Reddit removed "low usage" features from old.reddit

db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Reddit@lemmy.world – 407 points – Cleaning up some low-usage features
web.archive.org

It begins...

Found out via this post

Interesting side-note, reddit's anti-VPN policies and blocking some archivers like ghostarchive.

106

Remember when Reddit said they wouldn’t touch old.reddit?

People understand they can just leave that site, right?

I wish more people would leave and bring their niches over here. There’s still so many things missing on Lemmy.

I feel you. Really miss 40klore and an endless stream of bunny pictures. The only two things I miss on Lemmy. Everything else I care about arrived or is arriving.

Shout out to !bun_alert_system@lemmy.sdf.org and their bunnies

Have you tried posting about lore on !warhammer40k@lemmy.world ? It's mostly minifig pictures, but they would probably welcome lore post as well

Subscribed to both of them. Also to the Grimdank offshoot we have. Very much enjoy all of them.

Didn’t try posting lore or excerpts tho. Might try it when I come across something cool!

I think the frustrating part is that if those people just moved over to Lemmy, nothing would change about the communities. Lemmy today is robust enough to handle these communities. It’s just a matter of getting a community to switch servers.

I have so many posts to share, questions to ask, and things to do....but Lemmy is not as robust with users. And I refuse to participate on reddit. I need an /c/ xbox360hacks.

I got answers and engagement from communities that seemed dead on Lemmy due to lack of users. You should just try to ask your questions... One answer that truly helps is already enough usually, you don't actually need 100 users upvoting the same answer or 12 different answers where only 1 is good. For many things, low engagement is already sufficient.

Every tv show I watch I have to go to Reddit to view the conversation. And bite my tongue cause I refuse to log in and give content.

Same with watching the political debates. That was my preferred method of conversation.

Which shows are you in? We had some episodes discussion on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, but they never really took off. If you are interested in a show, you can maybe try posting there and see if other people want to discuss it with you?

Same here with various niche things. Reddit had a much higher percentage of jerks, though, so I'm overall better off not participating there.

I'm not sure there are enough people who would be interested in my niche hobbies (locomotives and outdoor warning sirens) to warrant communities for either lol. Trains maybe, definitely not the other.

It is near impossible to start a new community. The Lemmy code primarily favors existing large communities, and it needs to change to heavily promote new communities over existing.

Look what @fossilesque@mander.xyz or @PugJesus@lemmy.world are doing. Starting a community is definitely doable, if you keep at it.

A little bit everyday. :) It was the same on Reddit until enshittification started, probably around the time porn disappeared from the front page. Lemmy is actually way easier to start communities on than Reddit is now.

Giving your own posts an upvote when you're at 0 subscribers works wonders. I remember posting in the original version of RoughRomanMemes for literal months without significant interaction until I did that. Something about the 'active' feed I guess.

Once the community is grown you don't need to do that anymore.

Aren't post automatically upvoted by the person that posts them? Or, do you use alts to upvote multiple times?

I use my lemm.ee alt now. On Kbin it used to work if you self-upvoted, but Kbin doesn't look like it's coming back. I presume Mbin would work the same way, though.

I've kept at several, no one submits posts even after several weeks of submitting starter posts. It's just very difficult. People just seem to like the status quo because it's easier. I had to give up on !cranetrainexcavators@lemmy.world because almost no one was posting but me for an entire month, well that and plus I just ran out of things to post.

Trying !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world now, I'll probably keep at that since public policy is a huge personal interest. It's had some activity but it's like trying to run up an escalator backwards with a 100lb pack blindfolded and drugged. lol. /c/politics even added it on the sidebar and there is almost no posts except mine. Posted links in several other communities including /c/newcommunities .

It's just hard, not sure why my above comment was downvote so much. It's hard, not impossible, but hard. I feel like it would benefit Lemmy if the devs were to modify the algorithm to promote rising new communities over existing ones to even the playing field. They tried with scaled sort, but I don't think people use it much.

