly impressive how bad Reddit's mobile app, and main websites are. Its just so horrendous and so slow and so confusing, and so bad. If you go to a post, its hard to see comments, and if you click in white space it redirects you somewhere almost at random. It takes forever to load anything. When a million apps are better in every way and the old site is better, its confusing what they are doing over at reddit.
reustle 5y ago
This reminds me to nuke my Reddit account of 14 years. This extension edits each comment/post to be blank, and then deletes them. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-history/aclagjkmidmkcdhkhlicmgkgmpgccaod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-histor...
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post. But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post. Including Archive.org. > But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts. This is a topic where the interests of the community and the needs of an individual come in conflict, and I don't think there's an universally agreed-on standard practice. By community I explicitly do not mean the platform that's hosting it, though they have interests desires too - just the collection of people reading and posting. A deleted comment in the middle of a thread is often extremely disruptive, as everything below it in hierarchy (and other locations linking to it) loses crucial context. Being able to distance yourself from your comments (through deleting the account, and thus making the comments show a "deleted user" as author), but not to delete the comments themselves, balances these competing interests properly. For HN per se, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 for mod take on the topic.
    - crossroadsguy 5y ago
      If a user wants to delete the comment user should be allowed to delete the comment or account. Period! Reasons like community interest are not strong or proper imho. Also there’s no information about whether HN logs user IPs or any other info. Or info about how many IPs are logged. Whether they log all the IPs or last K IPs. For how long those IPs are stored.
Crash0v3rid3 5y ago
Reddit hosted videos have been such a joke lately. They are just ripped from YouTube and TikTok, almost always with out the creators permission.
- atrus 5y ago
  Yeah, if I'm looking for a time waster, I'll start on Reddit, just by habit. Then I'll go to TikTok when I see the first one on Reddit. It doesn't take very long anymore these days. I remember people on Reddit making fun of facebook saying everything on there was on Reddit 3 days ago. The tables have turned since then.
  - criley2 5y ago
    I mean, Twitter out-did Reddit on that by 2012. Everything on Facebook and Reddit is just screenshots of Tweets.
    - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
      yes pretty much.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      You're using reddit wrong if you only use "popular". There are thousands of subreddits and it's easy curate a subset of ones that fit you rather than whatever tiktok does (and then probably ships off to China for cataloging)
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    TikTok seems to be the #1 source for video content nowadays, the algorithm is just uncanny how fast it learns what you like.
    - Breza 5y ago
      Agreed! I downloaded the app, saw 10 minutes of teenage girls dancing, and deleted it. My friend talked me into giving it another chance. After a few hours, it was consistently delivering videos that were exactly my taste. I've never had such a good discovery experience.
culopatin 5y ago
80% of the videos on Reddit are from TikTok anyway so might as well just get them from the source and skip Reddit altogether
Havoc 5y ago
So what's next given that Reddit is apparently determined to go the way of Digg and the Dodo?
- holler 5y ago
  https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im is new but not that many people yet, still being worked on
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  I use raddle.me and mastodon
kburman 5y ago
I see where it's going. They would soon adding ads in videos
Darmody 5y ago
So viddit.red is it then.
DanieI 5y ago
I'm sad that they are shutting down Secret Santa. 2021 will be the last year of Reddit Gifts.
- nunez 5y ago
  WHAT? WHY?
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
