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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
by aucisson_masque 3mo 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 3mo agoAt least the sheer stupidity of bots is understandable. It's arguably the real users that are worse...
- reorder9695 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoVPNs get blocked? Your VPS needs an ip update.
- brokenmachine 3mo ago>I gave up on it years ago when they killed off 3rd party clients Revanced.
- roysting 3mo agoI suspect they’re not blocking tor to maintain both an image of being some kind of safe haven for democracy warriors and because tor is monitored by the 5+1 eyes it’s also a conduit for intel and asset development among those kids who think they’re democracy warriors or something.
- the-mitr 3mo agoYou can't login via tor anymore in my experience
- inigyou 3mo agoReddit did reliably block Tor with 429 but no longer does.
- user43928 3mo agoI find it amazing how they killed off 3rd party clients many years ago, yet their first party mobile client is still garbage. It is nowhere near as good as the third party apps that were made by a single individual developer. It goes to show how a presumably large budget and sizable team is outdone by a single talented individual outside of the constraints of an enterprise environment. Or maybe Reddit is particularly incompetent. I occasionally use their website on mobile, and if anything it has been getting worse. That Reddit sells our content and does a terrible job at moderation, which they largely outsource to us as unpaid labor, is just the cherry on top.
- naiveter 3mo agoRIP Apollo… I doubt Reddit killed the third-party apps to improve its mobile experience. They were probably just trying to cash in on the AI hype.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cyanydeez 3mo agoonce they break RedReader ill be out. old.reddit.com is now defunct
- idiotsecant 3mo agoThat's news to me, I use old reddit com all the time
- brokenmachine 3mo agoWhat do you mean it's defunct? I use old.reddit.com all the time. If old.reddit.com goes, I'm done with reddit. I might try out some kind of alternative front end from https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#reddit https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#reddit though. But if that's not good enough, I'm done.
- human305893 3mo agoIt now only works if you're logged in.
- alterom 3mo agoBastards. I didn't notice. Welp. I guess most people who are/were using it also had accounts.
- gonzalohm 3mo agoNot true, I use Firefox focus to access it, so now I can't
- saint_yossarian 3mo agoSeems to work fine here?
- pixl97 3mo agoIt's on and off for me, it's like they are A/B testing non logged in users.
- nonethewiser 3mo agoThey broke the mobile website. You scroll a little and it blocks content and asks you to get the app. old.reddit didnt but now you have to login to use it. I just want to read. I dont want the app and I dont want to login.
- ranger_danger 3mo agohttps://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master/instances.md https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit-instances/blob/master...
- analog_daddy 3mo agoNot sure how long it will survive, but opening it in a private browser tab helped. Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- valiant55 3mo agoA lot of the programming adjacent subreddits have been post after post of weekend vibe coded projects. It's become really exhausting how easy it is to turn out a new wheel that's going to get abandoned in a few weeks at best.
- duxup 3mo agoYeah the software related subs are worthless now. All spam.
- EdwardDiego 3mo agoYeah, it's a problem a lot of those subs are grappling with.
- smrq 3mo agoAdmittedly, HN is suffering the same fate to some extent.
- inigyou 3mo agoTo some extent? It's most of the content!
- broodbucket 3mo agoHow is that any different to HN?
- ksd482 3mo agoThe discussion quality is unbelievably shallow in most of the subreddits. Unless it's a niche and technical subreddit such as mathematical topics, bio science subtopic, the discussion is quite shallow and in some cases simply misinformed. For e.g., a recent question about "is this person racist?", everyone jumped on the bandwagon and said "yes!", "100%", "obviously" without citing any sources. They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said. It turned out the thing they paraphrased it was completely out of context and in fact proved it was opposite of what people were believing. There were a couple of people who pointed this out but they were downvoted into obvilion: -50 downvotes or something like that. So these comments were hidden by default. This is what makes reddit an ecochamber. Now just imagine people coming in and reading this post without any prior knowledge, and taking away the wrong conclusion. This happens ALL the time. I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes. EDIT: "They simply paraphrased it" --> "They simply paraphrased a small segment of a video of what that person said."
