Aaron Swartz is smiling.
reddit refuses visitors without a login
“Our numbers are dropping!”
CEO Steve Huffman said, “These deals aren’t binary. They have to make sense for Reddit, but there are many ways, I think, for the value to return to Reddit.”
lol - “The value has left Reddit”
-/u/spezWho could imagine when you piss off:
- third party devs who make the apps your best contributers use
- your unpaid content creators
- your unpaid moderators
…that the “value” would leave 🤣
Yep, it was the API thing that finally did it for me, but looking back, I should have seen it coming after all of the other stuff.
Third party apps made Reddit a dream on mobile, a big part of its success were the passionate people. And they showed us all the middle finger
and now its filled with prop bots, bots/spammers(for thier own sitess) and AI reposting bots.
For me it was the way they treated the Apollo developer Christian Selig leading up to the whole API thing. Absolutely heinous.
Same. Although I’m reading this on Voyager, which has borrowed heavily from Apollo
Gonna tell my kids this app is Apollo and pour one out for those that didn’t make it.
Remember when YouTube started having AI narrated posts from r/askreddit in its shorts? And how that slowly morphed into the AI generated slop stories about how one family member give the rest of them their comeuppance because the Henderson account valued results instead of random cheap business practices involving Sgt Menendez and his cheating ex girlfriend?
(This stuff is like candy to Boomers because it mirrors the reader write in sections of Reader’s Digest.)
I should have noticed this earlier, but it dawned on me a few weeks back.
Caught my father in law who’s addicted to youtube watching a video about some WWII pilot that knew how to shoot at enemy fighters from his time hunting hogs in Kansas. It was entirely AI generated, the video, the voice, and the narrative. That person didn’t exist and it didn’t survive scrutiny if you know anything about guns. But damn the comments were just boomers gooning over military wank.
the comments were likely Ai generated bots too.
I never did like the “bullseye womprat” logic.
For me, I already disliked reddit and just needed to know that this place existed
I use sync for Lemmy and its elite. I can’t fathom using the piece of shit reddit app.
Yeah it was my reddit client until the API then the dev pivoted to Lemmy and I just picked it right up again
lemmy has been talking about this for like 3 years now. you people have nothing new to say 😅️
Reddit never was the same after the whole API/Mod fiasco. Many subreddits simpy died. Old users that made the site what it is left and there were new ones, but the whole vibe shifted.
it wasnt the same when they used the banhammer on “illicit subs” during trumps first turn, every sub just had political elements in after that, and that was the same time russia started thier trolling, and the bannings began then.
The vibe is still similar in some places. I get a lot out of lurking on some of the trans subreddits for instance. But yeah, anything outside of small niche communities has been enshittified into another Instagram.
I actually got an award as being in the top 1% of reddit karma earners for 2022.
In 2023 they banned me because I didn’t buy stock when it was being introduced.
You’d think they’d want me there. Creating content. For free. I’m sure they thought I’d just create a new account. Nope. I just came here.
Weird thing is, I’ve had two main running jokes for years. One is being obsessed with corn. The other is calling George Clooney a smug bastard.
George Clooney really is a smug bastard.
2023 they banned me because I didn’t buy stock when it was being introduced.
I had several mod accounts (smaller subs - I made new accounts for each one) and didn’t buy any stock. Wasn’t banned. Did they explicitly say this to you?
I was also invited to participate in the IPO (in 2024) due to my “top tier” karma.
Didn’t get a ban for not participating but wouldn’t have given a shit if I did.
OH NO! CAN’T CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT!!! ThAt’S bAn EvAsIoN!!! (autistic screeching ensues accompanied by excessive farting noises)
Revenue of $804.9 million beat estimates of $731.8 million. However, US daily active users came in at 53.2 million, just shy of expectations of 54 million. The company’s total daily active users grew by 18% to 130.3 million versus estimates of 130.07 million.
reddit is fine
Firing Victoria was the beginning of the end.
It really was. Everyone was stunned when it happened. I hope she’s someplace good now.
And continuously piss off 99.9% of your uses
I want that sticker!
Thanks!!
…wait its gone :( darn.
Sorry, was in a hurry to GTFO of work when I posted, but yes, it was a limited run on etsy. I’d reach out to the maker and ask for them to do another run though.
