Yes, same here.
Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.
And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.
We were told that the boycotts last year were the end of reddit, or at least a substantial brain drain. Reddit was going to be a lawless wasteland because no mod would accept tending the garden anymore.
Reddit is now a public company with a CEO that just got a huge compensation package while mods still work for free. Far from lawless, far from being a wasteland.
Even the hacker community is still using reddit despite everything that's happened. This probably means that it hasn't lost any of its value.
Blocked VPN access or not, reddit already won.
Uh, reddit already won what exactly? How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special
Communities come and go. They are 95% reliant on the members, and some of their recent moves are adversarial. Everything there is becoming corporate, even the porn.
More active users than ever before just in the last 2 quarters of 2023 after stagnating for years. Its almost like the API thing backfired and that bad press was in fact good press and got more people onto reddit.
more people
how are you so sure the extra traffic is from people?
VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money, plus everyone I know uses it nowadays. I think it's mostly legit traffic.
VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money
There are services which provide a service so that your bot can still scrape from sites like reddit which try to block bots.
The coup failed and whatever reddit's been doing is obviously good for business. I'd wager the majority of people boycotting reddit are still using it like nothing happened.
Uh, reddit already won what exactly?
The right to do whatever they want and still keep the communities and content with pretty much no impact on their bottom line thereafter.
How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special
You raise capital if investors believe in the direction the company is heading. They're betting on reddit to make them money.
Everything there is becoming corporate
Reddit didn't start out that way, at least it wasn't the impression that seasoned internet users got. It used to be developer-friendly and open, whether you were using Tor, a VPN or a datacenter's IP.
It's, of course, their right to steer the company as they see fit and towards profitability. My only wish is that people providing valuable content and moderation work would start to see that the company's values have changed.
For today. Even Facebook is in decline. Online platforms don't last forever.
I thought so myself until reading the latest earnings call.
Usually they do, either as some other company's acquisition or as a company that acquires others (like facebook/meta).
Little actually is entirely gone, someone snatches it when the price gets low enough.
Whether they grow themselves to the point they buy others or are bought is a distinction without a difference in this case. Their DNA exists in myriad ways, and even if they survived and weren't bought few few online companies are the same a decade later.
Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were before the exodus, and bot content is visibly more prevalent. If you expected the website to die overnight, that was just an unrealistic definition of failure for a large website. Digg, the failure that founded Reddit, is still alive today. MySpace still exists. AOL is still selling dial-up internet. Failure at this scale is a slow slide to irrelevance, and Reddit is well on its way. The only winner here is the CEO.
Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were
Is that really a reliable metric for activity there? Genuinely curious. What if more content is being published and popular posts don't get as much voting because of the churn?
before the exodus
Exodus to where, exactly? A few thousand users switching to some obscure alternative isn't much. Sure, people left Twitter, but Threads and Bluesky are way bigger than any reddit alternative.
I left for HN. Not going back.
I read HN more than I did before, but reddit has vastly more long-tail content than HN or anywhere else. Reddit is Usenet. There is nowhere else I can consume content about very specific interests all in 1 place like reddit.
I dived deep into RSS feeds and decided to really just try and follow content creators instead of relying on a single site.
It's been a process.
Is that really a reliable metric for activity there?
You see, that's like naturally an indication of activity.
Exodus
A lot of people left searching for alternatives. Well, there was none and there is none - let's face it. However some stayed on Lemmys of the world and many (No, I don't have empirical statistics on these) returned but yet didn't really return. Many returnees have a quasi-zombie-like presence on reddit now (I am one example). I barely participate and if I do it's a quip or two couple of times a month. Basically, for some reason, I just don't give two shits about the "community" aspect of Reddit anymore. No, it's not anger. Something just went missing.
I was regular at and still visit two largest of the country and city subreddits (and few more) and the decrease of quality and engagement is palpable there. If nothing - the lull and uncertainty decreased the engagement and greatly degraded the experience of being there.
Many smaller and mid sized niche subs are just gone. Either made private permanently or are left abandoned with rules in place that makes engagement impossible. Reddit can take over and force the mods out but the engagement is not coming back. Remember these places were built from before Instagram and apparently mainstream Twitter generation. I doubt that is going to happen again. It was from another time and populated by a generation that didn't mind writing long texts and finding great content and sharing without an expectation of "influencer" status and income, among other things.
Having said that, I was shocked to see some of the Lemmy instances to be really active like small flourishing islands. Check some book/book review related for example if you are interested. A friend had sent me the link once - it was some "cafe", I can't recall; there might be more. I have no interest in those instances so I never joined.
tl;dr: people who cared - a lot of them - left. I think that matters.
The only winner here is the CEO.
And the whiz kid who launches the new and improved competitor. Every failure story like this is also a seed of opportunity.
Only if the kid can sell it on to a bigger sucker in less than the ~20 years it took Reddit.
Digg became a newsletter with cat pics, cute "you matter, don't give up" messages and other assorted clickbait. And it was forced upon the former userbase.
Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.
What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.
Respectfully, this is a small sampling of what's happening.
Reddit and Twitter, the two posterchildren of poor management, have plenty of actual interaction. They also have a significant amount of shitty noise, which is incredibly off putting, but the average person is still more likely to go there than where our niche communities end up.
They might be dying slowly, but they're not even on life support yet.
I think reddit is actually thriving. Everyone I know spends time there nowadays.
I think Reddit used to be a niche site for hackers [1], hobbyists and enthusiasts. Now it's a mainstream site where regular people browse news and memes. Maybe Reddit alienated it former audience, but it doesn't mean it's dying - it just changed.
[1] as in "hacker news"
The internet used to be a place for hobbyists, hackers, and enthusiasts. That's not true anymore, at least not exclusively. But that supports your point - when the lake turns to saltwater you dont survive by being a freshwater fish.
Twitter is doing fantastic.
Just because people want to go back to more censorship doesn’t mean Twitter is dying.
Twitter is doing fantastic.
Reported yesterday [0] that it’s worth 73% less than when elon took over.
You absolutely may have a different definition of fantastic but what was once one of the largest social sites losing 3/4 of its value in 15 months is significant.
aside from actual financial analysts, my own personal anecdata has pretty much mirrored their analysis. i’ve gone back and gave it an honest try like 4 or 5 times and each time has been worse than the previous. it just reinforced why i (and more and more people) choose to spend our time in other places.
[0] https://fortune.com/2024/03/30/fidelity-x-stake-73-decline-s...
Just gotta say that both things can be true.
Investment banks can find it worth less than it was from a return on stock financial view,
and millions of users can find it a fantastic messaging portal,
and individual people may not like aspects of the portal.
"was once one of the largest social sites" - I feel that X is still one of the largest social sites wordlwide and especially in the US.. Priori Data has them in the top 12 of the world at 600 million users 6 days ago.
It's just so much better than anything else even despite it all.
Which, honestly, is perplexing. It doesn't seem like it would take much capital to replicate Reddit pre-enshittification, but nobody seems to even be trying.
I guess nobody can imagine making money off of a less shitty Reddit. Maybe the things about it that suck for users are the only things that make business people excited.
Lots of people tried (voat comes to mind), but they ran into the same advertiser pressure monetization problem that pushed reddit to become the abomination that it is today. For whatever reason, hosting is expensive, and too few people are interested in making it truly accessible.
Before Reddit (and digg, and Facebook groups), forums were pretty popular. I was on many of them and they were simply run by passionate members of a community, not someone looking to scale to a multi-billion dollar company. It was just some guy willing to burn a little time and a little cash to talk to like-minded people about stuff they found interesting. It’s expensive when consolidated into one mega-site like Reddit, but very manageable for a smaller site. The people I know/knew running them were average people with average jobs.
I do still insist that they've suffered a brain drain that has not recovered. A lot of niche communities are instead mainly on discord now (which is arguably worse due to no search engine visibility) and when I stumble onto reddit looking for info on something technical, I often see deleted/edited out comments instead of potentially useful responses.
That. So much deleted content…
Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities.
What, you want tumbleweeds to physically roll across your screen when you look up "reddit.com"?
It's just a website. Use it, or don't. Save what you want, knowing it won't last. Sucks, but the Internet was meant for document delivery, not to become the one and only permanent home of certain social interactions.
Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities
Which would make it completely useless as an ad platform, which is the only way Reddit makes money.
