14 ms·

So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  IF you're an actual user of the site, like, logging in and what not, you can still just set your preferences to use the old design. Never need to go to old.reddit
• imzadi 2mo ago
  If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation
• khurs 2mo ago
  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-licensing-deal-shows https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...
  • willis936 2mo ago
    Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Of course not, are you crazy?
      • 0xDEAFBEAD 2mo ago
        Elon Musk, avowed supervillain, compensates X content creators. It does create some bad incentives however.
    • tweakimp 2mo ago
      The contributors are already compensated by the ads the are allowed to see.
    • 1970-01-01 2mo ago
      Those little virtual stickers isn't enough? What else could you possibly want as compensation?
      • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
        ideally? blowjobs. i ain't shitposting for karma, dammit
    • khurs 2mo ago
      91.5% Gross margin :) https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/news-details/2026/Reddit-Reports-First-Quarter-2026-Results/default.aspx https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/new...
    • nextaccountic 2mo ago
      yishan had such plans, to distribute 10% of company shares to reddit users https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-fundraising/ it was obviously abandoned though
    • sunaookami 2mo ago
      Thanks for the gold kind stranger!
  • hathym 2mo ago
    that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI
    • LaurensBER 2mo ago
      It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit data makes LLM stronger or weaker. Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.
      • NitpickLawyer 2mo ago
        Someone did a finetune w/ data from 4chan and found improvements on several popular benchmarks, so ... maybe?
      • dd8601fn 2mo ago
        For years before LLMs got big a comment I would often see was, "Google search is worthless now. I basically solve all my problems by searching reddit."
        • efreak 2mo ago
          Counterpoint: usernames of people counting numbers with no context whatsoever are so important they have their own tokens, despite being of no value (in fact, negative value, going by the issues they caused when actually used).
• superkuh 2mo ago
  This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.
  • nobleach 2mo ago
    I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.
  • mh2266 2mo ago
    iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there
    • superkuh 2mo ago
      That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied. It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).
• m0llusk 2mo ago
  This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
  • echelon_musk 2mo ago
    I look forward to New HN.
  • busymom0 2mo ago
    The new interface is filled with dark patterns meant to make you waste as much time on the site. The huge amount of wasted white space making you having to scroll more and constant clicks ensures you spend more time on site and this watch more ads.
  • nhinck2 2mo ago
    Name one vulnerability
  • krapp 2mo ago
    > Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.
  • cole-k 2mo ago
    Then they should nuke Old Reddit rather than offer a wishy-washy "we're being scraped" explanation. My beef is that under all of the layers of PR this ultimately comes down to an engineering liability --- which is not my problem. If they can't deal with *their* problem, don't pretend like it's *my* problem. I'm even fine with them saying "because old.reddit.com is used by scrapers, we're locking it down" which I would still contest the need to do when other sites can use e.g. Anubis, but I probably wouldn't write a rant about it. > Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization. To be pedantic, it is accurate, but missing context. Please forgive me for doing the same thing the Reddit PR team has done, I am not so morally just. Arguments aside, this is a touchy spot for me because I really do view my time spent on Reddit positively, and seeing where it has gone makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.
• msny 2mo ago
  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.
  • IrishTechie 2mo ago
    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.
    • NordStreamYacht 2mo ago
      I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right now. Maybe it's for specific subs?
      • sphars 2mo ago
        Not yet, but it's coming to old.reddit.com globally soon: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...
        • NordStreamYacht 2mo ago
          Just got redirected to download their app after being redirected to the new site.
    • therealpygon 2mo ago
      For you to give that good-good user tracking data you do.
    • nextaccountic 2mo ago
      Maybe RES (or other extension) should gain a mode where new reddit is rendered in the style of old reddit?
    • et-al 2mo ago
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• silon42 2mo ago
  I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.
  • _sys49152 2mo ago
    i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense
    • cole-k 2mo ago
      The 2s delay before response smells of rate-limiting to me! I don't remember it ever being so slow before, but then again I don't use Reddit anymore. Unless their servers are being hit so hard by scrapers they can't stand up straight...
  • BenFranklin100 2mo ago
    How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to new reddit.
• busymom0 2mo ago
  > This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans. I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.
• corbet 2mo ago
  I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.
  • rob 2mo ago
    Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
    • account42 2mo ago
      The response to that should be to restrict the events calendar and similar dynamic functionality, not to restrict the 99% of users who are accessing what should be 100% staticly cached HTML.
      • rob 2mo ago
        Good idea; I'll make sure we have all random ?date=1970-01-01, ?date=1970-01-02, all the way to ?date=2026-07-22 URLs cached, even the ones that are 404s but the crawlers still try anyways. Thank you!
        • account42 2mo ago
          It's always entertaining when people proudly display their lack reading comprehension.
          • rob 2mo ago
            That's very true.
• tempfile 2mo ago
  I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a legal identity.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.
    • tempfile 2mo ago
      Email and phone, or email or phone?
    • deltoidmaximus 2mo ago
      I can't think of many things I'd less like to verify with Persona than NSFW reddit. They should just ban NSFW content altogether at that point.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        They learned from the best: Tumblr.
    • Melatonic 2mo ago
      Do old accounts still work?
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        They're mostly banned or shadowbanned so it doesn't matter much.
• felooboolooomba 2mo ago
  Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems. In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-behind-metas-2b-lobbying-for-invasive-age-verification-tech https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...