- markdown 3mo ago> I used to enjoy reddit back in 2011-2013 when it was all about silly memes and jokes. Reddit is as it's always been. You just got older and don't get the current silly memes and jokes.
- inquirerGeneral 3mo ago[dead]
- ksd482 3mo agoI never said anything about not getting the current memes and jokes. I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously. And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow. I will however concede that non-scientific/technical discussions were always shallow.
- 3mo ago
- zitterbewegung 3mo agoHow do you think the bots are trained? Reddit has really good data since its comments and tags and specific subreddits basically have ranked questions and answers by points driven by the title and the comments are ranked by points which have quality answers.
- pixl97 3mo agoEh, that only works when fleets of bots aren't upboating their own commercial content.
- hunterpayne 3mo ago"Reddit has really good data" Depends on what you mean by good. If you want to make a bot that seems like a person, then yes. If you want accurate information, not so good.
- dlenski 3mo ago> I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM. That's a bizarre and self-sabotaging path to take. Almost all LLMs get a substantial portion of their knowledge from Reddit. In order to evaluate the quality of those LLM responses, you'll have to click through to the Reddit threads and critically evaluate the quality of the underlying discussions. If you just blindly accept LLM responses without evaluating the sources, you'll be accepting a lot of garbage, and it'll show. > And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots. I spend quite a lot of time reading and writing on Reddit, and while I encounter plenty of low-quality posts and comments, I'd say that essentially none of them are written by bots.
- qwerpy 3mo agoI agree with them. In many of the subs I used to frequent, the outrage is high and the signal is low. LLM really is the best way to consume the content there. Retrieve the new posts of the day/week, filter out the outrage and politics and low-effort Reddit in-jokes/copypasta, then summarize the various comment threads. My time is too valuable to sift through the utterly mind-numbing nonsense to get the occasional new piece of info. If you want to dig deeper, ask the LLM to dig in. Or have it regurgitate verbatim a pre-filtered selection of comments. Reddit is a good source of new happenings and discussions, but I’m willing to spend some tech company’s compute to clean it up for me. For example, I often want to branch out from a particular musical artist. Reddit has many good recommendations. LLM is perfectly capable of gathering these.
- hattmall 3mo agoTo many bots on reddit, so your solution is to go directly to the bot!!? If bots bury the signal in noise then an LLM is only going go back and give you the summary of the noise.
- qwerpy 3mo agoThe bots (and humans) I’m trying to weed out are the pot-stirring permanently outraged/bitter commenters. For example on a “car overturned on X road” post, people getting into fights about whether BMW or Subaru or Tesla drivers are worse. That’s all noise. I want to know when it happened, which direction of traffic, if it’s cleared up yet, etc. LLM works well to remove the off-topic garbage. If someone is botting the actual content (recommendations, reviews, etc) and the up/downvoters are unable to identify it as a bot, I probably won’t be able to either. So I’m not worse off using the LLM. Worst case I get some pre-digested garbage and I waste less time, best case the LLM pulled out a few good nuggets of info. It’s not a perfect system yet. There’s a lot to tune with how deep to go, what constitutes garbage vs signal, and so on. At least it’s fun :)
- hogwasher 3mo agothose bots are extremely effective at manipulating LLM results via comments and faking entire reddit threads. at least if you go to reddit, you know the answer came from reddit, and can be accordingly cautious.
- BigTTYGothGF 3mo agoI don't go to reddit for answers.
- chillfox 3mo agoI cancelled my Reddit subscription when they killed third party clients and haven't really used the site since.
- inquirerGeneral 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- m00dy 3mo agoReddit is must have if you want GEO presence
- inigyou 3mo agoSo leave it alone to the GEO bots and don't use it as a human.
- EA-3167 3mo agoI left Reddit years ago and it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve never come close to wishing to participating there again, and everything I hear from people who still hang on seems to reinforce my decision.