Reddit now won't let non-logged in users see subreddits until they've been "reviewed"

mpa92643@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 2321 points –

This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.

Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it's only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.

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This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don't really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we're (along with other competitors, we're not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don't bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie's stream...

This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee

Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we're going to come out much stronger for it.

Imagine the alternative--the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.

That could've theoretically killed us. Now it won't happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking "yep, security is important, that's true..."

Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it's much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what's happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.

Future incidents probably will still happen

It's not a question of if, but when. The only secure computer is one that's a mile underground, encased in concrete, and with no network connection.

And even then, it's still not a 100% safe bet.

We're kinda get vaccinated for the future with all this stress testing

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spez and Musk burning their services to the ground

Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn't really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don't have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.

The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.

Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn't particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.

There is already an army of repost bots which aren't going away. The bots don't care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.

And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can't repost the same stale content perpetually.

I don't think reddit is going to just die. But it's popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it's a shell of its former self.

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It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.

It's not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they've turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it'll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.

It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Man, we don't live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it's in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can't say. But I can say that reddit's been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn't, but they seem to believe that it's more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they're probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as "Television 2.0" and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can't behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.

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I completely agree. I hope Lemmy will steadily add features.

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If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you'll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.

This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It's much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.

I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it's in beta, for those reading who haven't used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn't come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something

Here's a screenshot from Discord:

Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it's not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.

For example, you can't rotate your app UI if you're not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.

Not saying you're wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn't on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.

This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it's not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.

As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.

This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn't mean that it's being used to track you down. It's probably just for crash reporting etc.

Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.

A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.

Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I'm sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn't mean that they're using it to track you.

Certainly not all scary. I don't work with these that collect the data but wonder if it isn't just some deviceData.collect() function or something.

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Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.

I don't have specific info on what's harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I'm at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It's absolutely wild.

Edited to add - they don't specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.

Yeah, don't be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.

Some apps won't work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.

Examples: I turned on the duckduckgo protection, opened the official app and visited a couple posts.

https://files.catbox.moe/sqbg87.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/nj7y8d.jpg

Thank you! I can't believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That's so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.

I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.

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How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android's app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?

When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can't actually phone home.

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The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.

Centralized control and ad based model ensures this always happens... Cable teevee, now web2.0...

About time the pleb base start thinking bigger picture and voting with their feet and wallets.

What is the alternative to web 2.0?

I always hated that crypto shit stole the name web3/web3.0. I think for a short period it seemed decentralized apps were calling themselves web3.0 but now it's just the fediverse I think. I like calling it the true web because the fediverse is very much like the old days where we had niche sites with their own communities, it's just that the content isn't locked into each site and we don't need a million different forum accounts to participate everywhere. Like the old days but supercharged with new tech.

What is web 2.0?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.

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The emergence of every website being gated, requiring an account and sla subscription. Also the rise of rediculous personalized advertisements and user tracking.

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We can go back to old HTML4 and CSS1 websites without any JS. What a sight to behold

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Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.

What's next in the Reddit bingo?

The removal of old reddit?

Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?

Buy upvotes?

The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn't count when there is actual factual evidence.

The removal of old reddit?

Yep, they will absolutely do that. Only a matter of time.

I’m 100% out once that happens. Well technically I pretty much am currently. I may look at r/all for a couple minutes then head over here for a good portion of time.

The comments on Reddit have declined since the purge, it's unbelievably shitty now.

How has it survived! Definitely getting the axe!

Honestly, I'm surprised Old Reddit has lasted this long at all, even before all this.

Buy upvotes?

The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright "gib money get updoot" but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.

"Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!"

To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn't be surprised at this point.

A new tier: reddit ultimate

With reddit ultimate you get all the benefits of reddit premium plus you get the ability to link your online and offline personas as well as a weekly free loot box.