  • masfuerte 2mo ago
    My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future. I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.
    • NuclearPM 2mo ago
      What is a tat?
      • seanhunter 2mo ago
        “Tat” means miscellaneous junk. That said, the anecdote is made up or important details have been elided to make it sound more interesting than it is. Amazon doesn’t depend on whatsapp for 2fa. You can configure amazon 2fa to send an SMS and it’s possible that the poster’s mother has misconfigured her phone to claim that it needs whatsapp to read the sms 2fa message but I highly doubt even that. When I look on amazon it allows passkeys, regular TOTP like with DUO authenticator or google authenticator or whatever or SMS with a backup of sending the TOTP code to the registered email on the account. Whatsapp isn’t even an option.
        • giardini 2mo ago
          How does "tat" differ from "grot"?
          • 2mo ago
• LaurensBER 2mo ago
  For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO. It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post). The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information. to give some examples of mod abuse: - /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power - /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company - /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars) - /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed - some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)
  • khurs 2mo ago
    Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.
  • rjh29 2mo ago
    You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.
    • qwerpy 2mo ago
      I tried this for a while. My local subs have been taken over by ideologues and the niche subs still get political/outrage bait flare-ups regularly. I've decided that the best way to consume reddit is through an intermediary, whether it's Google or an LLM that I ask to crawl through subs for recent posts, remove emotional/political content, and summarize for me. Ironically that's exactly what Reddit is trying to prevent, but when push comes to shove I'm happy to miss out on the 5% of useful stuff rather than have to wade through the memes, outrage, and bots.
• tassadarforaiur 2mo ago
  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?
  • tastyfreeze 2mo ago
    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.
    • stevenwoo 2mo ago
      I liked the anime discussions because I don't speak Japanese and there's often stuff that is not translated well (at least in the first official subs) that people will go out of their way to explain the language (or reasons for changes) or cultural significance of things that don't exist in other places. Also if one has read the source, one can discuss the differences, or if not, one can get clarification from readers on some things without getting spoilers one did not ask for. There's also nintendoswitch subreddit I used to look at for upcoming releases and opinions, nintendolife.com is ok, but not nearly the breadth of activity.
  • yesmens 2mo ago
    I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.
  • skydhash 2mo ago
    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.
• draw_down 2mo ago
  [dead]
• jdw64 2mo ago
  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.
  • Gareth321 2mo ago
    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.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Note that Cloudflare is the least reliable source for who's a bot.
      • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
        says who?
        • inigyou 2mo ago
          everyone who's ever been detected as a bot by cloudflare
• traceroute66 2mo ago
  YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community". I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).
  • khurs 2mo ago
    If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch many YouTube vids embedded https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.
    • traceroute66 2mo ago
      Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not. I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • account42 2mo ago
    It's particularly sad when its institutions doing that who should really have the capability to host their own videos.
• Gareth321 2mo ago
  I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.
    • Gareth321 2mo ago
      That would be a hard no for me.
    • NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago
      I think my account's old enough to drink liquor. Or had been, before they banned it.
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    same. already looking into private forums for if/when that day comes. some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine
    • whatdoyouthink2 2mo ago
      I’m building Wheesper with that same idea in mind. It’s for smaller private discussions shared by link, with everyone joining under a fresh pseudonym: https://wheesper.com https://wheesper.com
• account42 2mo ago
  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.
  • Klonoar 2mo ago
    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.
    • account42 2mo ago
      Have you ever looked at an old reddit comment thread. + Hey how do you do thing? | -+ [deleted] | -+ Thanks, that's just what I needed.
      • doubled112 2mo ago
        Some of that was a reaction to Reddit closing the APIs and blocking apps.
        • pndy 2mo ago
          IIRC that was also done in a fear that they'll start using comments to train AI. And some users claimed that their manually removed comments from weeks to years ago reappeared again.
      • mothballed 2mo ago
        Reddit will delete anything remotely controversial if it contains referenced facts. They banned and deleted my account for simply stating the 5th amendment prohibits requiring incriminating yourself to exercise a right. An Ivy League educated lawyer dug up the comment one year after I posted it, told reddit I was distributing illegal legal advice, and had my whole account nuked.
• wwalexander 2mo ago
  Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.
  • tastyfreeze 2mo ago
    Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results. Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you could expect mostly humans participating.
  • mehagar 2mo ago
    On iOS this popover breaks scrolling, which is required to show the Chrome URL bar, meaning I have to literally close the Chrome app and reopen it to even navigate to another page. I've taken this as a sign to stop using Reddit entirely.
  • windward 2mo ago
    As an opinionated 'power user' type, I've become used to experiencing friction on web 2.0. So for example I sometimes have to make accommodations because my adblocker or user scripts aren't working with a change on a site. I also find myself doing a lot of captchas, because I use a VPN. That's not unexpected: I'm treading an unhappy path, I shouldn't expect my usage to be considered when these changes are made. But what I find increasingly common is that I run into these kinds of frictions even when I do behave as a normie. So even if I do install the official Reddit app, I'll end up going through the broken flow you've described. Or I'll make an account and be immediately given a shadowban for being a 'bot'. Or I'll see cookie prompts interfere with login prompts interfering with app prompts. Devs aren't even making things work outside their own setup now.
