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Reddit is quietly changing the way its homepage works
- SEXMCNIGGA5439 3y ago[flagged]
- SEXMCNIGGA14799 3y ago[dead]
- labrador 3y agoI can no longer use old.reddit.com with a VPN. I wonder why. To prevent anonymous scraping maybe.
- neilv 3y agoWithin maybe the last couple weeks, they also seemed to start blocking some Tor exit nodes. I guess at least 50/50 it's an anti-abuse measure (rather than surveillance capitalism), at probably some human cost of denying reddit as a venue/channel to oppressed people. Incidentally, if anyone is using Tor in ways that show up as significant abuse to Reddit, that's hurting Tor for those who need it for more legitimate purposes.
- packetslave 3y agoI'll point out that Reddit runs an onion service (https://www.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion/ https://www.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...) so blocked exit nodes is more likely to be collateral damage from something else than a deliberate action. Generally speaking, if you're getting blocked (from old.reddit.com or otherwise), the workaround is to login. If you're logged in and still getting blocked (or are getting blocked trying to login, that's a different problem entirely).
- kunagi7 3y agoI can use it with a VPN but only if I have an already logged-in session. Without a logged-in session, I can only see error messages which change randomly. Most of them seem to be either an IP range blocking page or an image with "You broke reddit" message on it.
- PenguinCoder 3y agoSame experience here. Also seems that when using `old.reddit.com`, it logs you out a lot sooner than before (or in using `new.reddit.com`. It's just another layer of friction on using it.
- neuralRiot 3y agoIt started for me some time ago with a “unknown user agent” or something along those lines, now it show a “funny” can we see some id? Message, no reddit i will not disable my VPN to view your everyday-getting-worst content. Good riddance, you’re going the way of “x”.
- darknavi 3y agoI get the "woah there" message but can't log in. The login request returns the 403 "woah there" page and the user experience is that nothing happens. What a terrible experience.
- jerlam 3y agoold.reddit.com doesn't work for me when I have uBlock Origin enabled. Also, on the narwhal app that I pay for and uses the official API, comments aren't loading at all.
- everdrive 3y agoIt's not the beginning of the end for reddit, just another stage. I would honestly recommend archiving data on reddit if there's anything you particularly value up there.
- slothtrop 3y agoAgreed insofar as there is no viable replacement in sight. There may not be for awhile if, necessity is the mother of invention.
- cush 3y agoSo true. Users deleted so much of their data off reddit during the last big exodous... so much value lost. And the irony is that LLMs have all that data and will continue to realize the value from it that Reddit never could, even when they held it
- squigz 3y ago> even when they held it What makes you think they don't hold that data anymore?
- mateo1 3y agoWhen everyone holds the data you don't have an edge. They had dedicated users who kept generating new and relevant "content" for a for-profit company with an implied agreement to keep it accessible and discoverable, but they decided to kick them off the platform and try to take hold of what their users had effectively created. That didn't exactly work.
- cush 3y agoGDPR and CCPA
- neilv 3y agoYeah, that's very valuable information to people trying to solve problems. But "old content" is maybe not so valuable for engagement-based revenue. If Reddit wanted to restore the deleted stuff, I suspect that they still have copies of it. If user sentiment was the barrier to restoring the deleted (say, in non-"sensitive" subs), then waiting until after IPO seems a good idea, so maybe we'll see that now.
- princevegeta89 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if Reddit becomes just as predatory as Facebook or Instagram.
- mateo1 3y agoThe reason Reddit can't really do this (and they tried) is because people notice and react. If they turn reddit into Facebook they'll lose their "clients", particularly the "productive" ones. I'm not going to use Reddit if old.reddit.com breaks or if I can't sort by new/top. I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of users like me. People using the new layouts might "interact" more, but it's a shallow interaction. They don't write long form text, they don't post anything original etc. If they want a link farm they can have it but it'll gradually empty out and turn into a cheap tabloid-esque aggregator that copies twitter's trending. Maybe Reddit can't be very profitable after all and they should scale down their expenses and keep it as it is.