Trying !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world now, I’ll probably keep at that since public policy is a huge personal interest. It’s had some activity but it’s like trying to run up an escalator backwards with a 100lb pack blindfolded and drugged. lol. /c/politics even added it on the sidebar and there is almost no posts except mine. Posted links in several other communities including /c/newcommunities .

Curious about this one, politics seems a very popular topic on Lemmy. Did you post to !politics@lemmy.world and others?

I had to give up on !cranetrainexcavators@lemmy.world because almost no one was posting but me for an entire month, well that and plus I just ran out of things to post.

That's a very common experience. We have regular threads on !fedigrow@lemm.ee, this is definitely a recurring issue. On the other hand, if you can find someone to post with you, it feels very good.

Yeah it was posted to /c/politics and actually pinned for a few days. Had a lot of traffic from that while it was up but no regular posters. The problem was though there was a lot of pro Russia trolls and aggressive commenters. If it's going to grow it needs to be reeeeeal slow, so I can't really post about it much.

What do you mean “favors”? Like the algorithm pushes them to the top when viewing “all”?

I don’t think this is that big of a deal. The niche communities rarely reach the front page anyway. But people know to check them cause they care about the topic.

Maybe google SEO is a factor too. When I am lttp for a game or a show, google almost always has a link to the reddit sub on the first page.

Anyone paying attention knew it was just a matter of time. I used to think my last day on the site would be when they got rid of old. Turns out it was before even that.

Good, this will push more people to alternatives

More, yes, but still almost nobody...

The amount of people in the world is a pretty insane number, which makes "almost nobody" 8800 users visiting per day just on lemmy.world, and it's still growing pretty fast.
I'm fine with reddit doing their shit for the masses, and the ones with a bit more critical sense coming here.

45k monthly active users is already something

It’s not nothing but reddit claims about 270 million weekly active users. So it’s ultimately a difference of about 270 million (especially given that some active users here likely still use reddit and aren’t strictly a loss for them)

It’s a good thing though. The fediverse needs to grow a bit to feel less like a ghost town on less popular communities but when you grow too much you become a shitty community filled with bad decisions and poorly thought out compromises

Are the bots subtracted from that number?

Mark my words. This is just testing the waters

They aren't testing anything. They are just enacting a stealth twilight of old Reddit like they've been planning ever since they thought up the new UI.

People should talk about Lemmy more. Irl, on other social media, in game chats, etc.

Just sharing a personal experience here: I reached out to my country subreddit mods yesterday to ask if I could create a post about Lemmy in the context of the latest Reddit decisions preventing strikes.

They told me they would not allow it as it was self promotion, and that I should stop mentioning Lemmy in comments where people complain about Reddit.

Very frustrating when you see how active communities like !ich_iel@feddit.org is, as the subreddit mods promoted Lemmy during the 2023 strike

It just means the existing mods are more interested in holding on to power than for the wellbeing of their community, even if that means they're unpaid disrespected jannies for spez.

Even though they could just make their own Lemmy communities, or ask to be appointed as mods of existing ones...

Mods want people to lord over, the more the better. There are many times more at reddit.

Fuck them. They're literally part of the problem, and you listen to them?

I don't listen to them, they are the ones who remove mentions to Lemmy on their sub. They already banned me in the the past for that, so this time I checked before hand

ich_iel on reddit still promotes Lemmy in the Sidebar, Automod comments under every post and a tab at the top of the page. The mods of the country sub refused to move, but most of them are dicks anyways.

The mods that stayed want to keep their power, they’re not going to allow links to communities they’re not moderating.

Mentioning Lemmy will get you censored on reddit.

Not in my experience. Just do it and don't worry about it.

My guess, break existing old links on other sites so that they can show a graph with a drop in usage of less-ad-riddled way to access the website and drive more to the ad enabled views.

They already do that. www.reddit.com goes to the new ad-ridden useless interface.