    • yuye 2mo ago
      >But what I find increasingly common is that I run into these kinds of frictions even when I do behave as a normie. Often, this friction is on purpose. A good example is how websites show the cookie banner: The least friction will be to disable tracking cookies, and showing an unobtrusive banner asking the user to opt-in. Very few sites do this. Showing a screen-blocking pop-up where users get to "accept all" or "deny all" adds friction. The worst is when a site shows that pop-up but removes "deny all", instead forcing the user to reject all cookies one by one. I think it's the most commonly used dark pattern out there.
• inigyou 2mo ago
  There is a Nitter for Reddit, called Redlib, correct? Best to treat Reddit archives as read-only and modern Reddit as a marketing slopfarm. It mostly consists of bots trying to get their brands into AI training data.
• throw7 2mo ago
  old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.
  • alex1138 2mo ago
    [flagged]
• nottorp 2mo ago
  > is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans Was a surefire way?
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm
• BryantD 2mo ago
  “Safety” is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new front end doesn’t seem safer for end users. It probably does make it safer for Reddit in that it’s harder for scrapers to do their thing.
• knorker 2mo ago
  I assume this is another push to force people onto the terrible "new" UI. When they eventually remove the old reddit, they'll lose this 18 year reddit veteran. No way in hell am I using that infinite scroll abomination.
• decimalenough 2mo ago
  > This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans. This is, sadly, not even remotely the case anymore.
  • ditchfieldcaleb 2mo ago
    Still works as long as you don't care about recent results and are okay with filtering for pre-2023 answers. (So like, 20% as useful, but still...)
    • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
      at least with pre-2023 those shillbot accounts were run by people directly!
      • absoluteunit1 2mo ago
        Many still are
• pwndByDeath 2mo ago
  I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a useful asynchronous human interaction. I think reddit lost the useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that drama. I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic. If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it? Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help. But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility) But I may just be a crusty old mind.
  • fidotron 2mo ago
    The problem isn't "Is this human or AI?" it's "Do we trust the entity with this identity or not?" meaning it's entirely possible to be anonymous but use a web-of-trust style system to promote/demote stories. Part of the problem with that suggestion is everyone likes to tell everyone else who it is they should and shouldn't be trusting, so that dataset and acting on it would become a huge hot potato.
• Klonoar 2mo ago
  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.
  • cole-k 2mo ago
    > 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.
• benjiro29 2mo ago
  As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit". While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot? No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node... The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting). I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in. And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit. PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
  • red-iron-pine 2mo ago
    > "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit" the second old.reddit goes is the second I stop using that site it's already very obviously chock full of slop and AI bullshit, with some subs having long unavoidable lists of "your post was removed because you did not verify" trails that imply that automated posters found a thread and went hard but add in privacy crushing bs -- no reason to be there anymore. Back to old school forums
    • avadodin 2mo ago
• giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  I assume they are being screen scraped by LLMs even though you can find exports of reddit posts elsewhere. I can't blame them for trying to charge for API usage, it was never a cheap cost to them to begin with.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  Cannot duplicate. What I'm getting is a temporary/false "You've been blocked by network security" page but refreshing then brings up the reddit page as per usual. https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in_to_use_old_reddit/ https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
  • cole-k 2mo ago
    It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). Sorry, I neglected to mention/link to this news article.
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  An earlier thread: Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857
• ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
  Related: Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217 (Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in_to_use_old_reddit/ https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...)
• dust-jacket 2mo ago
  I feel like this is a deliberately obtuse response to a real and irritating change. Old reddit is going to be MUCH, MUCH easier to scrape. Scraping has the potential to bring down the site. Gating old reddit to logged in users will massively mitigate that. I don't like it either. But it's not hard to see a good reason why doing so helps "keep reddit safe" Even if it also coincidentally makes it easier for them to make more money. Grr.
• 1970-01-01 2mo ago
  Almost. NYSE:RDDT has decided that plain HTML is unprofitable. That is the entire premise in one sentence.
• Hitton 2mo ago
  Old reddit still works for me even without login though. I'm too lazy to figure out which from the multiple of userscripts and addons I use allows it, but apparently the block is done half-assedly and easy to circumvent.
  • zzo38computer 2mo ago
    It still works for me too (I have no account on Reddit and have no intention to have an account, even if they try to insist), and it is also possible to add .json on the end of the URL for JSON data (although, so far, I only use this feature to view pictures at the original size that are too small if I do not do this).
  • Melatonic 2mo ago
    It's rolled out slowly to different people and IP it seems. Not sure on the exact fingerprinting. That being said definitely curios what user scripts and addons you are using for general use
  • Casteil 2mo ago
    They're definitely doing it based on IPs. I just hopped to a different VPN endpoint and it works for me again (same browser). For now.
• impish9208 2mo ago
  I feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too idealistic back then, but it’s clear that the modern internet needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole eyeball scanning thing though?
  • Melatonic 2mo ago
    Never thought of this until now but what if you had some kind of pay system that worked more like an escrow-ish service ? So initially you have to pay some small sum. Eventually sometime not too long after (Hours? Days?) your money is returned to you. Make it pricey enough to deter large bot spam (some will of course still pay for single bots) and cheap enough to be affordable for most. Like putting a quarter in a shopping cart !