Loot boxes (8USD each or 10 for 50USD) may contain one of the following perks:

  • a week of free Reddit ultimate.
  • "3 nuclear downvotes", like a normal downvote but counts as 50.
  • "karma MSG", for 12 hours all karma you get or lose is counted twice.
  • "look into the shadows", get a complete list of all your shadow bans.
  • "STFU", mute all chats for a week.
  • "sacrificial lamb", remove any or all non-ultimate users from your followers.
  • "heeeere's Johnny!", banned from a sub? Guess again, and this time you can't get banned by non-ultimate mods for a week.
  • 5 gold awards, appears in 17 out of 24 loot boxes

A as a new democracy oriented initiative, for 50USD you get to dethrone one mod for a month.

The loot boxes would actually be able to get me back, not to buy them of course, but to see the havoc it would bring to r/Conservative.

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The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you're making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn't make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.

People get "slippery slope" wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.

The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn't just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn't intend to, and B happening can't be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don't want B but can't stop it, because we've slipped and we're sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That's the whole concept, that we're stuck sliding.

Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn't apply. There's seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.

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What’s next in the Reddit bingo?

See what stupid shit Musk pulled with Twitter a month ago, and that'll be what Reddit does in a few days.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they removed the ability to comment.

Old reddit and New reddit will probably cease to exist when sh.reddit is ready.

What's the difference between new.reddit and sh.reddit? They look nearly identical, but with different margins and padding.

I don't really know because I haven't spent much time with it. I do remember either in one of the mod summits or somewhere that Spez admitted that new reddit was bad and that they were already working on the next version of reddit, which is what sh.reddit is supposed to be. New reddit is an abomination and I've only ever used it for settings old reddit does not have.

But to be honest with you, I haven't really spent any time on sh.reddit because you used to not be able to log in to it.

Everything you listed is on the table for them. I hope they do it so it dies quickly.

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He's just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it's paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.

No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it's a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative....

One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.

His Royal Doucheness

I prefer King Steven the Turd....

I'm now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I'm in a happy place.

Still go to reddit sometimes. It's night and day compared to here. Everything on reddit is rage bait in one form or another.

I go to reddit for porn and that is it.

Make an account on lemmynsfw.com

It's just as good as reddits porn

I'm gunning hard for Lenny, but let's be honest with ourselves, ok?

It absolutely isn't. Not yet. In both quality and quantity, we're still lagging way behind, especially for niche or non-straight content.

Reddit is still the best place for Sounding... As a friend has told me

Lemmy very unfortunately doesn't have either the breadth or depth or Reddit porn yet. If it does get there it won't be for years yet.

That’s wild to me. I’ve been on Reddit for 17 years. And porn is not something I thought was such a huge point. Mothers same goes for this place. The platform just doesn’t seem to lend to that type of consumption. But never less, porns a huge part.

Same but I still follow comicbook creators and comedians on twitter.

I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped

I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC

I'd guess it does the news website thing. Scroll down and get meet with a create account blocking barrier.

Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like "If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit's policies? Try c/pics@lemmy.world" and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We're growing still but it's not like I'm seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.

”…I’m not seeing much Lemmy mentions….”

This is working as intended as Reddit is actively suppressing and shadowbanning any comment or post that mentions Lemmy or hyperlinks

Ah, trying to stop the Exodus by any means necessary. Lol. Time to find a good thread to get my old account banned on then!

F /u/spez is only following Twitter who've already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.

I'm not saying that isn't happening but it must be happening selectively because the small niche subreddit I moderate still has the post up where I announced and linked to the Lemmy community I made. I just went to the subreddit in my browser while logged out to verify that it's not in the shadows, but I could see it.

Yeah, it should be obvious that you won't have much success using Reddit as a platform to direct users away from Reddit. They've made it pretty clear by now that they aren't free or open. Makes me wonder what other topics they've done this more subtlety for, or will do in the future.

If you want to direct people to Reddit alternatives, you'll probably have the most luck on platforms that aren't Reddit.

Though I do wonder if Twitter and the meta platforms will also block it, since they are competing with the fediverse as well (though meta in a EEE kinda sense, so they'd need to walk a finer line since they are supposed to be embracing right now).

YouTube might be a place to do it.

Remember, corporations are never your friend. I remember when redditors thought spez was "one of them".

One of them... who was a mod on r/jailbait.

This is something that really needs to be brought up regularly.