Pretty simple explanation, they let the clearly copyright infringing content in to their walled-garden under safe harbour protections, but allowing download is contributory infringement with distribution and there's no hiding from that as they can clearly easily prevent it (as they have). Super hypocritical? Sure. Understandable? Also a yes.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Apollo, one of the best mobile clients for Reddit (highlighted by Apple in the App Store), allows direct download of media from Reddit. If Reddit forces this, I assume browser extensions are the next step that they can’t mitigate. If the browser needs to play it, it can be ripped.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Can they enforce DRM on the videos through EME?
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Maybe, depends on the amount of effort they want to put into it. Right now, if I recall, they're just dumping the uploaded content into an S3 bucket and serving it back out (reddit-uploaded-media.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com).
      - monocasa 5y ago
        I was pretty sure that they at least transcode it currently. At that point encrypting isn't a big deal.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    > If Reddit forces this, I assume browser extensions are the next step that they can’t mitigate. If the browser needs to play it, it can be ripped. I assume from a legal point of view that is a-ok. They can't do anything about it therefore they can't be expected to do anything about it.
kevincox 5y ago
Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit. But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling. Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.
- criley2 5y ago
  >I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds. I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.
    - criley2 5y ago
SquareWheel 5y ago
That's good to see, and I hope reddit starts taking action on more of these bots. There's no good way to filter them out and they make the comments section such a chore to read through. This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post. Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.
- hn8788 5y ago
  You can use RES and ignore the bots, then you'll never see them. If you don't want to use RES, you could always just block them through reddit and get the same effect. It's not hard.
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    There's hundreds of bots, and thousands of users who trigger them. You can't possibly block everyone typing /u/SaveVideo, or responding "Good bot/Bad bot" in the comments. Reddit's tools are not up to the task.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      If everyone is using a bot, sort of seems like it might be important...
  - crtasm 5y ago
    Can RES change comment counts? E.g. I see "post title, 1 comment", click to see what someone said but it's a bot. Blocking (ignoring?) the bot on reddit doesn't change the "1 comment" part.
    - hn8788 5y ago
      I don't think it does, but I've never considered it that much of an issue to spend 2 seconds clicking the back button if there are no visible comments. It's not like you know who's posting anyway, so it's always a crapshoot whether it's going to be a bot, relevant comment, or just someone posting something like "+1" or "^^This".
post_break 5y ago
Free booting platform upset users download content that doesn’t belong to the platform. Kind of dumb.
deregulateMed 5y ago
So now is the time to scrape reddit for any future AI machine?
JulianMorrison 5y ago
Reddit has gradually pessimized everything about its design and function. I am reinforced in my decision to walk away.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Reddit is 9gag now. Nothing is ever original content unless it's from a non-default subreddit. I remember when top comments were at least a paragraph. Now I see 1 word comments everywhere. It's basically becoming a forum agregator much like YouTube is now just a video hosting service. The communities are wastes of time and not worth devoting effort into. Just use them to get info you need and nothing else.
  - wvenable 5y ago
    The long tail of reddit is far larger than the default subreddits.
kderbyma 5y ago
I feel like Reddit is slowly rating away at its offering...why would I go to a forum which is moderated so heavily by politics....
anthk 5y ago
Reddit doesn't even work well with TUIR today.
rchaud 5y ago
Pretty much every Reddit video is an .m4v or .mp4 file that can be downloaded directly from the browser. Open the link in a browser window, then right click and choose 'Save video as'. Works on mobile as well.
- uxcolumbo 5y ago
  As far as I know the the video stream and audio stream are split and if you save the video it doesn't contain the audio. Those reddit save sites put both together. I don't get why Reddit won't allow videos with sound to be easily saved.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I downloaded one right now, with sound, from Now for Reddit app. There's a little three-dot control in the bottom corner that includes an option to save as a file.