    • Terr_ 2mo ago
      I want to see a vending-machines in City Hall or Post Offices etc., where you can give $1-5 to a charity of your choice and receive an anonymous "Probably Human or at least has Metaphorical Skin In The Game" token. The token can be spent/burned with any online service to create/upgrade an account. I'm skipping over many details about privacy and security and anti-resale, but basically it means that the service can extend trust in moderation, since you (A) have something to lose and (B) making lots of accounts has lots of physical friction.
      • Melatonic 2mo ago
        Not a bad idea. Couid be cheap I would guess since it requires physically going
    • windward 2mo ago
      This is similar to X's model, where every reply section is full of bluetick OF bots. Cheap enough for humans and too expensive for bots have a big overlap.
• doodlebugging 2mo ago
  I read the author's post and many of the comments and decided that I was finished with reddit, finally. I have always used old reddit to surf the subs and have never used new reddit. I did my normal morning routine of checking 8-10 subs that still have interesting content and did not see any nag screen for logins at all. Everything worked on my end just as it always has worked. I read comments and post titles with no issues and no login prompts. I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices. I surf entirely from a desktop using Firefox or Librewolf and a couple of extensions. I never log in to reddit unless there is some issue that I can help with. I avoid most of the popular subs and focus on things that I have direct experience doing or using. If I do post I leave it up for a day or two and then edit it a bit like Yossarian-style censoring - death to all modifiers!
  • cole-k 2mo ago
    It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). I neglected to mention/link to this news article. I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.
    • doodlebugging 2mo ago
      Well. This will be the end of reddit for me. I rarely log in when I surf those subs. If someone needs help and I know the answer then I will log in, otherwise I just bounce around. I'm not changing that. If a login is required on old reddit then I will finally be officially done with it.
  • StanislavPetrov 2mo ago
    >I wonder if the login nags only happen on mobile devices. Nope, I surf exclusively on a desktop using Firefox and yesterday I got hit with the login prompt for old.reddit. Don't have an account and don't plan on making one, so much for reddit!
    • 2mo ago
• storus 2mo ago
  Old Reddit is the only way to read text there for me so if that's login-walled or gone I am done with them as well.
• LoganDark 2mo ago
  New reddit has a literally worse user experience. No comments display more than maybe 1 reply and if you click to view more, it takes you to a dedicated page for just that reply. If you click the back button it completely forgets where you were in the original comment thread. Basically impossible to peruse comment sections like on askreddit posts, etc.
  • Terr_ 2mo ago
    It's really weird, I mean Reddit's strength was the threaded commenting system (esp. compared to Digg when they were competing) and then they started making almost every commenting-hostile move possible.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      The world changed. Infinite scroll content consumption is the new meta.
• plqbfbv 2mo ago
  I closed all my Reddit accounts after they instantly shadow-banned my 8+y main account after I shared a single gdrive link to reply to a user with actual data. I've been appreciated as contributor in various places for being helpful, thorough and precise, but Reddit doesn't care to have good content. It's simply not a good discussion platform (and the UI sucks).
  • leptons 2mo ago
    Mods are the death of reddit like I've been saying for at least 10 years. Shadow ban after shadow ban, the dopamine rush a bad mod gets from shadow banning someone must be amazing. It's way too easy for them.
    • Terr_ 2mo ago
      Advanced version: My account (very old, very established, much karma, no problems) got shadowbanned one morning for no discernible reason, the appeal was "granted"... but it's still shadowbanned even as the appeals page claims an appeal is unnecessary because the account is in good-standing. > the dopamine rush a bad mod gets from shadow banning IIRC admins (employees) can do a true shadowban, but moderators are limited to just excluding you from the subreddit.
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      Mods can't shadow ban. That's done by site-wide automated systems. Reddit euphemistically calls it the "spam filter"
• snacsla 2mo ago
  [dead]
• pestat0m 2mo ago
  hey, it's working again!
  • dogtimeimmortal 2mo ago
    ...and it looks like it's not working again today. tested firefox-esr, palemoon, and basilisk.
• programmertote 2mo ago
  I am like OP -- I use old.reddit.com strictly in Firefox. I'm comfortable and familiar with the old UI (been a Reddit user for as long as Reddit has been around). I was a little annoyed by being asked to log in. But I don't want to browse 'reddit.com' because I don't like the way the new UI looks. It's hard to read and scan the first few pages quickly in the new UI (also looking at you Vanguard; you destroyed your old UI which was compact and informative). Worse, now that I'm logged in and can use "old.reddit.com", Reddit serves me what it "thinks" I like, so now I'm trapped in the subreddit/topic bubble that Reddit selects for me (btw, it selects things poorly). I want to go to the old front page, so I click on 'Hot' or 'Top'. But Reddit still interleaves the posts with what it thinks I'd like to see. Madness and sadness ensue.
  • IncreasePosts 2mo ago
    The new UI you're talking about has entered 2nd grade
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      And it's worse than the day it was born
  • Melatonic 2mo ago
    It still does this when you're not logged in. Try a VPN or accessing old Reddit from different locations. Logged in though probably they do have way more data. Maybe you can opt out in some way ?
• aucisson_masque 2mo ago
  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.
  • seanw444 2mo ago
    At least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's arguably the real users that are worse...
  • reorder9695 2mo ago
    I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients, I have to say it doesn't seem like I've been missing much. The rare occasion I do need to see something on it, it's just full of deleted accounts and comments. I do also love how VPNs get blocked but accessing it over tor is allowed (genuinely I think allowing access over tor is great, but it seems so antithetical to everything else they've done recently)
    • Sha1rholder 2mo ago
      VPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.