Populist protests usually fail, they only get their way when moneyed special interests are also lobbying for the same policy change out of coincidence, their interests usually pass regardless of public interest or not
People waste their energy and call it “using their platform”, or just reminding people how irrelevant and inconsequential they are but bragging about it
The only thing stopping people is defeatism. People organized effective mass movements before the Internet - now it's infinitely easier, and so is the defeatist propaganda.
The Reddit CEO has been successful - one absolutely necessary reason is a lack of defeatism.
Well, that’s just it - we can have a lawless wasteland, or we can have arbitrary and capricious censorship. There’s no in between. If prefer the lawless wasteland (I remember them, they were much better than what we have now). Unfortunately, I’m in the minority.
Sure, it is public, but the price is going down, not up, as the IPO was just the exit strategy for all the investors who funded a site that never made a profit. And the overall vibe of the contents is bots and memes, not substantial content. There are exceptions to that, but that is exactly what they are - exceptions.
I'm not saying it'll be dead next week or anything... on the contrary, it probably will find a groove to survive in. But "substantial brain drain" sounds like a perfect description of what it really is.
The vast majority of people turned out to be highly passive and docile in the face of extreme enshittification. Sad, but that's where we're at.
Reddit only "won" the Eternal September types. The others have moved on.
Reminds me when someone declared that phpBB won.
So, going forwards—where should someone who lives in a repressive country go, to read and interact with Westerners? Now, practically every social website (*except HN) blocks you if you use a VPN, and you go to prison if you don't. You're twice-walled in.
The fediverse, lemmy, mastodon.
I suppose that works if you want to interact with the three people on there.
It's actually starting to get really good. It's like early reddit before eternal September
On the fediverse it currently is eternal September.
I was there before the reddit explosion when the majority of the posts on the fediverse were from one guy who just vomited cccp propaganda all day. I think it's in a much more interesting place right now.
Reddit otoh started to become boomer-Facebook-meme-town some time around the onset of COVID and then hockey sticked last year.
I suppose by three you mean 10 million
Ok, then you don’t have to go anywhere. Have fun.
It's already bigger than hn.
I would also add https://tildes.net
This is a website for people who think reddit is too conservative for them.
Really? My impression is that everyone is welcome. The only way I could imagine someone ending having a bad time there is to be hostile to other users.
I’ve been a part of a lot of online communities going back 20 years. The fediverse had the most off-putting user base of any I’ve experienced so far. I liked the whole decentralized idea, but the users and culture drove me away.
What's the user culture like? I haven't had time to check it out myself.
They're not blocking VPN access. They're blocking scraping and avoiding their API limits, VPN is side-effect of that it seems. If you login, VPN works fine.
Do they let you get to the login page if you’re on a VPN?
The login page works, yes.
Facebook and Reddit both have an onion mirror.
facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion
reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion
This is IP based blocking. You can get around it by creating a Reddit account, or logging in. I Just did that on my remote browser app, the demo of which is here:
https://puter.com/app/cloudtabs-browserbox
If you read past the "Woah, there pardner." You'll see a paragraph that says, Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing.
This works. You can use reddit if you just create an account or sign in.
I guess this is IP-based blocking to counter bots.
edit: Oh boy, these tiny servers are not meant for this kind of hug. They may suffer!
"Woah, there pardner."
Cutesie error messages aren't funny even the first time, and by the tenth time they are wildly annoying.
if you just create an account
"Just"
I remember getting a laptop with Windows 8 about ten years ago and upon turning it on, the Out-of Box Experience (OOBE) "greeted" me, something like 'Hi. We're getting things set up for you'
"Hi?" "We?" You are a piece of software. There is no "we" here. I can't even begin to express how infantilizing that sounds to my ears.
Anyway, I didn't last long on Windows for that laptop. /rant
You're not the target user.
I know. A few years later, I was helping my mom set up a new laptop and during the same OOBE, I made pretty much the same comment, and she seemed to think it was just fine or at least not weird-sounding.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it's for the same thing that gets people to refer to Google Assistant/Siri/et c. as 'she'. I've noticed that a lot also.
It's normal behavior, we assign gender to all sorts of objects be they made of metal and float on water or are just a series of electrons informing metal gates.
The message is fine for the true target audience which is vastly different from the audience of the 80s and 90s. Microsoft and Apple (well, Apple HAS been using friendly language since the 80s!) are smart to use friendly language.
Plus, it gets us all used to our corporate god-kings when we're dominated by the AI angels.
Would you rather have a hex code?
“Please wait and consult your operators manual: 0x0A”
I’m fine with that - it’s clear that “We” is Microsoft.
The infantilizing error messages are where it’s infuriating because it comes off as if they’re making fun of you. “Oopsie woopsie we did a fuckywucky and all your data is gone! Cherriooooo couldn’t be me!”
Agreed, surrendering our privacy is anything but "just."
Given how easy it is to create a reddit account I don't know how much privacy is being surrendered in practical terms
Creating a reddit account took 25 seconds and they even generated a username for me. No email verification necessary, sorry to a@example.com if you're getting emails about reddit user "Agile_Rectangle729"
Reminds me of Jurassic Park
Edit: parent commenter seems to be promoting their product. Looks like a random remote browser, perhaps avoid entering important credentials there.
Didn't work for me. I tried creating an account[1] moments ago; after filling out the form and submitting, I got back: "an error occurred (status: 403)".
OK, I don't know. Did you try just visiting some random reddit website from the remote browser I provided?
edit: I just tried again on a fresh CloudTabs browser and I could successfully create an account and sign in to reddit. So this does work!
What did you try? I think it might matter how you arrive at reddit. Try going through the address bar search to a sub you like, rather than pasting in a direct "login to reddit" URL. Idk for sure, but that might be more sus to their systems haha! :)
You need to click through a Captcha (at least I did ~ first time I got 1 "bicycle", this time I got 1 "motorbikes" and 1 "stairs").
Perhaps they adapt their IP blocking, this demo only uses 4 IPs globally. Maybe if we push too many users through there, they'll block anyway?? Idk.
Anyway, I just tested after your comment and it worked so we'll need to discover what happened for you.
My setup doesn’t include a remote browser and I’d prefer not to add one.
I listed what I’m using - safari desktop, nordvpn, the sign up link that I checked is in the grandparent comment. This worked earlier for me, now it doesn’t.
No worries! That must suck that you can't get on reddit via vpn.
I noticed the change a while ago, but was like 'blargh old still works'. So I really appreciated your post today that old no longer works!
Re connecting: I'm just sayin you can still connect to reddit over a remote IP if you login/signup per my tests.
Works for me.
Edit: parent commenter seems to be promoting their product. Looks like a random remote browser, perhaps avoid entering important credentials there.
True. Maybe I should have put a full disclosure? I thought it was obvious, but I get if it wasn't. I'm sorry for not being more clear!
It's a good point to advise people to avoid entering important credentials in something that probably looks untrusted. I'd also advise that at this stage as we have no SLAs for now, and are just testing this SaaS-to-be demo of this source-available product:
https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
Thank you for pointing out the reasonable and important security concerns. Although I should have probably done that myself, I was just so eager to help!
Aside: I am surprised tho that you were unable to even login on your VPN. I would think that the IP blocks we run the browser form and those of a VPN would be in the same category of 'cloud IPs', so why should it work on CloudTabs but fail for you directly on a VPN? Who knows?
That's the final blow for me. The last use case was when esoteric discussion there would be one of the few search engine results.
I've already long ago edited out all my old posts and deleted the accounts. So sad to see sites grow to become gated advertiser-friendly communities.
As an aside, I get irritated as all heck by the old, previously useful reddit threads that now show up in search results but with the actually useful information deleted by someone in a fit of rage. This is frustrating, since the information is not necessarily easy to find somewhere else. Or at all.
If you find that you must do this, could you at least re-host your answers elsewhere and link to them?
Yes, this is incredibly frustrating.
I wonder if we've surpassed "peak publicly searchable discussion". It definitely seems harder to find quick answers to obscure topics than it used to be 2-3 years ago.
LLMs will gladly hallucinate something, but given that this stuff is literally the training data that could help ground them in truth, I wonder where we're going to go next.
I mean yes, tons of discussion has moved to places like Discord to disappear forever.