tmpz22 5y ago
Reddit needed to break up its big redesign into multiple smaller redesigns that each focused on a smaller number of changes in support of fewer KPIs. They didn’t, and here we are.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
what is np.reddit.com ? why not just reddit.com or old. ?
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  No Participation. It's a way to prevent brigades.
- K5EiS 5y ago
  It is for "no participation" https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro
jokoon 5y ago
Youtube-dl works well for reddit video, just use it by giving the reddit comment link as YDL argument. It's impossible to detect YDL because it identifies itself as a browser. Meanwhile, just try to advocate for GFYcat instead.
- flatiron 5y ago
  It’s certainly not “impossible”. They could put some side channel communication in their player that YouTube-dl doesn’t implement. I can think of a bunch of ways you could do it.
  - jokoon 5y ago
    It's always a game of cat and mouse, but generally, someone good enough can always quickly figure it out, and it becomes costly for reddit to redeploy new ways to prevent it. The goal of reddit being to limit it, although I'm not sure they can really make accurate enough stats to know how many people download videos with YDL. The save vid bot is much more visible, which is the reason they reacted I guess.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 5y ago
Update: Reddit employees are denying that Reddit sent any such notice. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ojccls/reddit_orders_savevideo_bot_to_shut_down_or_face/h51p64a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ojccls/reddit_o...
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I suspected it was too evil for Reddit. Killing off secret santa was lame, but threatening to sue your users is a different level. Plus, there would be no reason to threaten a lawsuit when they could just ban the account. So, gaming this out, I don't think the person that ran SaveVideo was evil either. Assuming good faith, the most likely explanation that comes to mind is that someone fabricated a cease and desist notice. Either that, or Reddit lost track of one of their lawyers on payroll, who got a bit too bored. (As strange as it sounds, this actually happens; I once received a C&D from Magic Leap merely for mirroring their Magic Leap developer manual to my personal site. No idea how they even found the link.)
  - darkwizard42 5y ago
    Wow, I just saw the news about Secret Santa... how sad. It was truly one of the more unique community aspects... https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsetting_secret_santa_and_reddit_gifts/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsett...
  - Seanambers 5y ago
    Wow they killed SecretSanta??! Never participated, but thats a bad business decision for sure... Unless they come out with their own concept of course... As a former digg refugee, I'm sorry to see the same dysfunction strike reddit.
    - geerlingguy 5y ago
      Things seemed to start rolling downhill after they fired the AmA hostess (I don't remember her name); it seemed like a lot of the decisions since then have been more "corporate" and less "community". (As in, if it doesn't promise high returns in an easily measurable metric and time frame, it gets the axe).
jesseryoung 5y ago
When Reddit's videos started taking off (more posts using it instead of Gfycat) I got frustrated that I couldn't post the gifs/videos to Discord without requiring a click through to Reddit. I created this simple Docker container that uses Youtube-DL to download an mp4 of the video and upload it to a public Azure blob storage account I created: https://github.com/jesseryoung/vreddit-converter https://github.com/jesseryoung/vreddit-converter
pictur 5y ago
reddit will be in the dusty pages of history in a few years. they are having their best time right now. but every site run by a bunch of idiots will sadly disappear. for the web, this is truly pure evil.
CameronNemo 5y ago
Forget UX issues. There are bigger reasons to avoid reddit. https://raddle.me/wiki/what_is_wrong_with_reddit https://raddle.me/wiki/what_is_wrong_with_reddit
xvilka 5y ago
It's a terrible site these days, wouldn't be a bad thing for it to disappear anyway, and new company taking it's place. The size and speed of webpage is horrendous for something as simple as link sharing that can be done in a few kilobytes.
archon810 5y ago
@dang Can you update the title of the post please since it's now completely false?