      • leptons 2mo ago
        VPN blocking is a thing now. It's always a game of whackamole, but the whacker is getting a lot better lately thanks to states and countries having new laws against accessing age restricted content.
        • m00dy 2mo ago
          yeah, residential proxies are the future.
    • brokenmachine 2mo ago
      >I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients Revanced.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• TZubiri 2mo ago
  Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major client revision, they can put security measures in the new version that are not present in the older one, this happens in many many industries. To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request.
• TZubiri 2mo ago
  Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major client revision, they can put security measures in the new version that are not present in the older one, this happens in many many industries. To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request. Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck. You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too.
  • cole-k 2mo ago
    While most of the rant was indeed about their posturing (which I personally would not call "politics" but we need not debate semantics here if I understood you well enough), even putting that aside I wasn't able to find strong evidence of the "security measures" you speak of. If you're more familiar with the mechanisms by which New Reddit defends itself against scraping, I'm happy to issue a correction --- especially so if it can be explained why Old Reddit cannot offer such a defense. > Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck. Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice. > You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too. Alas.
    • TZubiri 2mo ago
      It's not necessary to analyze the specifics of reddit's architecture. This is a common pattern across many services that can be accessed by more than 1 client, whether it me on the same platform/device/OS or different. For example an SaaS provider might offer support for Windows Vista, and when Windos 8 releases, they still support Windows Vista, and when Windows 10 releases, they are now supporting 3 versions. They may decide to stop supporting Windows Vista at some point, that's completely normal for many reasons and security is one of them, on two counts, one that they would need to backport security features which is added work, and second that the old version API (Windows Vista in this example, Plain HTML in the other) doesn't support some security features or guarantees. An even bigger version jump than a major revision would be a different platform, Android for example is a competing Operating System with much stronger security guarantees, so it may happen, and has happened in the past, that a provider will stop supporting Windows applications and only support Android/IOS applications, (consider banking applications, which may only support access from phones due to its security and antitampering features). So yeah, getting familiar with Software lifecycle practices in general would help explain this, rather than rabbit holeing on reddit specifically. >Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice. Can happen, what I've also seen happen is that account creation and account management is handled by the new client, so if you create your account on the new client, they push most gatekeeping mechanisms onto that part and they allow you to use the old version for a little bit longer before sunsetting it completely as suggested.
• y-c-o-m-b 2mo ago
  If you were using old.reddit.com then presumably you were viewing popular by default? In which case you have some alternatives: https://safereddit.com/ https://safereddit.com/ https://lemmy.today/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay https://lemmy.today/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopD... OR https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=TopDay https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=TopDay https://piefed.social/ https://piefed.social/ (more or less the same as above)
  • lopis 2mo ago
    Lemmy's popularity comes in waves. I was hoping for the day that Reddit would shoot itself in the foot again, because Lemmy's traffic was going through a slump. I'm looking forward to a fresh new batch of new users, content and communities.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    I suggest https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/ https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/ It's one of the bigger instances, run by the people from r/piracy who were removed after the API changes (btw this means Reddit condones piracy, someone tell Nintendo), and without political bullshit
• zmmmmm 2mo ago
  Pretty clear they are defending against (a) AI scrapers (b) impending age verification requirements. Honestly, requiring login is probably the least they could do with old Reddit to keep it running with those two constraints.
• moralestapia 2mo ago
  The solution to this is to leave Reddit for good. I did that several years ago, after encountering a very abusive mod. I was a heavy user, visited the site several times a day for like a decade, and yet I was surprised to realize that I did not miss it one bit. Just leave Reddit for good. :).
• russellbeattie 2mo ago
  After 20 years my account on reddit was "permanently suspended" after some right wing nitwit reported a comment of mine as threatening. (It wasn't, though it also wasn't kind towards him and his ilk.) Happily, my login still works fine so I just keep using it as a permanent lurker. I find I spend a lot less time on the site as a result, which really is a blessing in retrospect. I'm pretty convinced it's at least half AI bots now. Given how much AI sites use reddit as a source of "truth", it's not a good sign. Still, I was among the first couple thousand people to create an account, so it still annoys me that the automated process just happily nuked me. Oh well.
• alex1138 2mo ago
  Oh I despise them You should become a pariah if you were anywhere close to companies like Reddit. Or at least Steve Huffman. There are some companies that clearly decided at some point "yeah, no. fuck the user"
• analog8374 2mo ago
  When we spend this much effort picking through their bullshit, whether we prove our case or not, they win.
• rose-knuckle17 2mo ago
  they mean keeping their board/investors safe from scraping. that's all.
• DivingForGold 2mo ago
  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.
  • recursivegirth 2mo ago
    Here is the recommend app for this, used primarily by the Tor browser. https://noscript.net/ https://noscript.net/ I use this on news sites to get rid of the paywall.
    • hogwasher 2mo ago
      ublock origin (not to be confused with the lite version) can also do this, and is more flexible. But it's easy to miss this functionality because you have to know about and read some documentation to learn how to turn ublock's "medium" mode on and how the controls work.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Plain HTML is unsafe for Reddit, which is a company, and needs a safe revenue stream.
    • SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
      Note, Reddit is a publically traded company with a P/E higher than NVidia. Nothing makes any sense and I hope Reddit crashes as soon as possible with their terrible decisions.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        At this point in history, money is a farce, but it's a farce we are forced to participate in at gunpoint.
• dredmorbius 2mo ago
  Reddit's been dead to me for years. It's ... deader now. I'd noticed this change myself a few days ago, suspected something was up. (Occasionally visit for information that's not readily available elsewhere. Log in only to pull content from my now-private subs, perhaps a few times/year.)
• jokoon 2mo ago
  got banned on my EU country subreddit for saying hamas dresses as civilians reddit is probably the worst echo chamber of the internet
• galleywest200 2mo ago
  I don't buy the “scraping” protection when appending .json to any reddit URL still gives you the data. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_this_at_a_concert.json https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/comments/1v3mzl6/what_is_t...
  • 20k 2mo ago
    They're just trying to manufacture a reason to kill off old reddit. Someone internally clearly hates the fact that its still quite popular, despite all the efforts to make it unusable so far
    • SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
      New Reddit for my phone has decided to put a bottom popup forcing me to the app. The second old goes away I’ll never go that site again except for search results. I ADORE that a publicly traded tech giant is so fucking stupid.
      • garciasn 2mo ago
        Their users and those users data are the product; you are insignificant in the eyes of their shareholders.
        • SV_BubbleTime 2mo ago
          You don’t seem to understand. It isn’t about me. Or even people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not even be obvious to people, but they’ll slowly turn away at this or the next thing or the next one after that. I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate. MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to it.
          • rmunn 2mo ago
            The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe: > MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it. This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship. > MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship. I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.
• janalsncm 2mo ago
  It’s really hard to feel bad for these Web 2.0 platforms that made money off of free content and are now enshittifying on top of it. I stopped using Reddit when they blocked 3rd party apps and forced people to use their first party ad-ridden and painful UX. Every time I go back I find some other annoying unilateral change like deleting r/all. In any case, Reddit was so filled with politics and bots and low-effort drive-by comments that I don’t miss it too much.
• sco1 2mo ago
  This is sad. I've been using a few read-only lurking apps to browse reddit for a while now and unfortunately this change seems to have broken most of them. I tried looking into how to do things the "correct" way nowadays and they seem to have completely changed their app platform since the last time I looked. They've completely locked out the old method for requesting API access in favor of whatever this Devvit thing is: https://developers.reddit.com/docs/ https://developers.reddit.com/docs/ If you want just plain old data access you have to submit a help ticket, which as far as I can tell just goes completely ignored if it doesn't get rejected outright by some automation.
  • lol768 2mo ago
    They've also started revoking previously valid tokens. I can no longer use RedReader with the API client I had created for this purpose. The only winning move now is to start impersonating their app.
• exabrial 2mo ago
  The funnest kinds of problems to solve are the pretend ones.
• Pxtl 2mo ago
  I've pretty much switched to Lemmy. It's one of the few Fediverse systems that actually seems to live up to its private counterpart.
• jwrallie 2mo ago
  Interestingly, I remember that the clean interface of old Reddit, not so different from current HN, was one of the nice things when coming from Digg back in the day. It started dying for me when they started censoring posts and comments to appeal to advertisers, followed by killing non-official clients, then the light mobile website. Killing old.reddit feels like the last nail in the coffin. Unfortunately, we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration.
  • probably_wrong 2mo ago
    I deleted my account when they deprecated i.reddit.com. It's mildly funny to read comments lamenting the death of "the good mobile interface" when the amazing one was already killed years ago. > we have yet to see an alternative that can sustain mass migration. I had hopes for Digg, but whatever it is they ended up building it's clearly not that.
• luxuryballs 2mo ago
  If you want to be paranoid it's a decent idea, if you also make your own internal html/xml alternative you can then say your sanctioned html flavor is safe, but regular html would mean it has to came from an outside third party no matter where you encounter it.
• Bob_bo 2mo ago
  [dead]
• luciana1u 2mo ago
  [flagged]
• kaide666666 2mo ago
  [dead]
• dyauspitr 2mo ago
  When I’m browsing, reddit on my iphone on Safari, when the little pop-up shows up that tells you to use the app it completely locks up Safari (it doesn’t hang) I can’t change tabs, bring up the back control buttons or do anything else except exit out of Safari how are they doing that?
• wktmeow 2mo ago
  I refuse to log in to Reddit, deleted my account ages ago. And now on mobile it places an unclosable pop-over asking me to log in to continue reading. So now I only read things on desktop. Would like to stop using Reddit all together but sometimes it is genuinely useful to read some human answers, although since LLM’s train on the data I can get a lot of the same info that way at least.
  • Topgamer7 2mo ago
    I would really just like to stop receiving bot spam because they allow arbitrary uses to "sign in" with your email without any validation. To which you then receive login codes via email and recommendations to Russian subreddits
  • p1necone 2mo ago
    old.reddit.com works to bypass that on mobile.
    • tw04 2mo ago
      The article is literally about how they’re killing old.reddit.com unless you login.
      • taspeotis 2mo ago
        There’s an article? All these years…
        • Alive-in-2025 2mo ago
          but is the article on reddit about old.reddit.com being killed so they can track your porn viewing after you have to log in.
  • twentyfiveoh1 2mo ago
    Try "RedReader". You can use reddit without the account.