Have an awesome weekend!
Its all good, its great it exists. You too!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
Can we send him pizza?
Beans, maybe?
What a galatically stupid asshole.
Out of all instances to put on a sticker… that’s not a good choice. Fuck lemmy.world.
what’s the problem with lemmy.world?
Why are you here?
He’s not there, he’s clearly on a different instance. The hell you on about.
He sees the content and interacts with it on his own instance so he is not in fact “here”. Unless you are trying to somehow claim ownership of this community because it’s hosted on the lemmy.world instance.
🤡
They lost me when they started charging for their api. It pushed out so many good apps. It was shitty.
Reddit did everything in its power to get rid of the users that made the platform what it is. Or rather, what it once was. It’s barely a shell of the former glory days.
And if you get rid of your power users who make good content and good comments, well, this is what happens.
I don’t browse Reddit since I switched entirely to Lemmy the day the API migration happened, but I did still reluctantly have to reference reddit on occasion. Now I can’t even do that for niche issues I run into. I am so upset that millions of people donated their time and energy into making Reddit the place it was just to have all of that entirely gated off. I know we’re likely all in the same boat, but there really are no words for what spez did. He ruined a really great place for community and knowledge and turned it into a slop fest.
but there really are no words for what spez did.
Profited. That’s the word.
Enshittified is more specific.
I learned that lesson with experts-exchange even before stack overflow. All sites will be bought out and enshittified.
Good ole Expert Sex Change. I haven’t thought about that site in years.
There are reddit front ends you can access. Won’t let you actually participate, but if you just need to access a page for info, they work.
My usecase is this: To see what both they, the people in power want us to see, and to see what users say in reaction to it. I see a lot of luigiposting on the comments, a lot of pro-socialism, a lot of pissed off reactions to bad corpodem takes, and I see way, far less pro-Trump or even middling takes on the front page, at least. I’m sure there are still righty/tankie subs, but it ain’t 2024 anymore.
You guys scarecly change your opinions, most of us are leftists, were when we got here and if we werent, we are now, in some shade at least. Reddit goes in flux a lot and seeing how much bluer their community is than 2024 does make me grin a little.
Let’s mods indiscriminately block users for arbitrary reasons; why do we keep losing users??
“please install our app to continue”
Scumbag Steve Huffman
If i cared more, I would make a scumbag spez
Is this a real thing? I can still access both new and old reddit via both mobile and desktop without being logged in. FWIW, I’m hitting it with Firefox + uBlock Origin on both.
People have been reporting it quite a bit. If i were to guess A/B testing.
It depends on your location and who you are.
A while back, I did an experiment. Reddit started asking me to log in to scroll, so I closed the window and didn’t try again that day. Next day, I tried to scroll reddit and the login to view popup appeared again. So I closed the window and didn’t look at reddit for a week. After a week, I went on reddit and magically it no longer worried about me logging in…for about a month.
They do A/B testing where they put one feature in front of some folks and a different feature in front of others so they can gather data about what people will and won’t tolerate. Between that and the massive tracking they do with IP addresses for people going around account bans, and there’s no real way to know if they were targeting you through cookies/IP, or if you just fell into different groups.
I don’t think they put a lot of thought into what’ll that do for some of the subreddits that are for desperate people looking for advice since two people back to back won’t get the same advice. There’s no way to swap notes, no reddit-of-record, and now all that good advice (and some of it was good) is locked away. It warms my cold dead heart to see their stock tank because they don’t deserve the best of their users.
Essentially yes, my thinking was simply that it’s A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H…etc testing.
I had reddit accounts in the past, though I deleted them all and stopped participating about 2-3 years ago. My assumption is that my passive scrolling was connected to previous accounts through IP, device ID, proximity to other devices, other accounts, typing cadence, etc., and I fell in the category of “maybe we can entice them back”.
I also agree that reddit likely made the decision to sacrifice a lot of high quality low engagement content for the purposes of mass market engagement farming. It’s sad as shit. I’ve got copies of wikipedia from back in the day, but I never thought to download reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy. It’s a nice place now, but so was reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy.