There are plenty of valid criticisms beyond character assassination. It is my understanding that any mod could add any user as a mod of their subreddit.

It's easy to get corrupted by money and success. Has been shown a myriad of times in any stage of human history.

In the beginning, spez might have been "one of us", but he gradually shifted away from that while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.

while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.

He probably really was one of us. To be honest, most of Reddit had no idea who tf spez was before this. Anytime he did something terrible, it would be big then disappear in a week.

Then, since he was so removed from a redditor's in the day to day, all would be well and he'd be forgotten. The local mods and reddit admins were who everyone would direct their hate to.

Mortals defending profits for corporations over humans rights. What could go wrong?

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They're doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it's been shocking decision after terrible change

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it compares to Twitter's attempt, Elon Musk seems to have a lot of natural talent at bad decisions.

A techbro saw Elon's dumpster-fire handling of twitter and went "Yes, this makes sense!" Oh Spez, this is why we don't idolize idiots.

Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.

The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣

But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.

I can't even imagine it being about the IPO anymore.

There might have been some concerns about profitability numbers for an IPO, but I don't think that's something you can right in a hurry. If the investors didn't like "N quarters of losing money", will they be that much more impressed by "we slashed and burnt big chunks of the platform, but we don't really have any clue if this will stick?"

More importantly, they had a strong narrative they could sell investors: They were the "anti-social media social media". Users remained largely in control of their curation, the content was less ephemeral and more indexable. They were perfectly positioned to differentiate themselves as other big players went whole hog on the "the algorithm is mostly standing between you and what you want to see" models.

Does that narrative hold up when their user base is either fleeing or feels held hostage?

It's 100% about the IPO. Other large websites have gotten into trouble with the credit card companies by offering porn. It's why Pornhub removed unverified amateur content, OnlyFans considered not allowing porn, and probably others. Your platform absolutely plummets in value if people have a hard time spending money there. Hiding unverified subs sounds exactly like this kind of move.

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Having tried /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim, I was going to point out how I didn't get the screen you got. However, /r/nyt gets this message. As an aside, /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim are verified while /r/nyt is not is interesting to me. Upon further testing, /r/nytimes works. Seeing how /r/nyt has 411 subscribers, while /r/nytimes has 8,431 subscribers, I think smaller, less well known subreddits will run into issues while larger subreddits or subreddits that are more well known will have no accessibility issues.

It's also interesting that this block doesn't exist if you navigate to old.reddit.com/r/nyt instead of just reddit.com/r/nyt. You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.

old.reddit.com on the Firefox Android app looks bad, but I wonder if someone could make an extension to automatically redirect users to old.reddit.com when navigating to reddit.com, as well as an extension that changes the layout of the page to something more mobile friendly, similar to RES but for your phone's browser. That might make reddit usable on mobile without the official app until old.reddit.com goes away or they try to implement some sort of user agent string check.

You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.

Doubt it was overlooked. I moderated a larger subreddit and I can tell you that the stats for old.reddit are tiny compared to the rest so it's not worth the cost of implementing. Further if you use old.reddit you probably already have a dislike for the app and will rather abandon the content then install the app. Finally old.reddit is used more by old-school redditors which tend to be the vocal minority that will complain about the change the loudest. So overall, ignoring old.reddit is propably the smarter decision from reddits perspective... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I always thought old.reddit going away was what would get me to leave the site...

Strangely impressed it managed to outlast me.

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I have the extension "Old Reddit Redirect" in my firefox mobile. You need a version with custom addon collections enabled (beta or a fork like fennec on fdroid), then you can install every addon by adding it to your collection, and most of them work.
If RES or an equivalent addon could produce a good mobile layout you could use them in the same way, but I don't know about that.

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Anyone noticed how Lemmy links are blocked and shadowbanned in Reddit?

Yep. There is a metric fuckton of tampering across the board, some of which is sub specific.

It's the same kind of things they pulled with WatchRedditDie a long time ago but now it's site wide with little to no subtlety. The rules are imaginary and meaningless, more so than they already were.