But unlike the previous poster, who blames the information creator for revoking what they published, why are we not blaming the actual abusers? Every site that is build on growth, Facebook, Google, Reddit, et al eventually turns into an authoritarian capitalist nightmare dystopia. Gobble up, lock down, and extract wealth.
tons of discussion has moved to places like Discord to disappear forever.
This is actually even worse than the new Reddit.
Every open source or other project that links to their Discord as a main place of providing support immediately loses a lot of respect from me: Chat is a horrible way of creating a searchable knowledge base.
Besides being opaque to search engines, it effectively signs up their users and contributors for either having to maintain parallel long-term-visible and searchable FAQs and other docs, or answering the same new user questions over and over again.
Having to publicly join a Discord (unlike Reddit there seems to be no way at all to browse anonymously) just to be able to see if anybody else has had my compile or setup error is completely unacceptable as well.
Yeah all that discussion is now on non-searchable, ephemeral private discord servers
Of course we have passed it. The moment LLM training happened was when everyone started locking down access to their data or increasing costs of developer API access - twitter/x have done similar things, and quora etc.
Now the corpus of user questions/answers, posts and so on has real value as machine learning training data it’s hardly surprising this is happening - no one wants to “give away the farm” to a rival LLM product bootstrapped on data that was too easy to scrape.
For older readers who remember the buzz about web2.0 in early 2000s and everything would be a public api or feed - the recent history of the web now has almost been the opposite. Examples of this are everywhere - RSS is essentially dead, news readers died, people are trying to put podcasts behind proprietary systems (Spotify) etc etc, more and more data is hidden behind account walls, app binaries on mobile often only arrive from a mandatory store…
That's the reason I haven't erased my Reddit content, so far. (If they go behind a login wall, that reason goes away.)
deleted by someone in a fit of rage
It sounds like you are blaming the authors of the actually useful information here.
There used to be an ecosystem: real people share their knowledge and experience, driving users to Reddit, and in exchange, Reddit provides free storage and a convenient collaboration environment.
I admit, it's not easy to monetize real people's contributions. But, regardless, the fact is, that Reddit destroyed this ecosystem. I can no longer use Reddit conveniently. And as a mildly active OP on Reddit I don't see, why Reddit should keep benefiting from my contributions while I can no longer benefit from Reddit. I think it's fair.
You could try the PullPush archive, it may have the original comments prior to to deletion.
Main site:
Frontends:
chances are the thread was crawled on something like archive.org
It's been a while that VPNs were blocked on the main website. But I have noticed this since a week that old.reddit.com subdomain has been included.
The next step for Reddit would be a complete Login wall like Instagram and co. I would be happy if they do, because it will save my time more (like twitter).
I would be happy if they do, because it will save my time more (like twitter).
Why is that? If you don't have enough self-control to not use Reddit, a login wall won't stop you.
Speak for yourself. It's enough for plenty of people, myself included.
Totally disagree. Killing my third party app reduced my reddit usage by like 90%. Now I really only use it on my desktop PC.
On mobile, when I tap reddit search results I am never logged in which means I have to go to old.reddit.com to see the full thread and comments. If they added a log in wall I'd just stop tapping reddit results on mobile.
Or it will since self control is not a binary, so more barriers can reduce use
Untrue in my case. Needing to create a Twitter account stopped me going to the site at all.
It would kill Reddit as a Google result that people seek.
Honestly, they jumped the shark years ago. It’s Digg 4.0 at this point.
I used to check Twitter 50 times a day, but the login wall combined with killing Nitter completely broke the habit.
This is very wrong. One of the most studied ways of breaking bad habits is by introducing friction. Nothing stops me from getting in my car and going to McDonalds but that is a lot of friction. It's easier to just stay home and cook something I have.
I suspect they will soon remove old.reddit.com. I think that will be my exodus call. I've been doing more on mastodon, lemmy, discord, etc and hope those continue to grow
The worst thing about VPN:s is the other users who get you blocked with them.
I'm trying to stick with Brave browser after moving away from Chrome, and the fingerprinting protection is already driving me up the wall; I can only imagine how much trouble being on a VPN IP is. I get why sites use IP reputation, but it's not a great experience.
I’m more impressed that places are still trying to hold onto IP Reputation in the age of CGNAT where the age old assumption that 1 IP mapped to 1 customer’s house is completely shattered to 1 IP shared in a geographical region.
CGNAT is also unusable. I had to buy a static from my ISP as they only do CGNAT otherwise.
Astrill works pretty well. I am currently with AirVPN and AirVPN gets blocked a lot. Guess you get what you pay for.
Reddit also blocks a lot of Ukraininan IPs
North American Boy Love Association #9
Is that an acronym?
I'm sure you know that NAMBLA is the North American Marlon Brando Look-Alikes and nabla is a name for the upside-down capital delta used to denote things like vector gradient.
I've had that happen with IP:s handed out to ADSL and 4G as well.
Maybe it's more common with VPN:s, though it's not with the provider I use.
Reddit is such a toxic hole anyway. It's all posturing, stupid cutesy language, and victim mindset. I'm so glad the site got awful as the content - we're all better off without.
Good Ukrainian War info, though
Telegram has much better info, Reddit's is usually a few hours or days old
I dont always necessarily need or want the latest info. I find Reddit to be a good aggregator/filter that also acts as one of the walls against disinfo, i.e. some of the content never gets posted, or gets immediately debunked.
/r/credibledefense is my go-to
I simply do not trust reddit and random mods to censor the real time feed of information coming out of the conflict.
this.
imagine downvoting you for expressing an opinion. HackerNews should be better than this.
Like any social website, it depends on how you filter it and which communities you join.
Tested, and ... no?
I tried two different VPNs, currently on NordVPN ... no issue accessing Reddit.
And I get that it's cool to bash Reddit on HN, but the sense that "I don't visit sites like that ... I exclusively visit HN" is really weird.
For what it's worth I have an 18 Year Club account on Reddit and I'm still active.
It's not a perfect "block every VPN ip setup".
See this for the screen you get when it's blocking:
Perhaps when they detect abuse (screen scraping folks trying to avoid the API costs) from these shared IPs?
So you can bypass it by creating an account? Absolute non-issue once again.
Maybe? Reddit isn't renowned for accuracy.
It is not just shared IPs, I have a personal VPN/proxy that only I use (although in an IP range that likely includes shared VPNs) and it is blocked. It could be that they are blocking all "non-residential" IP addresses and the VPNs that work are using botnets (or some other way they get "residential" IP addresses) to route traffic.
My memory isn't that great and I rarely look at reddit (just the occasional search results) but I think there might have been a similar block on old for a bit earlier (closer to when the block on the main domain started).
This happened for me when I wasn’t logged it, this is a likely factor. Were you logged in when testing this?
Not who you're replying to, but it happens to me logged in.
Just because you can't presently reproduce something doesn't mean that others are imagining it or making it up / "bashing". Remember that, besides VPN blocking being an imperfect and fickle thing, these companies like to A/B test on the unwitting public so different people can inexplicably get different experiences. When you can't reproduce something other people claim to be experiencing, resist the urge to call them a liar and spend a moment to consider other possibilities.
That’s great.
Worked similarly for the twitter addiction.
I’ve heard of Growth Hacks, but it really does seem like Steve Huffman could right a book on Decline Hacks. He may be the GOAT.
You're write.
Your rite.
The suppression of the .old rite by the modernists will be the death of Reddit!
I’m huffin' and I’m puffin' and I’m gonna burn my house down
I noticed something similar happen to me when youtube started blocking adblockers.
Curious why a VPN is necessary to access Reddit. NSWF content that's blocked by the ISP?
You misunderstand; I run all my traffic through VPN to stop my ISP from spying on it.
I sometimes enable vpn system wide for reasons unrelated to reddit and want to access reddit on the same machine.
I always use a proxy to my VPS when browsing the web since ~2013 when my ISP Comcast started (and never stopped) it's MITM attacks which inject javascript into HTTP sessions' HTML. This behavior would be illegal for most entities but Comcast is a big enough corporation they don't have to follow the law (CFAA).
If you use vpn for other purposes,its just a hustle to constantly switch it on and off.
some countries block Reddit by default.