584 points by nixass 5y ago

fouc 5y ago

> Aaron Swartz is rolling so hard in his grave that if we attached a dynamo to him we could power humanity for the next few billion years An apropos comment from that thread

okdjnfweonfe 5y ago

just by sticking a watermark on their videos, making some unique authorship tools, and make their content relatively easy to mirror, tiktok has taken a massive chunk of video thoughtshare with comparatively little effort. I really don't understand reddit adding features that are just enough to kill off competition la video hosting, but not enough to be usable... OK maybe I'm starting to understand now.

Sebb767 5y ago
> but not enough to be usable I actually don't understand this part. Trying to remove their external dependencies seems reasonable, but how would making them bad help? A part of it is surely dark patterns to keep users engaged (i.e. the limited comment depth), but some of it just looks incompetent to me.
- tolbish 5y ago
  If they were truly unusable, people would stop using reddit. The fact that reddit has more traffic than ever proves the initial assumption incorrect.

mr_gibbins 5y ago

Users saving videos is a commercial problem for the owners of those videos. And we can't be having users enjoy videos without ads now, can we? The Reddit 'gods' may have decreed that this bot must die, but of course the real god of Reddit - and of all social media - is, of course, Mammon.

arcturus17 5y ago
> Users saving videos is a commercial problem for the owners of those videos. 99.9% of videos uploaded on Reddit are not original content, they have been lifted from other platforms, very often by downloading them on said platforms then reuploading them on Reddit. The hypocrisy displayed by some tech companies is revolting.
- TheRealSteel 5y ago
  Exactly. Meanwhile, TikTok includes an official "save video" button...
  - remirk 5y ago
    But adds a clearly visible and annoying animated watermark.
    - nathancahill 5y ago
      So does Reddit for images.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      It's really smart, the location changes randomly so you can't use automated tools to crop it out. Newer clients add an end credit display too, maybe 1-2 seconds that shows the original creator's username. I'll take a watermark over having to jump through hoops to get stuff downloaded any day. Ability to directly link to said media would be better, but this is the world we live in...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kawsper 5y ago
Youtube-dl works just fine on Reddit, but for all the non-technical users this will work fine to prevent them from spreading the content and sharing a link instead.

nicbou 5y ago

When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat. They tend to vertically integrate and keep anyone from using their data.

squarefoot 5y ago
"When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat." Pretty much everything that helps a company grow is seen like a threat when "it helped us yesterday, but now can help others". Just like the competition hypocrisy: small companies love competition and fully support it, then they grow and do whatever they can to destroy it.
toxik 5y ago
Not entirely dissimilar to what is happening to the Chinese market right now. Interesting observation.
- diegoperini 5y ago
  I don't live in China. Can you give an example and educate me/us a little?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  What is this referring to, as someone with little exposure to the Chinese market?
piva00 5y ago
Exactly, Twitter went through the same process, locking down its API, introducing usage quotas and getting increasingly more hostile towards Twitter clients that circumvented the ad-serving side of it. I remember it was a shitshow at the time, probably around 2012, I worked for a company that was leveraging Twitter's API for a product and we got quite nervous about the hostility.
- skinnymuch 5y ago

nhinck 5y ago

It's quite funny for a content aggregation site to get all high and mighty about tools that make it easier to share and aggregate content.

uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
Since the redesign Reddit has been putting a huge amount of effort into keeping people on their platform. They've went out of their way to make it impossible to send a link directly to a video without external tools like the savevideo bot, any link to click will load the entire thread and they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests and merge them client-side so you can't just open dev tools to get the video link as the video link has no audio.
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Should have put all that development effort into making a video player that, you know, actually can play a video.
  - uo21tp5hoyg 5y ago
    If I could get more than 40% the way through a video before it drops to 144p quality I would be so happy.
    - switch007 5y ago
      No need to brag about being able to watch 40%
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago
  > they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, many video sites do this (YT being the biggest). It allows you to change the video source on the fly (changing the bitrate for example) without effecting the audio playback so preventing any audio glitches during the swap. People are a lot more forgiving of video artifacts then they are of audio glitches. It also allows you to have a lower bitrate copy of the original video for mobile playback without having duplicate copies of the audio. So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video (Tools like youtube-dl will happily merge the video and audio into a single container after downloading both pieces of the puzzle). Although, I don't use reddit anymore, I gave it up a few years ago, so maybe they have gone completely evil and the video/video track splitting is simply to annoy hotlinkers (I know they have been throwing more and more dark patterns in to their redesign, the redesign was basically the kick I needed to quit that habbit). Just giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one for now as there are legit reasons to do it. EDIT: 1) My ref to youtube-dl is about how it will merge the 2 after giving it a single YT URL. No idea if it works on reddit, but as it works on a number of sites I wouldn't be surprised if it also works on reddit (its been years since I've been on reddit in any meaningful way, so never had the urge to try). 2) ffmpeg and avconv will merge pretty much any audio track with any video track you throw at it into a single container without the need re-encode the video. In fact iirc I think those are the tools youtube-dl will use to merge the tracks after downloading content from YT. 3) as for annoying hotlinkers, there are (imo) better ways to annoy hotlinkers then spliting the audio/video tracks. Personally my fav way is to replace the video being served to the client with a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up serverside after the hotlinking is detected - but serving the orig video when its not hotlinked, but I'm a dick :-P (a more sane and polite way would be to simpy not serve any video at all, saves wasting bandwidth).