Yes but on other sites where people have historically posted the shortened direct sub urls that used to go to old.reddit will now forward to new reddit or be broken according to the comments of the OP post. That’s the key difference here. Posts people made many years ago will now go to new reddit, which is why I suspect specifically attempting to manipulate user / site stats because even if their api prevents search engines from using it properly, there’s a wealth of already indexed links out there.

I love the two comments calling out that this thread was posted to the help subreddit rather than any of the other more appropriate subs for changelogs.

Like come on, you know that wasn't an accident.

-.-

Fuck spez.

Seems like millions of redditors say just that through the many slaps in the face to users, then hang around anyway. :S

They have already been trying to bully old.reddit users for quite some time by forcing a regular cookie acceptance prompt which automatically changes the settings to new reddit.

I'm very disappointed about the removal of r/randnsfw.

I'm already less and less on reddit except for a few nieche subs. The day old.reddit is gone will be the last time I visit that site.

I've been back on lemmy for a month after a long break and it feels permanent this time. I like that I can generally replace /r/<sub> with lemmy.world/c/<sub>, that helps.</sub></sub>

For what it's worth, the primary reason I joined lemmy.world, in particular, was their offering of old.lemmy.world

I'm old and stuck in my ways. I love the old-timey feel of the "old" UI in light mode with endless scrolling turned on.

Dbzero disabled it recently cause it was glitching and the code isn't maintained anymore, hopefully it won't happen on LW

For what it’s worth, the primary reason I joined lemmy.world, in particular, was their offering of old.lemmy.world

I thought you were joking, but nope, it's real. Neat.

Tbh these really are low-usage features, I didn't know about any of them, aside from the snoovatars that I've always found stupid. So I don't think anyone could be pushed away from the site because of this.

OTOH, if they're low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

OTOH, if they're low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

It's generally desirable to remove old code and features to make the code neater. It's also possible that some bug happened because of those features.

It's usually better to not touch code that is working, it won't become "clean" just because you deactivate some stuff and if you do try to actually remove code (to "clean" things, whatever that means in a setting bigger than a small project), good luck not breaking anything.

Source: oldtimer software dev

Code that exists still needs to be updated and maintained. It interacts with the rest of the code. Sure you can leave it lying around, but at a certain point the technical debt is going to catch up to you.

Man do I have news for you...

I mean I don't like it, but the number of time I have seen crappy 20-30 year old code that's completely shit, ingrown into everything else...

Maybe you can afford this in your personal projects but I have yet to work at a company willing to invest in that. Sure, a conscientious developer might clean up things they’re working on, but old code usually gets ignored until the pain of keeping it gets too great, until someone is forced to do something about it

Oh, sure, I've been there. Am there. And Reddit may have gotten to that point with these features where maintenance costs overtook the costs of removing them.

Old code still needs to have unit tests, maybe they use libraries you need to keep patched etc

Better to remove

they even got rid of the login button lol. having a small userscript to insert the login button as html works tho as the method/css remains.

you will use the web 2.0 bloated javascript filled internet and you will like it.

The live version of that link only has 50 comments wtf

The leftover redditors are thoroughly domesticated by now. They just passively take what spez gives them and like it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redlib/

You can also just use LibRedirect

ayy i use that extension

Why do all the videos on redlib say @https://redlib.nohost.network? Is there a setting I need to change?

No idea. I can see videos without any issues. Maybe try a different host.

Another day, another disappointment from Reddit. I deleted my account the day you made your instance and thankfully things over here picked up pretty fast. I haven't felt a need to go back.

tbh if you need to see a reddit post use a frontend like redlib it doesn't have signing in with a reddit account but atleast you can browse a post without tracking

being able to sort saved posts into categories was my favourite Reddit Gold feature.

They've already outlined their general plan for removing old.reddit. It was buried in the middle of an announcement post like 2 years ago. It's just a matter of time and usage at this point. This is probably a slow creep method.

It's sad to see something so much time has been dedicated to, become shit. I guess it was like building sandcastles, afterall.

I saw someone call them making .old shitty a few days ago.