- I use a VPN as generic connection, always
- i'm often on public wifi as I work remote and travel
- It's not really for reddit, it's for random other sites, and I switch IPs often as part of a multilayered privacy protocol
- I like keeping people trying to track me on their toes
- Primary reason is to keep ISP from tracking my activties when at home ~75% of my time. AT&T (and other ISPs) is well known for selling your info to 3rd parties
Short Reddit. Join Lobste.rs.
I got locked out of the whole site, essentially because I use multiple accounts for anonymity reasons (as many do, given that almost all Reddit clients support it) combined with the fact that I accidentally posted to a subreddit from a different account than one I had been banned on, on that subreddit. (I'd literally forgotten. The reason doesn't matter, because even a single untoward or misinterpreted comment shouldn't result in a sitewide ban. Mod having a bad day? This one literally did not accept my apology. WTF?)
Anyone who actually looked at the accounts they traced back to me via advanced machine-learning-driven fingerprinting and considered me guilty for "circumventing a ban" without even investigating, would have seen that 99% of the time I tried to be helpful. I absolutely hate trolls and trolling. (But unfortunately, there are times I'm just "in a mood" thanks to a sleep disorder.)
I can invite anyone here to Lobste.rs if you'd like. It feels like early Reddit. They do ding me if I invite you and you misbehave, though, so please be nice.
I didn't realize my email address wasn't in my profile. I'm: {name} at {outlook}
Sent!
I'd love an invite, people keep talking about it i'd like to check it out at least...
{name} {g mail}
Sent.
Me too! Can I have an invite?
FWIW I too am unable to access reddit using my home (residential) IP. I've never had an account there, so I have no idea why they would block my IP. I also haven't scraped anything, ever.
Previously I could access old.reddit.com, but now that's blocked too. I also can't create an account -- I get "403 forbidden", even if I specify an email address and clear my cookies.
I even created a support ticket about this a few weeks ago, which went unanswered (apart from an automated message which wasn't helpful or applicable at all).
I suspect it might be because I often use RedReader on my Android phone, which is still working somehow regardless of the IP ban.
Funnily enough I can access Reddit through a VPN.
Check if your IP is accidentally marked as a VPN IP at the big IP location providers (e.g. https://ipinfo.io/).
Thanks, but I did check that earlier as well. My private, static address is correctly labeled:
privacy:
vpn: false
proxy: false
tor: false
relay: false
hosting: false
service: ""FWIW I too am unable to access reddit using my home (residential) IP.
That is an interesting development.
I wonder how much overblocking there is? Every time Cloudflare says they have block a huge number of attacks/bots/whatever, I wonder how many are false positives?
I deleted my Reddit account long back after they blocked VPNs. I used old.reddit.com usually from DDG or Google search results. Now this is fucked up. I am not able to access Reddit through either VPN or Tor. They are dead to me now.
I just want a solution to completely remove Reddit links from appearing in search results. Anyone has any solution?
uBlacklist maybe? if you use Google for search
This is what I use! I recommend it.
You may be able to find an extension for your browser of choice to do just that! I have one for Firefox but I’m on mobile right now and can’t find it. I can send it later if you’d like. But they do exist!
Everything works fine via iCloud private relay. No account or other mitigations required.
So perhaps it’s not VPNs that are blocked and instead the traffic you’re sharing an IP with.
That is a possibility. Then again, another user reported icloud private relay not working[1].
Thresholds, location constraints, or ab testing could be at play too.
Are you logged in? They’re only blocking suspicious bot like traffic on VPN. Logged in accounts can still use it over VPN.
Use Tor?
These type of blocks are meant to try and counter abusive bots that hide behind VPNs, Proxies and Tor.
In general, Tor exit nodes are quite well known and blocked to a greater degree than VPNs.
But not in this case.
Tor still works, but VPNs don't. Reddit even has an onion domain, but I gather the new IPO-centric management might axe it soon.
If you don't need to be logged in, redlib (previously libreddit) works well. Similar to what nitter was to twitter.
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib?tab=readme-ov-file#inst...
I would like to add the browser extension LibRedirect[0] that automatically redirects your reddit (and others) links to your configured instance
https://libreddit.privacydev.net/ works for me.
Reddit is so far from what it was back when it was cool. I get it: they need to make money. And they will make money. But I don’t want to play there. Where else can I go?
What subreddits do you frequent? If the smart people are still there, stay. If they are leaving, find out where to.
Super annoyingly iCloud Private Relay triggers this for me too
Is iCloud Private Relay not Apple's VPN?
What if you make your user agent a crawler?
The big, important crawlers have known IPs don't they? Isn't that how news sites, quora and friends selectively apply their pay wall and still get indexed?
Surely one of us here can start a new Reddit.
Call it not Reddit.
The original vision of the site being self funded by users for users is a good one.
I would argue a necessary one. Just look at all the high value discussion being lost due to Reddit being enshittified
There's https://lobste.rs
It's getting harder and harder to be anonymous on reddit. I used to rotate my accounts every year but now they keep shadowbanning me. So I had to jump through some hoops, and while one VPN was indeed instantly network blocked, another country/server from the same vendor was not.
So eventually I got my new account for 2024 sorted.
But now I'm afraid to login from my regular browser because I'm pretty sure they have it fingerprinted. The only reason I got this far with the account was through Firefox private mode, and creating the account at a friends place.
So I've upgraded Firefox now and hopefully that, and releasing my ISP DHCP IP, will be enough.
reddit is _much_ more lenient on anything if you use the official app. This concerns shadowbanning from known devices as well as banning the account for things they don't like. You get away with a lot more
I have had the same results with multiple VPN providers for the better part a month now.
Last time I hit this, all I had to do was log in. Is that still the case?
Reddit is dead to me.
It's not VPN access that's blocked specifically; it's access from IPs that are identified as hosting providers (AWS, Hetzner, etc.). If it affects you, the workaround is to be logged in.
Doesn’t work on Mullvad. That “Whoa there, pardner” is so condescending
Yes but it isn’t a recent development. They’ve been blocking ExpressVPN IPs for the past year or so.
I can access both including old subdomain while on VPN.
Not just VPN/VPS proxy access. They block my home residential IP too if I'm not using a megacorp browser. I opened a ticket about this a couple months ago and despite a few auto-replies assuring me they'd look into it and get back I've received nothing and nothing has changed.
Their ticket system is just there as a tar-pit to dissuade people from contacting them.
Still works on VPN via old.* if you click “comments” link instead of the big blue thread link.
But yeah otherwise concur with the sentiment regarding social media.
HN isn’t much better. Whole lot of vanity and thin skin for a community of “radical truth seekers”.
IMO humans are social but not meant to be social this much
Big tech has yet to crank out a wheel. A technology with a Lindy effect measured in centuries or greater. Just 1900s electronics and on the software side, one state compression and copy-paste protocol after another.
I just tried via my VPN (Speedify) and get a network policy page that forced me to log in, but gave me unfettered access thereafter.
depends on the vpn endpoint. i suspect they're mainly getting hit by ratelimits. switch to a less popular endpoint
I quit Reddit and use HN exclusively. I miss the forum days, early Reddit, and feeling of community. Is there anyplace to go these days, aside from here of course, that has quality content with good moderation on a diverse set of topics?
How are they detecting VPNs? Is it because the MTU isn't 1500?
It's working fine for me. I'm on Windscribe. Have you tested with TOR?
Ok? Do we need a topic anytime some site decides to make changes? :(
Reddit is blocked in some countries and the best way to access it is by using a vpn as those countries usually block or transparently routed dns queries to other dns servers to enforce their national block list. I guess redditors in those countries is in for a surprise.
I was shadow banned for some time when using Opera’s proxy once. Was quite annoying since I didn’t know for awhile, but when I contacted them they removed the ban immediately.
In my view, this action should not have been taken without first ensuring that people from countries where internet access is heavily restricted, such as Iran(where using a VPN is most common method to access the free internet and information is already limited), still have a means to access it.
I had a friend who discovered she had to undergo an STD.free-test when she needed to through reddit. and now reddit is not accessible anymore to people living where she used to live.
For some reason, the Reddit onion mirror keeps working. Makes me wonder if the VPNs not working is a bug rather than an intentional choice.
Mirror: reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqnwfj4ooad.onion
I am used to having streaming video providers blocking VPNs to reduce account sharing with friends, and I understand that.
However, move regular sites are blocking VPNs which is bad, especially when using public WiFi networks.