I’m sure there are a bunch of people who are a lot more knowledgeable about it, but it might be as simple firing up your own instances and just federating. By not allowing people to post you’d just be in readonly mode and would get passed all the posts, maybe. With every other kind of archive process like this the images/videos/audio are the long pole. A full 100% backup of “what did everyone see back then” is out of reach; even youtube (or especially youtube) goes back and edits old videos for newer compression or a change in copyright rules.
My only real thought on it right now is an annual back up is waaaaaay too slow. I’d want to see more about what the ActivityPub stream looks like. I’d want to hear from an owner of an instance about how quickly their storage requirements go, and I’m now curious about whether there’s any evidence of anyone else such as Three Letter Agencies already backing it all up.
uhh, relevant username?
I would assume that the entirety of lemmy is being scraped by three letter agencies and their global equivalents. Hell, I assume that a small core minority of the tankies are actually state actors pushing statist propaganda, as lemmy does skew pretty left.
OK, I’m curious first about the data requirements.
If people are posting just to stir up shit then that would be something that would have to be handled at the community level or at the individual level. If we don’t agree with someone’s opinion then just ignore that person. If people are coming around trying to stir up violence that’s a different story. The bar is lower than ever for firing up a lemmy instance if people are into that kind of thing.
Link to the nazi bar story. If anyone has a better place to link to please let me know:
Who knows. I’m just curious about the data storage requirements.
Its been hitting me. Can’t use old.reddit without logging in and new reddit is an abomination.
I can scroll comments for about a minute before that pop-up comes up saying you need the app. But I rarely visit reddit anymore unless it’s something I need some information on that I can’t find anywhere else.
I had that for a while. Then yesterday I got a lockout message.
I’ve stopped using it like this. Just annoying. At least lemmy has good clients
I get blocked now in a regular browser, but not in an anonymous browser.
Try deleting storage for all Reddit domains, that fixes it for a bit.
For real, this recent change sucks ass
i’m only here cos reddit sucks donkey dick now. I think they just sold out and in turn have lost support. I went there for the news, before it broke else where. Now I never get breaking news and 80% of the posts I see feel like they are for teenagers. For Profit Pigs
Wait till google decides to de-rank them for being login-walled. All those search results they’re using as leverage.
Well I was banned for saying there’s never a bad time to punch a nazi in the face in response to a screenshot of Indiana Jones doing just that. So good. Fuck reddit.
If anything this shows how totally fucked equity markets are.
- Predicted $732MM revenue, reported $805MM (10% higher than projected)
- Expected 54MM DAU, got 53.2MM (1.5% lower than projected)
- Expected daily users growth of 130.07MM, actual growth 130.3MM (0.2% higher than projected)
So they’re making way more money than expected, but they haven’t sold out their users fast enough so dump the stock?
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
After the apicalypse many subs seems to have died, also the new UI that has been pushed for a decade or so, seems to promote consumption of content and discourage creation of content, further reducing new content.
Reddit has been many, many times by AI companies, why keep scanning if the content stays 98% the same, with most new content being of mostly lower quality, simply due to people posting AI shit.
This was a very predictable outcome.
As soon as Reddit’s history got scanned by AI models, it lost 98% of it’s future value.
Don’t forget that you can’t use VPN now, use the web version on mobile, and most accounts gets banned as soon as they are created by the automod.
You also cannot view it without being logged in now. Which gets a groan from everyone in chat when a friend shares a Reddit link.
I have no clue why they decided chasing off users and being less useful was somehow going to help them. Particularly when they were the place to go for huge segments of the population.
You can still browse anonymously with red reader. Suggest getting it off f-Droid, but it’s also on the play store. No iPhone version though.
Another reason to switch to Android/GrapheneOS.
Firefox (including the one on Android) has extension called libredirect which… redirects to those privacy oriented frontends for lurking.
I was heavily addicted to Reddit and I’m glad they allowed me gradually get off of it with the API (never installed their app) and now blocking read only access (which made me use libredirect).
Given that content quality is also degrading I never felt urge to to use the app, now I don’t log in (using the lurking portals makes it more disruptive to leave a comment, I always log in using private tab) and I suspect I eventually will stop using even that (there’s only few subreddits that I am still interested in).
j
Redlib is also an option with a few working instances. No need for an app for that.
redlib is self hostable. Its great if you’re into that.