WatchRedditDie was an alt right shithole full of hate that needed to go. I clicked a link there once and it was nothing but trump supporters pissing and whining that trans people and women exist.

Oh absolutely. I just use it as an example because it's one of only a few heavily restricted subs that hasn't yet been purged by admins.

Wow really?! Reddit has turned into a total dumpster fire

Turned?

Buddy, that fire was lit years ago. All that happened was Steve threw a gascan in

I moderate a small niche community and the post where I linked to the Lemmy version of the sub is still up and the link works. I logged out and checked it to make sure it's actually there and available. Are they doing this manually and focusing on larger subreddits?

I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.

Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.

It's probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It's already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user's etc.

Be patient.

I find the size quite pleasing. Sure there are more posts and stuff to see, but here it’s possible to actually have a conversation with someone and not have your comment buried in 3k other comments.

But that being said, I would like to see Reddit crash and burn, so business practices like that doesn’t become more common.

And you are right - decentralisation is the future.

Another reason for get out of Reddit

Haven't looked back in over a month

I miss Apollo. Reddit not so much

I miss some of the more niche communities.

Hopefully over time they will migrate here. I'd have a go at making them myself but I'm totally inexperienced with making and modding a community.

Left when Apollo died and haven’t looked back since.

I've actually removed my 11+ year account today, fuck that dumpster fire.

Reddit desindexed by Google in 3....2....1....

That may be intentional. I know they want ai companies to have to pay to train on all that human written conversation. Right now it can be searched and accessed on google cache.

Reddit and AI companies are all financially backed by the same people. Anything they lose on Reddit (which they aren't) they gain on the other side. Plus, bots make this unlikely. Who wants an AI trained on spam bots and automods?

Don't let Spez make it sound like everyone working at Reddit is broke and needs pitying. He wouldn't be CEO if he wasn't on CEO pay.

Really trying to force people to install and browse with the app. I'll never do it.

Never installed the Facebook app either. Just too much data harvesting, too invasive.

Deleted Facebook, deleted reddit, deleted Twitter. Never looked back.

Glad to be free of my Reddit addiction as well. I miss /r/truegaming but hoping we can build it here!

With time people will start getting frustrated with all the inconvenient features that Reddit pushes out. Slowly but surely the communities will rebuild here, just like Digg to Reddit.

Honestly, in my ideal world, all the communities I enjoy will be somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people (if I had to put a number). I don’t want a Reddit replacement, I want something a little more akin to the forums I used to enjoy. I don’t want an algorithm trying to upset me or force me to doom scroll and I don’t want trolls/“karma farmers.” We’ll see if we can build that. For now I’m just content not to see a bunch of NFT “snoovatars” (cringe) everywhere.

I hear that. The general difficulty of setting up a Lemmy account will detract many low effort users (at least I hope)

Do you remember something awful forums? Think it was $10 for an account and it was amazing. I wouldn’t mind having to pay for an account to keep bots and trolls from infiltrating

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For now old.reddit still works.

Honestly I'm amazed. Old Reddit is still functionally unchanged over the past several years and honestly a great experience. And Reddit must know exactly how many people are using it because they're visiting an alternate domain.

Can't imagine it has much longer...

It’s the only way Reddit is even usable since they removed the third party apps.

You can use it on mobile by using Firefox Nightly, enabling the add-ons collection workaround, and installing the old.reddit redirect addon (and uBlock).

Granted, browsing old.reddit on a mobile screen is not a great experience but it's leagues better than the alternative.

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Weeks maybe a month before old reddit goes away. Reddit has to as it loses them advertising money and those that use it are those Reddit dislike.

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My operating assumption here is that Reddit can collect more data to sell if people are logged in and use their app.

Does not matter if you destroy 75% of the usefulness of the system if the remaining 25% can be more effectively monetized.

exactly. People keep saying Spez is an idiot. Him and the board ran the numbers, knew there'd be attrition and still think they'll come out ahead so they went with it. They expected people to get pissed off but for enough suckers to stick around to make things profitable under the new paradigm

There's a reason so many sites force users to sign in if they reject cookies. It's all about tracking data.