I am able to access reddit this morning using protonvpn
I gladly quit Reddit more than five years ago, but have found myself edging back into it because the most active communities for two of my interests happen to be there. At first I would go a couple times a month to read updates, then a couple times a week, then I started logging in to my old account so that I didn't have to type in the URLs, and then not long ago I found myself writing a comment.
So, I'm sort of glad Reddit is adding an obstacle to recidivism. I don't think they're doing it to help me, but that's the net effect.
Damn shame, there are some fun, very above board subreddits that I wouldn't care to be on without a VPN. Granted it would be easy to migrate them as well. And in fact, those same communities are probably on Discord.
Since it started "paywalling" content read to be logged I stopped using it. Miss Swartz era. Wishing to find a good replacement.
So move to lemmy ?
I've run into this issue also, for the past week or so. I'd rather stop using reddit altogether than use it without a VPN.
Why would they do that? For China's investment?
I have no problems connecting with Cisco AnyConnect
Currently working for me with ProtonVPN
Been like this for over a month on old.reddit for me... Tis a shame.
I have quit using Reddit. Sad day.
Frankly, I love old Reddit.
I work with Chrome-based addon "AdGuard VPN" and it still works fine. It will be pitty to block users from using VPN as there are countries (like Indonesia) that blocks Reddit by default.
Have tested a couple of Surfshark locations - most of them are blocked by Reddit (new/old).
When Reddit farts - Fediverse ignites the fire: influx of users to Lemmy and other similar sites is visible, so I encourage to checkout it and maybe run an instance for yourself and your friends as well.
Mine's fine.
It worked with ProtonVPN.
I thought it was my company VPN that blocked reddit at first but no.
Weird move. I just wanted to see a discussion about some problems with I don't remember what software. I guess reddit is out of the list of websites to reach to.
Yep, for me this means I simply can't use the site anymore. Recommend: https://old.lemmy.world as an alternative
Works fine with ExpressVPN, at least the New Jersey-1 outlet
try a different IP aka switch vpn servers. No problem here at all
I use Mullvad and have been encountering this error occasionally for at least the past few weeks. Usually disconnecting and reconnecting to get a new IP makes it go away.
I assumed it was just automated blocking based on suspicious activity from a particular IP; though I guess it also could also be an attempt to ban all known VPN provider ranges and they just don't have all of the ranges for Mullvad.
So you want to use Reddit, but you don't want to be a user of Reddit?
who knows what their reason for blocking some commercial VPNs is, but they have their reasons good/bad. You can still 'access' Reddit.
asd
Very true. Over the last few months as more bots and reposters come online you have seen the subreddits bleed back into related subreddits. Most of the posts on /r/popular (landing point for navigating to old.reddit.com when not logged in) come from subs that never appeared before last summer's mod rebellion about 3rd party apps. Subs like /r/AITAH, /r/SipsTea, /r/TikTokCringe, and several others hit /r/popular regularly.
/r/news will see stories that are functionally dead with no comment activity hang around for multiple days. The sad fact that the mods for the sub require you to have an email associated with your account keeps me from adding any content there since I don't give that out.
A lot of content that rightfully belongs in one sub is cross-posted to related subs for additional karma. /r/pics is one targeted sub that catches a lot of content that normally one would only find on /r/oldschoolcool.
It's almost like reddit is returning to the pre-subreddit days where there were no boundaries on the content that one would see on the main, and only, page as it updated. Memes, rick-rolls, news, questions, etc all just fell into line and as the site grew, faded quickly into the mist.
With all this in mind I have been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.
If the post involved answering a question commonly encountered on the sub, one that would be easily discovered if reddit had a high-functioning search functionality, then for the most part, I leave it in place. Most subs I interact with are DIY type subs for automobiles, home projects, etc. and there are problems common to some models of car, truck, etc that people always ask about so removing that content seems wrong.
It is sad to see a tool like reddit become such an enormous pile of suck but I think it was inevitable.
So you don’t see that you are being part of the problem?
Not at all.
I have contributed a lot of content since 2005 under several different user names. A lot of that content required significant time for me to locate links, photos, etc to be able to provide accurate answers to a question or, as many of my posts attempt, to correct an inaccurate answer that seems to be getting a lot of traction in the post.
The content that I post is mine, the aggregation platform is theirs. I post with the understanding that it becomes as public as the sub allows and that I have the ability to edit as I feel appropriate.
Reddit is a platform for aggregating news and information on a huge variety of subjects but the content belongs to the users. Reddit felt like they needed to monetize things and the only thing they have that has any value is the user content and user ID info. I have never provided any ID info so they are stuck with an IP address for me. I'm okay with that.
They have had ample opportunity to crawl all of my posts over the years, archive them as they see fit, and repost them later as long as I get acknowledged as the OP. They have backups. Many others have used publicly available tools to crawl the site and index user content. It is safe to say that nothing that I have ever posted has disappeared. It is available in someone's archive somewhere. I'm okay with that because I can't change that now.
When I post today, I monitor the thread activity and when it dies I edit my post unless it fits the criteria that I honor - the post references a situation where someone needed information about a common issue with a vehicle or other product that I have a lot of experience with. For example if someone just bought a 15 year old vehicle and suddenly they encounter an issue that is well-known to everyone else who has ever owned that model then I post a clear answer with photos if needed to help them solve the problem. People like this tend to be unable to afford newer vehicles and problems like this can be expensive to fix if they go to a shop when they are really simple to fix with ordinary tools. I give a description of the process to repair it so they can get on their way and not have their "new-to-me" car break down and cost them a job. Most of my posts are reposts of content posted several times over the years such that I just grab the text from my local folder and the associated photos and let if fly again.
This is necessary on reddit because their search function is intentionally broken so that old useful posts can be hard to find. This encourages people to make new posts solving old problems and drives traffic to reddit. It's a dick move on reddit's part but I accepted that years ago.
The absence of permalinks on many subs also fuels this repost bullshit. Few subs have permalinks to popular questions or FAQs on the sub, therefore you see a lot of repetition in subject matter of the posts. Reddit subs are less of an information site than they are an activity site. Reddit needs a certain amount of traffic on a sub for it to be a useful place to post so search is crippled, permalinks are largely absent, etc.
The content I post on reddit is mine. I will do with it as I please. If you wanna see everything I have ever posted in its original form you need to use one of those crawler tools before I edit.
No matter what excuse you make, you’re still being part of the problem.
If you could do the same on HN would you? How is your action not petty and trolling?
And exactly how was Reddit suppose to be an ongoing concern without monetization? Were you going to donate to them? Provide free labor?
I have been part of their free labor since late 2005. Now they want to farm out my content with no compensation to me. They would have nothing of value without the content that users like myself freely provided.
I donated my content without which they would never have gained any traction online.
I also edit comments on HN if the edit is appropriate and I remove comments if the thread is dead when I comment so that the comment adds nothing to the discussion.
These words that I spent my time to type should never be construed as an excuse. They are an explanation. There's a difference. As to whether I am part of the problem or part of the solution or just a small part of something else, that is always open to an individual's interpretation based on and biased by their own personal experiences.
This has never been my problem. It is a problem that they should have had the foresight to solve before they launched.
So exactly what do you propose? Should they pay everyone who makes a post or comment on Reddit?
Do you feel the same way about HN? You are posting here for free and providing value.
Do you feel the same way about all of the companies that YC funds?
If so, why are you commenting here “adding value”?
AFAIK HN doesn't have similar VPN access limits in place. Nor is HN restricting third party API access [1] or selling user content [2] for model training purposes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
So do you propose that Reddit fund startups every year and use Reddit to promote the startups it funds?
How do you propose Reddit make money?
Sounds like they are proposing reddit shouldn't make money through the content, and die if that is the only path.
This is reasonable.
I think if you did a deep dive on reddit that covered everything you would see that they have struggled with this issue since they launched. It's really not my problem to solve. I add content. Some of that content has value.
They have lots of gifted supporters in the Y-Combinator family who could think of lots of ways to monetize things and I don't worry about how they end up doing it until it reaches the point where it is not possible to trust that you are interacting with a thread posted by a live person or one that is a repost from a bot farm.
Reddit is over-run with bots now and the average user has no way to know which users are live humans versus bots used to drive traffic. I've always been a "don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining" type of person. Credibility is key. Reddit needs a way for ordinary users who would like to contribute content - free or paid, I don't care - to recognize bots and other artificial traffic like paid adverts or sponsored posts. Camouflaging users wastes my time when I need to look at post history to decide whether they are real or just karma farming.