BoxOfRain 5y ago

I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.

Theizestooke 5y ago
The niche subreddits are still valuable to me, particularly stuff like r/emacs and r/AskHistorians
- haunter 5y ago
  >and r/AskHistorians You mean [deleted]
  - Bronze_Colossus 5y ago
    /r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
- ansible 5y ago
  Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I've often wondered if AskHistorians wouldn't be better off as their own website?
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

These "bots" are spam, pure and simple. By forcing users to visibly name the "service" they want to use in public discussion threads, and the service visibly answering on the same thread, they are basically forcing the users themselves to advertise the service. But it's still spam. You get tens of mentions of the service on each reddit thread. It would be terribly simple and probably even more userfriendly to just privately message the bot in order to activate its action, and/or much more tech-friendly to have a browser extension to do the same action. I'm quite sure youtube-dl already works with more types of "Reddit videos" than "SaveVideo" ever will, and youtube-dl couldn't care less if Reddit approves of them or not. But, of course, thanks to the apparent power of advertising, any such service that does NOT spam everyone like "SaveVideo" and the rest is condemned to obscurity. Net result is tens of annoying SaveVideo (and their even more spammy competitors) messages in every popular reddit thread. How do you call it when someone posts several messages in every single popular thread with the name of their service? I really don't know why the websites (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) put up with those. Yes, Twitter has Threadunrollers and the like which is basically the same thing. Personally I consider these "business models" to be one of these plagues on the WWW that must be eradicated with prejudice. The other one being websites that just grab files that are otherwise publicly available and put them behind a loginwall/paywall (e.g. Pinterest, Scribd, Manualslib, etc.), then SEO the hell out of it so that the original file becomes much harder to find.

ecmascript 5y ago
If you work for reddit you should disclose that.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  tl;dr use the damn youtube-dl. You still get your videos downloaded, you don't spam people who is discussing in the same thread, and Reddit "gods" can't do anything to block you. If you don't want to download a python script to your machine (why?), then use any of the million youtube-dl-wrapping websites online or one of the hundred browser extensions. I'm 99% sure "SaveVideo" is just wrapping youtube-dl anyway.

MikeUt 5y ago

They* want to be the only record keepers, and it scares me. Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" (or all the videos of a banned account), it will be as if it never existed. *Nearly every major video host deliberately makes saving videos difficult.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" This is why I'm keeping an offline digital music collection for the first time in over a decade, it's because I'm sick of this kind of behaviour from record labels. Their attitudes of deleting things on a whim as though they never existed pissed me off to the point I don't see streaming services as a viable means of keeping my music any more.
- Causality1 5y ago
  Yes, this sort of thing has made me quite the data hoarder. It began as a way to save bandwidth for YouTube videos I wanted to watch repeatedly but after I noticed the number of holes in my "liked videos" list I started saving everything I found worthy. Huge swaths of content are being deleted every day. Not only copyright threats but also people who've decided they don't like their old content anymore and therefore nobody should be able to see it. A goodly chunk of my formative years would be lost to me if I didn't have my archive.
- autoexec 5y ago
  The MPA/RIAA are one of the greatest threats to the internet in general right now. They are constantly pushing for more and more power, making greater and greater demands of ISPs and hosting companies. Even now that a global pandemic has demonstrated how essential internet access has become to our lives courts seem quite happy to insist that ISPs permanently ban people based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement. They've turned the DMCA into an alternative revenue stream where they can shake down people (both the innocent and the naive) who are forced to hand over settlement money for protection because they most often couldn't afford an attorney for advice let alone afford one for a long battle against media giants in courts that have increasingly become pay to win. It's frightening how much they've managed to get away with already. I used to worry about how much of our culture they were taking from us, now I worry about them taking things much more fundamental.

megablast 5y ago

It must be such a small percentage point of people who use this service, why bother??