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Yeah this move has killed all interaction with Reddit for me. I only open a reddit page now if it's in my google results for something I'm searching, but the last few times I've hit this message. There's thousands of subs that are never going to get reviewed because they're small and I'm sure at the absolute end of their queue.

Old.reddit is next, the new Reddit design is shit on purpose to make you use their app.

They've promised to not remove old.reddit ("old.reddit isn't going anywhere), but who knows whether they'll keep their promise. At the end of the day, if it actually is removed, it'll likely draw even more people to Lemmy

This promise was made by Steve Huffman. You’ve probably heard the name before as the dude that blatantly lied, then doubled down on the lie even AFTER audio recordings were released that completely refuted his lies.

He and all of Reddit corp are not to be trusted.

They promised not to fuck API users over too.

Oh honey. Does remind me bot work here?

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With mlmym.org, I don't even need old.reddit anymore to get the same feeling while browsing lemmy.

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reddit and twitter are literally competing to see who can destroy their platform first and unfortunately they're both winning

I can't believe neither has lost it yet. I keep seeing public entities talk about their Twitter page, and I keep seeing subreddits active.

The second Digg 4.0 speedrun any%

I’d posit they went Digg v4 when they updated the site to remove the ability to see upvote and downvote counts for posts and comments, and artificially inflated scores on the same day. /all/ went from interesting stuff to… promotions, ads, and rubbish. Also when they made /popular/, then turned /all/ into… the same thing.

It's interesting because they justify it by saying it's for compliance (eg, because logged out users haven't answered affirmatively that they're over 18). Gives them cover when we all know the real reason they're locking it down

Just makes me say, “oh, fuck off”.

Wasn't one of Spez's bucket list to have his own private bunker for the apocalypse? This is it. Secured. Contained. Protected. Isolated. But also dead.

Try old.reddit.com in the browser. It is not pleasant but it works on mobile.

What do you mean, old reddit has been the only usable reddit for years now.

I think meaning it's not very usable in the browser, which I agree with.

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don't you dare bad mouth old.reddit...ah, who am i kidding, idgaf about reddit anymore.

If you pop into r/compact you can pick up a script for the Firefox tampermonkey add-on that will make old.reddit look like the old .compact interface. Very handy when reddit was still worth using.

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Has Elon Musk secretly bought Reddit as well?

Spez admittedly idolises Musk.

You say idolises. I say can only climax now to watching the Tesla truck launch video on full volume with a 1:100 scale model of space X rocket up his anus.

Your way is more succinct I admit.

Which like how‽

They're following the same model of (attempted) monetization.

Meanwhile Elon admits advertiser revenue is down 50% from before, when they were already losing money.

Search is broken in Reddit right now (for me at least). Best part is, it doesn't always report an error, just pretends there are no results.

Oh, and Reddit Status doesn't know yet.

Lol reddit search has always been almost entirely worthless. I know search can be hard, but it has to be by design.

I'm not talking about inherent brokenness that was always there.

There is a specific search with a non-dictionary word, and limited to specific sub, that always worked, but it's not working right now, returning zero results. Reddit search is fully broken right now (except for finding sub names if you don't limit the search to a sub).

Problem is still persisting btw. And Reddit Status still reporting no problems.

Ironically, if they spent a lot of time improving it, Reddit might've been far more profitable. A big advantage Reddit has is all of the genuine conversation and questions for things people Google. Reddit could have weaponized it by becoming a direct competitor to Google, and I think they would've actually done really well.

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Reddit search has always been broken, even when it was working.

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Did Elon Musk enforce post view limit ? I don't know about that

I think its at 1.000 posts per day for regular people, 10.000 for Twitter Blue Subscribers

And People without an account cant see any posts anymore

He backtracked the last part, I think because Google was started to delist Tweets from Google searches. You can see a specific post, but not the comments to the post.

Oh really? Last I checked I couldn't see anything whenever there is a Twitter-Link anywhere

They really are morons.

I generally refrain from considering myself more intelligent than others, because.. well, it’s just a safe bet, but also because they probably have optics on something and know something I don’t.