In the end I agree with the part about dying if this is the only path for reddit. All good things come to an end. That's why corporations can live forever.
I was addressing your HN comparison. If HN starts adopting similar practices then it'll be fair for the person you were replying to also take a similar stance. Have a "free" public forum where users contribute content was the model Reddit had been using for years. Once they started changing the model, why shouldn't users start questioning their own role in the now outdated arrangement?
It is not my part of their business to propose solutions to their self-inflicted problems of monetization.
I don't need to be paid for my content. I post on HN and reddit and several other forums as a way to help others solve problems when they own or use something that I am familiar with.
Like I said above, I understand that some of my content provides value when I post. I also understand that joining and posting to forums and sites is a personal choice that is totally optional. No one asked me to post. No one forced me to post. It is always my decision.
That is how it should be.
I also understand that the part of my content that has value is always content that I could choose to post to a personal blog or other personal website with all the tools to help me monetize traffic. I have made the choice in my own life to avoid that path since the chances of it gaining enough traction to be useful to others is less with a blog or youtube channel and I don't need that level of friction in my life.
EDIT: As for the part about why I comment and potentially "add value" - sites like HN and reddit and the other topic-specific forums that I post on add value to my life by providing information that I need so I post comments in an attempt to add some value on their end when I see the need. Value to you or any other user is always subjective.
Everyone who used the site and moderated it was providing free labor. Do you not remember the moderation protests against the administration of the site?
Now that those mods have left, the value of Reddit has too.
If you didn’t get any value from Reddit why did you comment and provide content? Why are you commenting here?
The site is systemically bad now. Shitting up or deleting the content is part of the solution, to accelerate the timeline of typical users finding it worthless so that it can die and give rise to something better.
So if you don’t like a place in the real world, do you vandalize it or just not go there?
It's silly to act like every online context has a real world analogue. But no, I don't vandalize it. Whatever you consider the real world equivalent of deleting my comments after the place has enshittified itself, that's what I do.
There is a difference between deleting a comment and purposefully posting meaningless junk.
You're right, the latter is funnier. Like I said, the more it's weakened the faster people will move on from it and let it fully die. For now it's only spiritually dead.
Yes if you are 12 and posting to 4Chan it might be funny
Since many of your replies are referencing my post I would just like to add that I am not 12. I'm closer to 9 (in dog years). I grew up a long time ago, maybe before you were even a sparkle in your parent's eyes and a new name on the family Christmas card.
Deleting is easy to restore. There have been cases where reddit restored deleted posts. Edits are a bit harder to filter for so they probably won't bother.
At least I didn't have the power of the spez and use it to edit someone else's comments.
Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that from day one a user had the right to edit by adding to or subtracting any part of their content or to delete the entire comment? How is this vandalization? This is user control, the same level of control granted on a site that was built for users to post on and discuss any subject - free speech was a keystone principle until some bad actors couldn't stop posting trash and ended up rightly banned.
Millions, maybe billions of comments are digital dust at this point. Like thoughts lost just before they made it past the tip of your tongue. This is normal and expected behavior. Conversations get lost in the fog.
Reddit isn't a Banksy. Today, it's more like the monkey area of the zoo in spots with each monkey's hand ready to sling the shit. When you consider the huge number of bots on the site it is likely worse than that.
Originally /u/spez and /u/n0thing set a standard where a poster who dropped a reply containing information that didn't fit the established narrative and tried framing it as an accurate answer was asked to post the references that supported their conclusion. It was "tits or get the fuck out" days. That by itself promoted healthy discussions and worked to disseminate accurate information on important topics. It helped establish a cadre of users who are outstanding in their fields and who enjoy sharing their expertise with others.
In time, especially after Digg imploded themselves, the expansion of subreddits made it untenable for proper moderation so a lot of boogers were allowed out of the nostrils and while the quality of discussions in general on the site was still good, many subreddits were established where people could say anything with no one calling them out. It sideloaded all the horseshit that used to hit the front (and only) page of reddit to the subs - stuff like goatse, nsfw content, etc. In the earliest incarnation reddit's front page was a minefield of stuff you really needed to avoid if you wanted to surf online and still keep your job. Early users learned fast to read the comments before opening the post.
I'm having a hard time understanding how a feature - user control of content they post - is mislabeled in your reply as vandalism when the user elects to employ that feature in managing their content.
He said he was modifying the content to add useless messages and song lyrics. How is that not trolling and just plain juvenile behavior?
That was me. I know there are a lot of comments and replies to comments here so it's easy to lose track of who did what to who.
I think if you read my replies in this thread you can begin to understand why it is not trolling or juvenile behavior, it's just me exercising control over the content that I posted, on my own time, following all the rules that reddit established when they launched.
This is a feature. Like I mentioned, all the content that I have ever posted is likely to be indexed in someone's archive somewhere whether reddit controls that archive or not. There are too many players in that space and they have been active for years with publicly available tools to manage all the grunt work for anyone who wanted to download it all and slog through it looking for gems.
If they find one of my edited posts that has a suspicious amount of worthless updoot karma and that post is totally out of context then I am sure they are bright enough to figure out that they will need to get that content somewhere else.
I left untouched all of my old "Best of Reddit" and the gilded posts since those had above average value to the readers who chose to engage and updoot.
At the end of the day, the content has always been mine to edit or delete. That is the way that the site was designed to function so labeling anything I do as vandalism, trolling, or juvenile behavior only works to make you look like someone trying hard to understand how to value your investment in reddit in the event that others choose to act similarly.
As I mentioned somewhere else, reddit could change all of this if they instituted controls that would allow live users to instantly recognize bots and adverts so that users can instantly choose to read a post or comment or to ignore it. The fact that they embraced and actively ignore the bot armies, the shills for various products or philosophies, the blatant adverts, etc tells me and others that they have lost touch with their users.
As it is, forcing me to check karma levels and username age to hope to recognize reposters and bots is just wrong. Clear and ban the bots, ID the adverts, add a shill warning to those who evangelize or push agendas or misinformation, and the traffic finds a floor.
On that floor reddit will find those loyal, long-term users like myself a lot more likely to engage. Clean the house and make it more livable and others will move in to see what's up. Sunshine is the best disinfectant here. Otherwise people like myself will choose whether to continue to engage with reddit and set their own terms of engagement.
The reason they commented originally was because they wanted to provide value to a community that had provided value to them. Reddit was simply the platform that hosted that community. Their loyalty was never to the platform, it was to the community. When Reddit decided to screw over that community so the execs could get a big payday from the IPO, it sort of broke a social contract.
Letting them keep extracting value out of you is kind of like if you worked at a grocery store, and then they unjustly fired you or a couple of your friends. Now they’re not doing so well, but are you “part of the problem” if you don’t keep shopping there?
No. Screw them.
This is a great way to explain it. Loyalty to the community. You spend enough time on a sub and you begin to recognize a lot of posters even though you will likely never meet them.
Kind of a waste of your own effort going through your post history when everything is crawled already
I totally agree. Seems dumb and probably is dumb. That's okay. Totally my choice.
Yes. An excellent character in an excellent book. Thanks for this.
Unfortunatelly it won't work/happen... even after huge protest and backlash reddit is still strong and go-to-place :-(
I hear a lot of people talk like this, and I understand that reddit has huge traffic numbers. However, for me Reddit peaked in interesting content around 2013, and I stopped daily browsing in 2015. Sometimes some subreddits have interesting posts, but interesting content is far from the norm. Now each subreddit feels like it is having the same discussion again and again, and the median post is a meme or some chat-gpt generated text dump. As Reddit became more and more popular the most upvoted posts became more and more mass-appeal and easily digested content.
Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.
But thats not what the reddit owners care about. They are happy people like you leave, you are hard to monetize and block ads. The people who look at the front page today and say this is great? They don't block ads. They don't use old reddit. They don't realize when they are engaging with a shill post. Reddit wants proportionally more of them and less of you, and they are winning.
That only works to a point I think. If your forum devolves to only having the easily duped people, it becomes a lot less interesting overall (since the content is from the people) and even those people leave.
Its about making as much money as soon as possible so you can cash out and diversify. Its not about making a long term sustainable forum model.