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

willis936 5y ago

Friendly reminder that old.reddit.com is still up. I deleted the app this morning. Maybe old.reddit.com will be a nicotine patch.

_archon_ 5y ago
While old. is an improvement, mobile accessibility is horrendous by design. It increasingly seems like the site has entered a profit-driven tailspin.
- _hao 5y ago
  What about i.reddit.com for mobile?
Ashanmaril 5y ago
There are decent (free and paid) third-party clients that make Reddit a much nicer experience on mobile. On Android I was a big fan of Sync for Reddit, and on iOS I've been using Apollo. Every once in a while I'll open up the official client and I'm just blown away at how bad it is. It's constantly trying to get me to watch livestreams of people doing random things unrelated to my interests. Why would I ever want to watch a livestream on reddit?
- willis936 5y ago
  Apollo is attractive, but being closed source and giving all permissions to a social media account makes me a little nervous. It seems relatively time-tested, but even if the developer is benevolent it increases attack surface area.
- ecshafer 5y ago
  It is honestly impressive how bad Reddit's mobile app, and main websites are. Its just so horrendous and so slow and so confusing, and so bad. If you go to a post, its hard to see comments, and if you click in white space it redirects you somewhere almost at random. It takes forever to load anything. When a million apps are better in every way and the old site is better, its confusing what they are doing over at reddit.

reustle 5y ago

This reminds me to nuke my Reddit account of 14 years. This extension edits each comment/post to be blank, and then deletes them. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-history/aclagjkmidmkcdhkhlicmgkgmpgccaod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-histor...

crossroadsguy 5y ago
Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post. But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post. Including Archive.org. > But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts. This is a topic where the interests of the community and the needs of an individual come in conflict, and I don't think there's an universally agreed-on standard practice. By community I explicitly do not mean the platform that's hosting it, though they have interests desires too - just the collection of people reading and posting. A deleted comment in the middle of a thread is often extremely disruptive, as everything below it in hierarchy (and other locations linking to it) loses crucial context. Being able to distance yourself from your comments (through deleting the account, and thus making the comments show a "deleted user" as author), but not to delete the comments themselves, balances these competing interests properly. For HN per se, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 for mod take on the topic.
  - crossroadsguy 5y ago
    If a user wants to delete the comment user should be allowed to delete the comment or account. Period! Reasons like community interest are not strong or proper imho. Also there’s no information about whether HN logs user IPs or any other info. Or info about how many IPs are logged. Whether they log all the IPs or last K IPs. For how long those IPs are stored.

Crash0v3rid3 5y ago

Reddit hosted videos have been such a joke lately. They are just ripped from YouTube and TikTok, almost always with out the creators permission.

atrus 5y ago
Yeah, if I'm looking for a time waster, I'll start on Reddit, just by habit. Then I'll go to TikTok when I see the first one on Reddit. It doesn't take very long anymore these days. I remember people on Reddit making fun of facebook saying everything on there was on Reddit 3 days ago. The tables have turned since then.
- criley2 5y ago
  I mean, Twitter out-did Reddit on that by 2012. Everything on Facebook and Reddit is just screenshots of Tweets.
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    yes pretty much.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    You're using reddit wrong if you only use "popular". There are thousands of subreddits and it's easy curate a subset of ones that fit you rather than whatever tiktok does (and then probably ships off to China for cataloging)
- theshrike79 5y ago
  TikTok seems to be the #1 source for video content nowadays, the algorithm is just uncanny how fast it learns what you like.
  - Breza 5y ago
    Agreed! I downloaded the app, saw 10 minutes of teenage girls dancing, and deleted it. My friend talked me into giving it another chance. After a few hours, it was consistently delivering videos that were exactly my taste. I've never had such a good discovery experience.

culopatin 5y ago

80% of the videos on Reddit are from TikTok anyway so might as well just get them from the source and skip Reddit altogether

Havoc 5y ago

So what's next given that Reddit is apparently determined to go the way of Digg and the Dodo?

holler 5y ago
https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im is new but not that many people yet, still being worked on
CameronNemo 5y ago
I use raddle.me and mastodon

kburman 5y ago

I see where it's going. They would soon adding ads in videos

Darmody 5y ago

So viddit.red is it then.