• holoduke 2mo ago
  There UI tactics are top evil. Does anyone else has the issue of back button action not remembering scroll position of the previous page? I think they did it deliberately for some unknown reason.
• gblargg 2mo ago
  Scrapers prefer old.reddit for the same reason users do: it's lean. Oh well, good thing Reddit has solved the scraping problem. It's a small price to pay to not have their site scraped anymore.
• Melatonic 2mo ago
  Remember Aaron Schwartz !
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    The first "example" of what happens when you free information.
• madhu_ghalame 2mo ago
  [dead]
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Ok you implement it then
• surcap526 2mo ago
  [dead]
• Havoc 2mo ago
  One more walled garden enshitifying rapidly
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    A walled garden overrun with weeds. Just leave.
• shevy-java 2mo ago
  I retired from reddit last year or perhaps two years ago already. The reason was censorship by insane moderators. I am also hardly the only one - there is so much criticism about reddit on reddit that it is quite interesting to see reddit has not yet died already. On the one hand, some info on reddit is useful, but on the other hand, I would not be in the slightest concerned if reddit were to be removed - nobody needs censordit. Thinking about it, I actually should have also deleted all my contributions; feels a bit unfair that they can still benefit from what I wrote even though they (many moderators) censored me.
• phreack 2mo ago
  The login page is a very nice reminder to not use Reddit. I have the old reddit redirect extension so this change was the push I needed after the latest very clearly botted hate campaign took over the site recently. Dead internet theory is taking it over, so I'm off to the next moderated social website.
• inigyou 2mo ago
  It says to keep Reddit safe, as in their profit. It doesn't say to keep you or your computer safe.
• p2detar 2mo ago
  Reddit is such an amazing business model that exploits the gullible. People go on reddit, voluntarily post comments, generate interest vectors that can be harvested and get "paid" with upvotes. The so called reddit mods do voluntarily, unpaid work to manage subreddits that can be closed at any time by reddit admins. All of this work done by people for free for a commercial platform, so that it can then build a walled-garden around all that content and charge others for API usage. Hats off.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    This is called chokepoint capitalism and most web2 sites do it. HN also does it.
    • vovavili 2mo ago
      Hacker News is way more innocent in that it's main purpose is to expose a narrow slice of highly technical and entrepreneurial people to YCombinator and companies that it funds. Of all the social media websites it employs the least amount of dark patterns and is the only website that I know of that natively helps people for whom the use of the website becomes problematic.
• egorfine 2mo ago
  As a heavy reddit user since the glorious Digg times... what's up with this "old reddit" thing? I vaguely remember some problems with new reddit initially. But the "new" frontend looks nice to me in all aspects. What am I missing?
  • dagenleg 2mo ago
    The UX is horrendous, density of information is a fraction of what it was and the infinite scroll sucks
  • Markoff 2mo ago
    for starters when I browse reddit in new interface after short scrolling it tells me to install app and I can';t read further comments, no such issue with old.reddit though I have also Continuum client with my own API key in phone, but for some google results it's just faster to read it in browser than opening the app
  • windward 2mo ago
    Absurdly, it is much faster to browse between pages using old reddit. Seriously, try it out. I wonder if the person who created a ticket for implementing the progress bar ever wondered if it was symptom of a greater problem?
    • Terr_ 2mo ago
      You can also actually see a big discussion without lots and lots of clicking until clicking too deeply makes you lose all your progress and start over.
  • realusername 2mo ago
    The new frontend still doesn't have a proper zoom implementation so I can't use it
• latexr 2mo ago
  > This is because appending `site: reddit.com` to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans. People share that tip as if it’s some kind of cheat code for the internet, and it baffles me how they can’t see they’re being manipulated. Of course advertisers took notice and there are Reddit posts which are ads disguised as content. That has been happening since before LLMs. After LLMs, of course plenty of posts there are written by them. Not that the human posts are great, either: for sharing opinions it’s of course subjective, but for factual stuff they are just as wrong as anywhere else on the internet, but with the bad results even more upvoted to the top. Reddit is full of propaganda and confidently ignorant people.
• nelliepeter733 2mo ago
  [dead]
• bo1024 2mo ago
  Yes, and I have the same problem with Cloudlare’s “we are checking the security of your connection” page that is now popping up for me everywhere. Thanks for making sure I’m secure enough to read your three-paragraph news article…
• ggm 2mo ago
  Why people do things and what people say decided what they do often differ. I think it very likely reddit want login to old reddit for lots of reasons and the post fact rationalisation to badge it security is the least important one. Money and legal compliance pressures are far higher in my view.
• junon 2mo ago
  You're not a fringe user, a ton of people use old reddit (myself included). They're killing themselves the same way Tumblr did. Oh well.
  • forestingfisher 2mo ago
    I doubt Reddit will die anytime soon, at least not within the next 5 years. They have an incredibly lucrative AI deal with Google, and their activity has skyrocketed over the last couple of years. The average person who just wants to fix their car doesn’t care about Old Reddit, the poor moderation, the spam filters, the slow website, or the removal of r/all. Most people are already used to modern web design anyway. What Reddit has is an active userbase and a huge amount of answers, and for now, that is what keeps them successful.