I have observed a recurring pattern of "this popular place is doing something I don't like! Let's all move to a less popular place, that will show them!" Time and time again, the people who made the move learned that they were the minority in what they didn't like. Also, while the old place might have a greater variety of people (good and bad), the new place is often filled with many people who were angry about the old place (maybe mostly "good", but makes a lot of angry posts).
So now, people who are at this newer, possibly better, but quieter and angrier place, they have to wonder if they made a good move. Sometimes, with enough patience, the new place do eventually turned out to be just as great. But usually my observation is that people just give up and leave, possibly returning to the old (still popular) place.
Yep, I've seen the same phenomenon.
Another example being of X to the fediverse. So many people switched over, made not being on X their entire identity, freaked out when the place wasn't as sanitized as X and eventually just went back.
The protest was done in the worst possible way.
You don't PRIVATE the subreddits. You keep them visible, lock out new posts, and direct visitors to a successor website to continue the discussion.
Some communities did exactly that. Jellyfin is one example.
Ain’t that the truth.
I tried moving to Lemmy, but turns out that the only people there are other techies who are mostly interested in techie topics (and I already have HN for that).
If you want a broader perspective or you want to discuss non-techie topics, Reddit is still the place to be, for better or worse.
Agreed. The manipulation became obvious with the capital fueled shareblue / "correct the record" campaign from Dems years ago and has only gotten worse since.
The stated purpose of CTR was to defend against Trump, but it was of course also abused to help sabotage Sanders. A tool like this will always be abused to perpetually elevate capital interests over human interests.
Whatever solution everybody jumps to, it needs to somehow prevent this behavior because it's not going to stop on its own.
Is this "CTR" from the world of alternative facts, or a real thing?
I can’t speak to what the GP is talking about here, but Correct The Record was a SuperPAC whose purpose was to “…fight online harassment aimed at Clinton and her supporters by staying positive.”
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...
Appreciate it. So it's a "nothingburger" to borrow parlance!
Looks like you got to the bottom of it. Good luck with your "democracy."
Hey, thanks! She's got some leaks and is showing her age, but we genuinely do love this old ship.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/04/if-you-want-solid-evi...
Not the "nothingburger" establishment Dems like to claim.
What is the alternative? lemmy and mastodon are protocols, what specific site with high engagement and good (not over zealous) moderation is worth checking out?
HN is nice to lurk but you really gotta be a conformist. It all just feels like tribal bubbles. It really is making me appreciate free speech, I prefer the days when horrible people were allowed platform/reach. The state of society right now (not just on the internet) is not compatible with liberty and free thinker idealisms.
The alternative is to simply not use it. Read books, hang out with friends, do some tinkering.
Free thinking is perfectly well possible without Reddit, in our very society. Unless you have some really weird thoughts? Rubbing these thoughts in other peoples faces may not be viable, but it has never been, as far as I recall. And I'm glad for it.
Most communication happens on the internet these days. But also, my whole point is the "friends" bubble is increasingly getting smaller and tribal. We don't interact with strangers because our communication platforms optimize and moderate them away. How can democracy work if you can't talk to and convince fellow citizens on various controversial topics?
Even on HN, I was doing fine until I started commenting on political posts. My account started getting restricted when I stated the idea that Tor and similar software being used to undermine foreign governments and the works of many tech companies in this area is wrong, that democracy works for us but the "manifest destiny" approach of forcing democracy on others amounted to neo-colonialism.
If my views are wrong and unpopular, the downvote/karma system takes care of that. What's wrong today is, moderators and algorithms are herding us into tribal camps. People have forgotten how to passionately disagree with others without hating them or excommunicating them. We are being excommunicated from each other for the crime of thinking for ourselves.
i’m not trying to be dismissive of your concerns, so if this post comes across that way, i apologize in advance. im aware this will be wordy, i can't really sum this up in a more succinct way--im with the family doing easter dinner so i dont have the mental bandwidth to eloquently sum this up. i think the subjects surrounding this are super important for the future of the internet so its impossible to put the nuance it deserves into a tweet size paragraph.
also, in advance, while im gonna disagree with some of your points, i strongly agree with you regarding algorithms. im confident in saying they have played one the largest parts in the downward trend of online social. i’ll expand on it a little more below.
anyway. the reality is, the internet has pretty much always had moderation. if anyone attempts to convince you otherwise, they're wrong. irc ops banned indiscriminately, they did this so often it would make modern day internet hogs cry. bulletin boards always had various types of rules and they too would absolutely regularly ban people. forums have always banned people. etc... banning is definitely not some new internet thing.
there were/are of course places that have no moderation but they’re ghost towns entirely overrun with spam, or worse. they're absolutely not places that will ever attract a significant number of users.
this idea that we can build a large online community with no moderation, or somehow only moderate illegal content is just not based in anything resembling coherent reality. we have proven this time and time and time again. there are thousands, maybe millions of sites with little moderation that are empty other than loads of spam, nazi shit, child porn, noise spewing bots, dead internetting back and forth...
i bartended through college. a pretty good real world comparison to mods would be a bartender. for a huge number of bartenders, a much more important skill than even making drinks is to know when to remove a person from the bar. this skill is absolutely more important than mixing up a cocktail. knowing when to save someone from an uncomfortable interaction is paramount. recognizing early when a person or group is making the experience miserable for the rest of the people is so important. we don’t expect a bar or restaurant to have a written list of Every Single thing that could get someone bounced out because 1) this list would be impossible to make, and 2) people generally know how to behave socially in the real world. yet somehow we've been convinced the same etiquette doesn’t apply online. which, to be a bit terse, is kinda stupid. as the internet ages, ultimately we’ll see online users are people. people still find the same behaviors creepy. the same things weird. even tho it’s online we still think it’s weird if a random person interrupts our conversation and starts screaming weird stuff at us. while bartending, i had to remove people from the bar regularly for all kinds of weird shit, not once did i ever hear someone cry “but i have free speech” while being dragged out of the bar. not once. if someone had yelled this, the crowds would laugh at them. common sense and etiquette rules over free speech in social atmospheres. and until we realize this extremely basic thing (so basic that toddlers understand it) we’re still going to see people being metaphorically dragged out of forums, even while they're screaming “i have the free speech to unprovoked call that random stranger a fat pig! free speech!” its hilarious that people don't understand this extremely basic human issue. yes, they have the free speech to be a dickbag but somehow forget the bartender has the freedom to snap their fingers, point at the person and have the bouncers drag them out? common sense and etiquette rules in social atmospheres.
you mention “how can we talk to and convince people on controversial topics?” (again, i want to stress that i hope i don't come across as dismissive of your concerns, but…) you don’t need to convince random strangers to believe controversial topics. you don’t need to. and we need to understand, when people do this, they come across as zealots. take the real world again as an example: if random strangers approach you and start chirping controversial x, y, or z subjects, thats weird... people will treat that as weird. they will cross the street to get away from zealots who do this. if you’re on a site and it seems like people are metaphorically crossing the street to get away from you, ask yourself how you might appear if you approach a random stranger in the real world and strongly start talking about weird controversial shit? would they look at you sideways and slowly back away? would they maybe come up with excuses to leave the conversation? common sense and etiquette rules. be normal. you don’t need to “convince” random strangers to save democracy. most people find randoms bringing up controversial topics to be creepy and weird.
we’re people, we’re not random usernames you need to “save” or “convince” of anything. especially controversial shit. just like in the real world, remember, sometimes people are open to a conversation--i want to stress a conversation, not a debate--sometimes they're open to one, but more often people just aren't interested. there are so many very good reasons people may not want to have conversations at any given time. and beyond that, it’s even more rare for people to want random strangers who are trying to save or "convince" them through some weird internetDebate. that’s not normal. rarely does anyone want to be preached to (and yes, im fully aware that i am saying this as i’m preaching to you lol, sorry) if someone isn’t specifically looking for a debate, it’s absolutely offputting and creepy when people do this. sure, there are tiny little niche communities where people enjoy what these communities call "debates", but those are a tiny fraction of people compared to the massive world of normal people who find that weird.