But this.. what the shit is actually happening? It’s like they’re watching everything Musk does and just.. decides to copy it?

They saw Musk admit Twitter is income negative, right? Right?

Guys?

well spez also admitted in the ama that reddit is "not profitable"

Amusing thing is a company being unprofitable never seems to be lacking in money to use it as their own personal piggy bank to live lavishly and climb up the wealth rankings. Always get reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley.

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Of course it's not, if it was he wouldn't be following the steps of daddy Elon. It's just two like-minded tech-bros who want to turn other people's unpaid contributions into profit for themselves.

That's not the problem. Most in development tech companies aren't in profit mode. The problem for reddit is that they have no way to generate revenue to attract investors

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Mark Zuckerberg was planning on introducing some subscription service like Twitter checkmarks to Meta, but at least he responded to questions about it in his comments section. Iirc the program might even have been delayed due to its apathy from users, but I haven't heard much about its plans lately. At least he understood how stupid he sounded once he spoke with consumers.

I don't even think a subscription model is a bad idea. Right now you pay with your data - ie you are the product. Therefore the website you use (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc) has the primary incentive to please their customers - the advertisers.

When you have a subscription model, the user becomes the customer. Any changes would, presumably, be made to improve the user experience. Right now that isn't really the case. As that now famous enshittification article from January elaborated on - websites are nice to the users until they feel like they have the users captive.

The moment that happens, they pivot to extracting as much as possible out of the user.

Would this happen at the same rate or at all in a subscription format?

Having said all that, I would only ever consider subscribing to something on one condition

  • the only revenue stream is subscription. You have a free tier paid with ads and all of a sudden the incentives remain identical for most of userbase M

I think the Patreon model would work best for a social media network. There are a few patreons that make on the order of 10s of thousands of dollars per month. That seems like that would be enough to pay for hosting and wages for a few coders and admins*. Not everyone would have to pay so it could be a free public service for everyone else. The people who fund a social network need to be funding it because they see there is a societal need for such a network not because they expect a return on their investment; or because paying gives them some special privilege within that social network.

*Or even better several separate patreons for the coders and admins in a federated network.

Right now you pay with your data

When you have a subscription model, the user becomes the customer.

You'll still pay with your data and you'll still be the product when you pay. The statement of if you don't pay you are the product is outdated for the present day when it comes for for profit companies. You can drop thousands and you'll still be getting data collected on you.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/6/23673339/tesla-camera-privacy

Stuff like YouTube premium don't opt you out of getting data collected on you either. Data harvesting is a core foundation of these services that isn't going to go away no matter how much you pay. You aren't paying to not be the product but for additional features.

Who are these people that will fund a social network, with no expectations of a return on that investment, so that people can fill it up with memes and porn for free?

People that want there to be a platform they can enjoy using. There doesn't have to be a monetary gain for your life to be enriched by an investment you make. I mean, people make donations to wikipedia, how is that any different?

I've given money to both Wikipedia & Lichess on multiple occasions.

Gotta support these types of things. They are the shining gems of what is possible online.

Wikipedia seems to be a non profit and doesn't seem to be in the business of harvesting user data seems to be a difference, or constantly chasing after unlimited growth that leads to constant growing expenses due to expectations of shareholders that leads to focus on sustainability not being a priority.

Exactly, there is no reason a social media company has to be a for-profit business.

A subscription model just means you'll pay them to aggressively collect and sell your data. There might be a different service somewhere that will do one or the other, but there's no way reddit is gonna give up an established revenue stream

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Somehow the same content become appropriate just because some people know how to download an app.

So glad I rewrote all my comments before getting out of there.

install Reddit enhancement suite and run this script in the developer tools console:

var $domNodeToIterateOver = $('.del-button .option .yes'), currentTime = 0, timeInterval = 1500; $domNodeToIterateOver.each(function() { var _this = $(this); currentTime = currentTime + timeInterval; setTimeout(function() { _this.click(); }, currentTime);});

You even keep your karma that way

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they made this change months ago, nothing new

Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.

They're getting desperate.