• GaryBluto 2mo ago
  I've noticed a large uptick in websites being more comfortable blatantly lying to visitors recently, where beforehand they'd say something like "for the best experience" or not state a reason at all to try and get you to do what they want. A recent example: if you use a VPN and are signed out, YouTube will occasionally claim you need to sign in to "Protect our community", despite signed out users being unable to affect anything in the first place.
  • alex1138 2mo ago
    Imagine an internet court of law where you can be punished for lying Half these fucking sites would be shut down instantly
• zahlman 2mo ago
  > This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans. This take seems... very out of date. Anyway, old.reddit.com is still loading fine for me in a Private Browsing tab. Firefox + NoScript on desktop, just like OP.
• dncornholio 2mo ago
  This is petty. The people who still claiming the old reddit was superior might hold truth, but it's time to move forward. Reddit owes us nothing. Also you can scrape Reddit with JSON now, which is 10x better than any HTML, safe or unsafe, whatever that means.
• tdeck 2mo ago
  I always wondered how Reddit justified the old.reddit effect. If your new design is so awful that a large percentage of users refuse to use it, and prefer the (more performant!) version from more than a decade ago, shouldn't that be a strong signal that you've made some mistakes? Why not try making the new version more appealing by investigating and fixing the issues that cause people to use the old one. I guess credit to whoever fought internally to keep old.reddit running all these years. I'm sure it's been a candidate for the axe many times.
  • vovavili 2mo ago
    Reddit redesign strikes me as a convenient excuse to enforce infinite scrolling by a company looking to IPO.
    • walt_grata 2mo ago
      I read it as management only knows how to evaluate and reward change even if its just for the sake of the promotion process
    • malfist 2mo ago
      Reddit has already IPO'd
      • vovavili 2mo ago
        I was thinking from a timeframe when redesign was introduced.
  • asddubs 2mo ago
    While I do use old.reddit and genuinely think it's better UI-wise, in the general case users tend to be resistant to any UI change because it breaks their habits and muscle memory. This is valid but applies even if the new design is easier to use/better in one way or another.
    • tdeck 2mo ago
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• jLaForest 2mo ago
  BTW old.reddit is still working for me without login when VPNed into Canada (for now)
• lisp2240 2mo ago
  Yes. There are questionable policies on the website where Ghislaine Maxwell is the top moderator.
• dclaw 2mo ago
  If old.reddit dies, I leave. It's just another step into the grave.... That's about all that should be said.
• darepublic 2mo ago
  First there is a patch of greenery. People naturally drawn to spend time there. Then a generous benefactor comes along and builds a paved road. Hey you don't have to use those footpaths anymore! You can ride your bike along this! Thank you! Then this wonderful benefactor starts adding more things.. fencing.. signage, guardrails. Then one day the benefactor says to everyone I've made all this for you. And yet some of you still don't use this place in the intended way. I will now put up a security perimeter. You must show your papers to enter, walk along the narrow lanes we've set up and obey the signage and pay a toll to justify all I've done. Some of you are so ungrateful I wonder if we can find a new patch of greenery
• darepublic 2mo ago
  many 'human' generated comments on reddit are very toxic. characteristic of a sort of oneupmanship of shrill accusation and doomer-ism that gets incentivized with karma. Even when the general sentiment is justified I find it unhelpful and harmful for mental health. Yet I still sometimes drift over there. It can be addictive to scroll through.
• Mountain_Skies 2mo ago
  I started getting it on new Reddit about an hour ago. So far it's only a couple of sub-reddits, but it's weird that this is happening around the same time they put a login wall on old reddit. I don't think it's a NSFW thing because I'm getting it on the College Football sub-reddit, which should be accessible to anyone. Guess they want to be more like twitter.
• modinfo 2mo ago
  Reddit isn't saying HTML has a security flaw. The problem, from reddits perspective, is that old reddit makes it easy to scrape a lot of content anonymously. Requiring a login gives reddit an account it can rate limit or ban, while "New" reddit provides more telemetry and anti-bot checks. The article is right about one thing: JavaScript and frontend bloat do not secure public content. They just make scraping more "expensive" But frontend design does affect how easily a site can detect and restrict automated traffic. Reddit may have a real abuse problem. Calling the change necessary 'to keep Reddit safe' though, is slippery wording. this is about controlling access to content and automated traffic, not protecting anyone from unsafe HTML.
• moritzwarhier 2mo ago
  The "plain" HTML spec is notoriously hard to analyze statically though, due to "error tolerance". The "error tolerance" introduces algorithmic complexity into what could be a parsing problem. Root cause: DOM parsing can lead to a different result when you take the first-pass output, serialize it to HTML again, and use it as input for the second parsing pass. And if it sounds stupid: browser do this, AFAIK. Side note, not security-related: CSS has introduced two-pass rendering since Flexbox, AFAIK. Not the same thing regarding what "rendering" means (there, it's about boxes on screen, not about transforming HTML->HTML, but...). Lehacy inline attributes that allow JS execution are a favorite example, but disabling them via CSP is not a silver bullet. Even if you disallow all attributes like "onclick", "onload", etc, modern document parsing is not context-free, and allows for arbitrarily complex exploits, AFAIK (a href, src or style payload can be just as bad as arbitrary JS execution). The author of the ancient library DOMPurify made a decent amount of money from explaining this thoroughly and providing solutions. In short, detecting XSS is a variant of the Halting Problem in some especially hard cases, as far as I remember. Because HTML parsing is not context-feee.