im sure we’ve all had the “have ya heard the good news about jesus” people knock on your door? a lot of times that’s pretty annoying. imagine how much more obnoxious it is if a random were to approach you and your friends on the street: “did you know jews and gays are ruining the world?” when this happens in the real world we’re like, 'get away from me dude, wtf…' the creepy weirdo factor doesn't change just because it’s online. and it doesn't have to be that controversial... its just odd when people try to jam controversial shit onto random strangers. its just creepy.
as for algorithms, i totally agree with you, they’ve done far more to destroy social than anything. in the big picture i dont think we need to be stressed about it though. im confident we’re gonna ultimately see a rejection of algorithmic curation. i mean, algorithms are just so bad. everything from shopping algorithms to music recommendations to the conversations the algorithms choose to show us. its just bad. a fail all around.
i suspect online will go back to something closer to offline reality. in reality we are never all jammed into the same room with an algorithm strongly implying "now scream at him! now tell her shes fat! now tell him why his doctor is wrong! now yell at that group!" in the real world we have never in the past (and still don’t) need or even want to talk to random strangers in the real world. we don't scream our ideas at each other. we don't think we need to interject our personal ideas into other peoples conversations.
frankly it’s bizarre that the same group of investors keep trying to convince us to do this. trying to convince all of us to simultaneously go to the same place and listen to their curated algorithms. its super odd. the same group of investors are repeatedly trying, over and over again they've been doing this on multiple different failed social sites. "everyone listen to our algorithm! it failed on that other site we own. but you *all* need to listen to this one! no, dont go elsewhere, listen to ours, all of you! you'll hate this one idea from him, yell at him!" its super creepy.
also, this thing where a few people keep loudly trying to jam and force everyone around them into a “debate” is another piece of this thing thats got to go. more of us need to read the room. sometimes people will be interested in an actual conversation but they're rarely interested in what these guys laughable call a “debate”. we need to be normal. if a person indicates they want to have a conversation with a random strange, sure, jump on in, have that conversation. however, if they’re already in a conversation with their friends, are they open to a random chirping in? if they’re not interested, yet someone forces their way in, its not at all surprising when that group of friends metaphorically crosses the street.
anyway, go easier on yourself. you don’t need to save democracy. don’t imagine you're “making democracy work” by forcing controversial opinions on normal everyday people. especially those who aren’t interested in your controversial opinions. we’re just randoms on the internet. none of us are saving anything with our internet posts on random social sites. there are much bigger things pulling those levers. pursue interests. have fun. be normal.
A bit lengthy, but I for one tend to agree.
Basically, most of us haven't figured out how to meaningfully make the switch from real-life communication to online.
A lot of communication happens online, but that doesn't make it great. Most communication online is unidirectional, dishonest, or plain wrong.
Before the internet, there was television (the drug of a nation...). I fail to see how social media actually improves communication. By all means it seems to spread disinformation faster, but it does not seem to lead to constructive thought. Even here on Hacker News, discussions can last only up to a day typically.
I personally don't care for all this to go away. We didn't win much by it, we won't lose much.
You wouldn't have had a big "friends bubble" in the 1990s, you may have had the illusion of having a big one in the early 2020s. Democracy is not built on that illusion.
X/Twitter is supposed to be the free speech platform.
A course I’m taking told students to post daily updates there for some accountability and community. I signed up to do that. I followed some normal stuff as part of the onboarding (some tech people, some local news, a couple podcasters… only 17 people) and the “for you” feed it gave me is nightmare fuel. To be fair, I turned off the content filters, as I do on every site, but it’s usually not that bad. I’m thinking of turning the filters back on to see what that looks like. So far it hasn’t really been a community I want to get invested in. Not to mention the comments on posts are littered with completely unrelated posts. A 3rd party app would go a long way, but like Reddit, Twitter killed that off.
Losing the VPN crowd will cost them next to nothing.
Only because they've already lost most of what is actually valuable (to most early users; maybe not to advertisers).
There are many many users who were not early users who find Reddit very useful and a positive in their daily lives.
Is that despite or because of the changes they've made in the past years?
A vast amount of reddit “users” are persona bots behind proxy and vpn networks.
I thought we all quit when they disabled API access and ruined Apollo. People are still using Reddit?
tens of millions a day, I sometimes wonder why people take on these false "people are still using __________?" when they know that people are still using twitter and reddit and facebook. Do you have any explanation as to why one would act pseudo-shocked? Is there a point?
(Not OP) I legitimately thought reddit the site had died and gone full ghost town. My use of reddit has almost always been as a knowledge resource, and that had been totally destroyed with these API changes.
Like, very often I have a technical question, search it+reddit and find a seemingly helpful thread with most of the comments deleted. It's logical to assume that most people who also engaged with reddit like this have slowed their use considerably.
Hell, lately I'm more likely to slap "hacker news" onto my search query
Apollo can still be used with sideloading a patch that allows you to enter new API key. As a single user it is hard to get to the limit.
If Lemmy had an automod I'd happily try to move the niche communities I help mod over, but without even the basics (regex rules + mod queue) attempting to mod any sizeable community is ime an exercise in frustration, making Lemmy essentially useless for us.
That's a real shame, because otherwise it looks like great software. I've got an offline instance sitting on AWS since last summer just waiting for any bit of progress, but gave up hope some time ago.
Please tell me which communities you mod, and if it's not anything 18+ I can help you with moderation and use it to guide the development of the moderation dashboard I started working on.
https://github.com/hjalp/automod
It seems like someone has made an autoposter. Maybe someone could have a look to extend it.
Maybe if I was a teenager again I would spend the time to figure out how to use Lemmy, but at this age: I go in, curiosity takes me to “instances”, I see a million. Click a few, many are dead and I start wondering “wait, I have to navigate through this sea of non descriptive URLs that tell me nothing about the instance to get to the data?”
And even if that’s not true, that’s about where I drop it, because it seems like a big climb for something I already know won’t work as a Reddit replacement because there is no way my friends will be convinced to put this kind of effort, and because it’s hard to discover.
> Let's just QUIT using Reddit.
This suggests that you need others to join you in quitting. Why not simply quit yourself?
More people leaving means less FOMO. Or perhaps they want to harm reddit in some karmic justice way.
People want to talk in the place where other people will listen. People want to listen in the place where other people are talking. If you walk out by yourself and end up standing in an empty room, you'll just end up turning back.
Around 2 years ago I got incorrectly banned site wide for 3 days for "ban evasion". Haven't used it ever since (except through google searches). There's no downside to leaving reddit really.
probably the cabal of mods that run the more popular subreddits. I deleted an account because of that; I had posted in one of the antivax subs about how stupid people in there were being and the popular reddit mod cabal sentenced anyone who posted ever in a slew of those antivax subs to "bans" and if you used a different account you were "ban evading". It's a petty power play by very small minded people to hurt those even though reddit possesses no mechanism to know you are "banned" in a sub other than a one time message. It just shows how pathetic and small their lives must be to try and reach out and cause other folks trouble
I'm not sure that one who purposely goes into subreddits of topics one disagrees with to throw insults and start arguments is exactly a model user, in fairness.
There still is a lot of useful information posted on Reddit. Was it scraped somewhere for preservation purposes?
https://lemmit.online and https://zerobytes.monster mirror the posts into their own instances
https://alien.top mirrors the posts and comments from some communities into a set of topic-specific instances and is my project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy. Visit https://portal.alien.top to get started.
Actually yes, the entire thing: https://academictorrents.com/details/9c263fc85366c1ef8f5bb9d...
Nobody is actively hosting it with a frontend though.
I love /r/askhistorians, though. Excellent posts.
This (and r/stopdrinking and r/peloton for race feeds) are my only reasons to visit nowadays.
I did several years ago and it's been great.
I'm still a bit hooked on HN. But not nearly as bad. ;)
My strategy was to slowly unsub from everything until it got so boring I just stopped visiting all together.
That's why reddit, as an investment, is so strange.
Running forums as a business is antithetical to the needs of the community. Fortunately, there's always "another forum". Quitting is really easy. I know because I've been doing this for almost 30 years.
Might as well quit using Internet.
I gave up over a year ago. Best decision ever. It’s just garbage now that gets posted.
If not site:reddit.com, what am I going to type into Google to get any kind of reasonable search result?
The day Apollo ceased connecting is the day I deleted my account. I wish Steve and the crew my very worst.
All true, but I haven't found any forum that works for very localized (geographically or otherwise) interests than reddit. I've long ago stopped looking at or participating in any non-localized subreddit.