Honestly from where I sit seems like the opposite. They are confident they are doing whats best for them, not the platform. They are cleaning house and setting up for new monetization schemes of the platform. Removing people from the platform they can't harvest data from is a net positive from their point of view.

In other words, "censorship" -- "We shape this site our way and there is nothing you can do about it."

Aaaand that is the final nail in the coffin for me. Rip in pepperonis plebbit.

I genuinely believe that Reddit and Twitter are concerned about AI scraping their website thus allowing users to access the data without visiting the actual websites.

This, to me, is another benefit of the fediverse. These instances don’t care if AI is scraping their data because they aren’t in it to monopolize the user created content. They don’t create the content and they recognize they don’t own the content.

So long as the instances are financially solvent, they are happy.

Hear me out.

Elon destroys twitter and eventually makes it a joke and no one can be trusted cause the process of verification for that is a joke now.

Spez destroys reddit. Shuts down 3rd party apps. The majority of people have to decided whether to stay or leave.

The SAG and WGA go on strike because of wage issues, now shows like Last Week Tonight and other shows that take deep dives into the problems of government can't make shows that inform people.

All of this is, in my opinion, to shut down public conversations about many issues and the timing is also coincidental since the 2024 election is coming up and in a time everyone is divided, there is no comfortable place to communicate. The curiosity is if trumps social media and other right leaning communities are facing the same disruptions. Not saying reddit and twitter are bastions of the "left" but twitter and in particular reddit have been a place for public good. Now twitter is a hallway that is almost completely covered in fecal matter and reddit is a poorly designed website that blinds you with advertisements and OF spam bots.

Elon I can see doing it maliciously, because he benefits from a Republican government. Edge Lord Jr has probably doing it because Senior told him it was a good idea. The survivability of these companies are not in their interest because why care if you can just close it down claim the sale and go make more money somewhere else.

But the biggest one is the "Late Night" shows. Most of them are the way some Americans get informed about some of the more deeply rooted problems in America. You can look at shows like John Olivers, Last Week Tonight and maybe Late Night with Seth Meyers. Shows very critical of Republicans and trump in particular, completely crippled by the SAG and WGA strikes.

In total the information delivery systems we are all used too, have been dirupted and I'm seriously questioned its timing.

You think the writer's strike is part of a conspiracy to prop up Republicans for an election in a year and a half?

No, I'm saying the people that control their wages have been slowly moving towards the point of protest so the shows they write for don't air because they are fighting a noble battle against shitty wages.

Seems more simple and likely to me that the "normal" corrupt and crony capitalism we've allowed to take over our government and big businesses is just reaching even more for the next dollar, like they always do. Although the leadership at Twitter and Reddit seems particularly bad, maybe because their product would appear even more unsustainable with proper transparency.

It's true that capitalism and public interest are generally incompatible. Though this seems a bit more nefarious, considering that actions at both Twitter and Reddit have only continued to devalue these institutions, no?

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, though. America will escape this rut when people realize it's Big Cor'prit that we should be afraid of and not so much Big Guv'mint; the former is a virus that corrupts the body. And the immune system (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, etc.) have largely failed.

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Glad I'm not the only one considering this. Been in conversation with another long-time user of Reddit (>15 years) and let's just say that if the goal was to suppress grassroots mobilization of progressive coalition, this is what you would do. We already know how compromised the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg are... And we saw just how much we had to pull the teeth of Reddit to do something about The_Donald...

I often wonder if Trump would have been elected in 2016 if Jon Stewart was still on the air. Now imagine if right-wing groups controlled Reddit, Twitter, and clamped down on all late-night talk shows that help pierce right-wing ignorance chambers of this country.

I'm glad I'm not alone either. I'm thinking he could of swayed the independent voters who were confused but, to be honest things have changed in such a crazy weird way, I don't think it would of mattred. His faithful friend John Oliver was doing his absolute best but the message fell between the mass noise brought on by the maga crowd.

Some people suffer from reddit nostalgia and forget some of the most disgusting subs and activity during the early days was common place but as time went on it rooted them out and forged a better sense of community. Then trump emboldened idiots to be idiots and cultists obey their leader. Questionable people bought up share and spez suffered a stroke after Elon gave him the boner after telling him how much power he has.