- bumbledraven 3y agoThe intro paragraph is confusing. > Reddit closed out its first day on the market up almost 50%, but has since come crashing back down to earth at 30%. So the price was up 50% from the IPO, and now it's only up 30%? That hardly seems like crashing back to Earth, which would be "up 0% from the IPO", if I understand the metaphor correctly. > Despite the drop, Reddit is beginning to rethink how it functions now as a public company. Why "Despite" instead of "Because of"? If the price continued to rise, I would think that would make the owners want to continue doing whatever they were doing, at least for a while longer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Animats 3y ago"Quietly"? No, Reddit users have been screaming about the new layout. More ads, more irrelevant stuff. Much of Reddit seems to be a link farm for Twitter. Big decline in traffic on technical subjects. I follow mostly subjects related to graphics, such as Vulkan, Rust gamedev, etc., and those subreddits have become very quiet.
- SOTGO 3y agoThe article isn't about the new layout. It's about an apparent difference in the karma system that seems to de-prioritize content from karma farmers and content that comes from off of Reddit. For specific subreddits it's hard to make a concrete statement about what is going on with traffic. Some subreddits I frequent had traffic decline noticeably due to them shutting down to protest the API changes, while others have lost traffic to other platforms, most notably Discord.
- mhh__ 3y agoQuieter and more dominated by relatively green programmers. I can't get good entropy about tech anymore from Reddit (e.g. I often look on hackernews or Twitter to find out how the sausage is actually made when it comes to bits of tech stacks and so on)
- verzali 3y agoThat's been my experience. Reddit used to be the place to find people who know what they're talking about. Now it's only the confident loudmouths left.
- BoxOfRain 3y agoI wonder what will step into that role in the future? There's clearly a demand for a place where people broadly know what they're talking about.
- red-iron-pine 3y agofor programming there is a lot of action on Lemmy. not much else doin on there, though.
- greenthrow 3y agoThis change started a loooong time ago. Reddit is absolute garbage now. I know very few people who still use it regularly. Most of the activity seems to be paid content farms and bots.
- SOTGO 3y agoIsn't the crux of the article that they're observing less karma farming? I don't know if I agree with their data but they seem to be saying that it's getting better.
- boringg 3y agoArticle can claim what it wants but the site is definitively worse in the last couple months. And in the last two weeks another step down.
- SEXMCNIGGA19471 3y ago[flagged]
- SEXMCNIGGA35120 3y ago[flagged]
- SEXMCNIGGA15400 3y ago[flagged]
- SEXMCNIGGA49066 3y ago[flagged]
- louwrentius 3y agoI closed both my Twitter and Reddit accounts, I’m so done with these platforms.
- cush 3y agoIronically, Reddit just went down https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/ https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/
- exe34 3y agoHN hug of death.
- boringg 3y agoMan wouldn't that be funny if ever that could happen to Reddit.
- tsss 3y agoIt seems that Reddit has a 30% chance to be down at any given moment regardless of outside influences. No other AAA website is so badly programmed and so badly managed.
- seurimas 3y agoIs that a joke, or are you just misreading the stats on that page? Reddit definitely isn't down 30% of the time.
- tsss 3y agoJoke, but not far off.
- JohnBooty 3y agoI've had my share of problems with Reddit but it's never seemed to have an undue amount of downtime, and I've been clicking on the old.reddit.com interface about a zillion times per day for close to a decade. I know you're not being literal with the 30%, but I have found it's uptime to be really good. Especially for a site constantly battling spam/bots/etc.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago> So the price was up 50% from the IPO, and now it's only up 30%? That hardly seems like crashing back to Earth, which would be "up 0% from the IPO", I read it has +50% followed by -30% which is indeed roughly "up 0%".
- SEXMCNIGGA31912 3y ago[dead]
- SEXMCNIGGA14920 3y ago[dead]
- m0llusk 3y agoJust in the last week the main page has been changed to aggressively default to "card" size instead of "compact" which blows everything up so that ads can be big videos that get forced on people. Very clear at this point that advertisers are the customers and not the users who generate content in return for points. Still sometimes worth looking through, but less so all the time.
- SEXMCNIGGA1382 3y ago[dead]
- SEXMCNIGGA32347 3y ago[dead]
- SEXMCNIGGA25297 3y ago[dead]
- bigfryo 3y agoNope it's still third world Karma farmer Bots
- simonblack 3y agoReddit has released next to no information about how its karma system has changed since it stopped being open-source in 2017. Karma is a meaningless measure of anything. Increasing your karma is a waste of your time and angst. But ... whatever floats your boat. If you want to waste your limited time on Earth by chasing karma, good for you.