DanieI 5y ago

I'm sad that they are shutting down Secret Santa. 2021 will be the last year of Reddit Gifts.

nunez 5y ago
WHAT? WHY?

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

Pretty simple explanation, they let the clearly copyright infringing content in to their walled-garden under safe harbour protections, but allowing download is contributory infringement with distribution and there's no hiding from that as they can clearly easily prevent it (as they have). Super hypocritical? Sure. Understandable? Also a yes.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Apollo, one of the best mobile clients for Reddit (highlighted by Apple in the App Store), allows direct download of media from Reddit. If Reddit forces this, I assume browser extensions are the next step that they can’t mitigate. If the browser needs to play it, it can be ripped.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Can they enforce DRM on the videos through EME?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Maybe, depends on the amount of effort they want to put into it. Right now, if I recall, they're just dumping the uploaded content into an S3 bucket and serving it back out (reddit-uploaded-media.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com).
    - monocasa 5y ago
      I was pretty sure that they at least transcode it currently. At that point encrypting isn't a big deal.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  > If Reddit forces this, I assume browser extensions are the next step that they can’t mitigate. If the browser needs to play it, it can be ripped. I assume from a legal point of view that is a-ok. They can't do anything about it therefore they can't be expected to do anything about it.

kevincox 5y ago

Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit. But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling. Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.

criley2 5y ago
>I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds. I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.
  - criley2 5y ago

SquareWheel 5y ago

That's good to see, and I hope reddit starts taking action on more of these bots. There's no good way to filter them out and they make the comments section such a chore to read through. This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post. Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.

hn8788 5y ago
You can use RES and ignore the bots, then you'll never see them. If you don't want to use RES, you could always just block them through reddit and get the same effect. It's not hard.
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  There's hundreds of bots, and thousands of users who trigger them. You can't possibly block everyone typing /u/SaveVideo, or responding "Good bot/Bad bot" in the comments. Reddit's tools are not up to the task.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    If everyone is using a bot, sort of seems like it might be important...
- crtasm 5y ago
  Can RES change comment counts? E.g. I see "post title, 1 comment", click to see what someone said but it's a bot. Blocking (ignoring?) the bot on reddit doesn't change the "1 comment" part.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    I don't think it does, but I've never considered it that much of an issue to spend 2 seconds clicking the back button if there are no visible comments. It's not like you know who's posting anyway, so it's always a crapshoot whether it's going to be a bot, relevant comment, or just someone posting something like "+1" or "^^This".

post_break 5y ago

Free booting platform upset users download content that doesn’t belong to the platform. Kind of dumb.

deregulateMed 5y ago

So now is the time to scrape reddit for any future AI machine?

JulianMorrison 5y ago

Reddit has gradually pessimized everything about its design and function. I am reinforced in my decision to walk away.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Reddit is 9gag now. Nothing is ever original content unless it's from a non-default subreddit. I remember when top comments were at least a paragraph. Now I see 1 word comments everywhere. It's basically becoming a forum agregator much like YouTube is now just a video hosting service. The communities are wastes of time and not worth devoting effort into. Just use them to get info you need and nothing else.
- wvenable 5y ago
  The long tail of reddit is far larger than the default subreddits.

kderbyma 5y ago

I feel like Reddit is slowly rating away at its offering...why would I go to a forum which is moderated so heavily by politics....

anthk 5y ago

Reddit doesn't even work well with TUIR today.

rchaud 5y ago

Pretty much every Reddit video is an .m4v or .mp4 file that can be downloaded directly from the browser. Open the link in a browser window, then right click and choose 'Save video as'. Works on mobile as well.