From my readings in the last few weeks, there does seem to be some sort of coordinated effort to control public messaging. There was/is a discussion about how the right wing is suing and chilling any and all efforts to expose and educate about disinformation. The lawsuits were so menacing that they even wanted to go after the students of the classes run by professors they were suing for teaching about present day disinformation in our society. It isn't just professors, it includes writers and journalists and groups that targeted disinformation. This is being done under the banner of 'bias'. Opposing, criticizing, or pushing back against far right wing messaging is attacked and sued as intolerable bias.

It's believed that this is to clear the way for a massive onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories entering into the 2024 election cycle. As far as what's happening to some social media sites, the timing is suspect. Reddit and Twitter were among the most effective at getting out the blue vote. Now they are in shambles.

Twitter was ruined for the reasons you state, but thinking it was for the west is untrue. One of the biggest investors was the Saudi king, a ruler in an area where Twitter was used to organize actual revolts and revolutions. The destruction of social media is definitely being done in prep for elections. The strikes seem like coincidences as far as the election goes.

Buy it, kill it. 44 bill is chump change to the

Many people benefit from its downfall, its not exclusively to the election i just used it because I live in the "west" and I can see it disrupting a very critical election because 4 more years has of trump is gonna be bad for everyone....

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Sounds like a good reason to delete all your content that they profit off of and stop using it...

Just use old.reddit.com if your still going to view reddit...

Yeah, it is not as nice as the modern version (modern version iscomplete and total garbage imho), but the old.reddit.com still functions and gives you the exact same content without the hassle of the modern site. Just not as nicely formatted for mobile...

But it is only a matter of time till they get rid of it too.

You also have to be logged in, in order to automatically use old.reddit.com (without an extension to auto-route links back to it, at least). I know because when I used reddit in...erm, private mode, it would always route me to the new, awful ui which didn't support RES.

From what I tested, that is a problem with Chrome itself. That problem does not seem to exist on default Firefox for Android, default Edge for Android, or even even default brave for Android.

Then again, why bother in Reddit's case when majority of people use Chrome?

Don't have anything iOS to test. But the problem could exist on Safari, but without iOS I couldn't say.

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Reddit on mobile browser is actual dogwater. Tho most social media apps are extremely hostile towards non-App users.

I go there for a couple of smaller subreddits I still visit (barely starting out on Lemmy, tough). But a lot of content seems to be slowing down, like 2 day-old threads on the home tab (I only go on desktop with adblockers).

This is obviously anecdotal, and have no numbers to back it up. We'll have to see how it goes into the future. Reddit just keeps pissing off their core users time and time again.

I've noticed the same thing. Subs that used to have a vibrant /new feed now seem to have just a few recent posts.

My anecdotal experience is pretty much the same. My home country's sub (the only one I really look at "new" on) slowed down a lot since the Reddit blackout. Before, you could expect a new post every 15 minutes or so. Now? A whole day can go by with one or two new posts. It's weird. I still see the usual names in the comments, but posting in general is extremely slow. My "Best" tab in the homepage (this is old reddit mind you, I don't know if that's a thing on nuddit) also holds the same few posts at the top for the entire day, whereas it used to cycle a lot faster before the blackout.

They’ve made it impossible to browse on mobile without the app. I keep getting Reddit posts as google answers that I can’t open

Is this for posts that mods haven't manually approved, or is it completely random which posts have not been 'reviewed'? I swear I've seen this on posts with thousands of upvotes that surely must have been approved by then...

This isn't new, tell your phone to show desktop site to bypass all their mobile bullshit.

Here's the thing. I shouldn't have to. I shouldn't have to rely on a third party app to deliver a better product (multiple 3rd party apps achieved this).

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Degenerate rich kids don’t like how they’re being talked about. The only worse thing than elites is their children.

I'm sure this has been said, but they did that for a while at least on my end. Mostly big front page content was blocked in my experience

I'm not seeing this message on any subs, including the small subs I frequent.

Press the dots in the top corner and see if there's a "desktop version" button. That gets around the block for me.