uxcolumbo 5y ago
As far as I know the the video stream and audio stream are split and if you save the video it doesn't contain the audio. Those reddit save sites put both together. I don't get why Reddit won't allow videos with sound to be easily saved.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I downloaded one right now, with sound, from Now for Reddit app. There's a little three-dot control in the bottom corner that includes an option to save as a file.

tmpz22 5y ago

Reddit needed to break up its big redesign into multiple smaller redesigns that each focused on a smaller number of changes in support of fewer KPIs. They didn’t, and here we are.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

what is np.reddit.com ? why not just reddit.com or old. ?

vorpalhex 5y ago
No Participation. It's a way to prevent brigades.
K5EiS 5y ago
It is for "no participation" https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro https://www.reddit.com/r/NoParticipation/wiki/intro

jokoon 5y ago

Youtube-dl works well for reddit video, just use it by giving the reddit comment link as YDL argument. It's impossible to detect YDL because it identifies itself as a browser. Meanwhile, just try to advocate for GFYcat instead.

flatiron 5y ago
It’s certainly not “impossible”. They could put some side channel communication in their player that YouTube-dl doesn’t implement. I can think of a bunch of ways you could do it.
- jokoon 5y ago
  It's always a game of cat and mouse, but generally, someone good enough can always quickly figure it out, and it becomes costly for reddit to redeploy new ways to prevent it. The goal of reddit being to limit it, although I'm not sure they can really make accurate enough stats to know how many people download videos with YDL. The save vid bot is much more visible, which is the reason they reacted I guess.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Ajedi32 5y ago

Update: Reddit employees are denying that Reddit sent any such notice. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ojccls/reddit_orders_savevideo_bot_to_shut_down_or_face/h51p64a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ojccls/reddit_o...

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I suspected it was too evil for Reddit. Killing off secret santa was lame, but threatening to sue your users is a different level. Plus, there would be no reason to threaten a lawsuit when they could just ban the account. So, gaming this out, I don't think the person that ran SaveVideo was evil either. Assuming good faith, the most likely explanation that comes to mind is that someone fabricated a cease and desist notice. Either that, or Reddit lost track of one of their lawyers on payroll, who got a bit too bored. (As strange as it sounds, this actually happens; I once received a C&D from Magic Leap merely for mirroring their Magic Leap developer manual to my personal site. No idea how they even found the link.)
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  Wow, I just saw the news about Secret Santa... how sad. It was truly one of the more unique community aspects... https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsetting_secret_santa_and_reddit_gifts/?sort=top https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsett...
- Seanambers 5y ago
  Wow they killed SecretSanta??! Never participated, but thats a bad business decision for sure... Unless they come out with their own concept of course... As a former digg refugee, I'm sorry to see the same dysfunction strike reddit.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    Things seemed to start rolling downhill after they fired the AmA hostess (I don't remember her name); it seemed like a lot of the decisions since then have been more "corporate" and less "community". (As in, if it doesn't promise high returns in an easily measurable metric and time frame, it gets the axe).

jesseryoung 5y ago

When Reddit's videos started taking off (more posts using it instead of Gfycat) I got frustrated that I couldn't post the gifs/videos to Discord without requiring a click through to Reddit. I created this simple Docker container that uses Youtube-DL to download an mp4 of the video and upload it to a public Azure blob storage account I created: https://github.com/jesseryoung/vreddit-converter https://github.com/jesseryoung/vreddit-converter

pictur 5y ago

reddit will be in the dusty pages of history in a few years. they are having their best time right now. but every site run by a bunch of idiots will sadly disappear. for the web, this is truly pure evil.

CameronNemo 5y ago

Forget UX issues. There are bigger reasons to avoid reddit. https://raddle.me/wiki/what_is_wrong_with_reddit https://raddle.me/wiki/what_is_wrong_with_reddit

xvilka 5y ago

It's a terrible site these days, wouldn't be a bad thing for it to disappear anyway, and new company taking it's place. The size and speed of webpage is horrendous for something as simple as link sharing that can be done in a few kilobytes.

archon810 5y ago

@dang Can you update the title of the post please since it's now completely false?