The reason: greed
You can without being logged in, but not old reddit. If you’re getting the “join the most alive place on the net” (lol) popup, ublock has optional anti-annoyance filters that fix it.
Is that pop-up on the “new” Reddit?
Yeeeh. There’s a “oh you gotta log in” pop up on “new” reddit now, and old reddit makes you log in. Site’s gone to shit
LOL, I thought the whole point of this was to encourage people to migrate to the new layout.
Nahhh they’re going full Pinterest “you have to log in to see ANYTHING!” D:
For now, you can still use nü-reddit without an account.
Just within the last week or so old.reddit.com was effectively disabled and stopped working. (I think it might work if you log in, but i quit doing that 3 years ago). It was a nice resource and it’s said that it’s such a shell of what it was. Right when the internet is really needing human voices too
They are only doing one segment of users at a time and I’m guessing their metrics are telling them 90% of those users don’t play ball and just stop visiting. I’m guessing they might go back on it in a bit.
Doubtful. It was inevitable that they would do that eventually.
Users using old.reddit are undoubtedly the least valuable users.
They wouldn’t turn it off for everyone all at once in order to avoid creating a large number of upset users all at once.
They fingerprint your device, if you get a new phone or reset i (you can restore, just logout on safari and clear cache, use a new user, etc. google automatically logging me back in to an alt that got banned alongside my main got it banned) I’d just quit and find better hobbies, reddit feels like it isn’t a waste of time but it really is.
Yeah it is a waste of time and I have been seeing that more since switching back to the fediverse.
Also thanks to the mods of /r/worldnews for helping kick my reddit checking addiction since I got banned and keep getting flagged as ban evasion lmaoooo
Fuck spez and etcetera
In my case it was r/publicfreakout which always feels ironic
Never forget that they killed the API for a mere $60M AI deal.
Like, if spez apologized and restored API access, and made an effort to kick fascists off the platform, I might consider going back. But as is, I will watch with glee as he fucks over everyone stupid enough to buy his IPO.
Besides apologizing and changing course, spez would need to leave before I considered going back. The way he behaved during the API BS ended my capacity to trust him in any way. Reddit as an organization, maybe they can turn things around and return to their purported values, but spez is not an honest person and will do or say anything if it serves his own interests.
60M USD is insanely cheap for that data, remember, it was categorized and structured into threads and subthreads in specific categories, not to mention all different languages already being mostly sorted and ready for consumption.
They could probably have got a few hundred million USD for it if they held out longer.
Most of the people who bought during the IPO probably already cashed out.
At this point, I don’t trust any corpo platform. If I don’t already use it, I don’t need it. My efforts go where it matters, not to sites that don’t love me back
I swear Reddit started changing as soon as Trump won. I think reddit did such a great job of exposing Republican lies and grifts that some rich ass hole just said we will express interest in investing if you start censoring your content and now here we are
They pushed donald and conservative to the front page constantly with less upvotes/comments than any other post there
trump the 1st time actually. thats when they started banning heavily, also the same time russia realized reddit was ripe for stoking division/infighting. remember all those subs that were considered illicit by the gop.
It feels like the decent into fascism started there in general. We need to backlash so hard we make up for lost time and then some. Fuck conservatives for subjecting us to this, and fuck “centrist” liberals foe enabling them every step along the way
/r/the_donald was one of the most active forums pushing Trump.
The r/AskRedit thread that got me banned permanently was asking how people thought the Trump presidency would end. You could tell by the amount of “Post deleted by user” and “post removed by reddit” that the general consensus was that eventually someone would hit the bullseye and finally ventilate this sack of shit’s skull. I observed that it’s telling that they are so against even discussing threats of violence, that it makes the mods complicit in the crimes of the regime. Fun fact/spoiler alert: The mods did not like getting called out like that.
I don’t get how they hate violence when I was last there it was full of drone videos blowing bits of Russians I to the air.
because the admin are secretly right-wing sycophants or Neoliberals who think every political problem can be solved by “talking out our differences to find a middle ground.”
I’m no tankie, and I do always hope that a peaceful solution can be found, truly I do, but the cold fact is that the most effective cure to actual, demonstrable fascism is BULLETS. Preferably “early and often.”
But this is veering into politics so back to discussing reddit
The_Donald was banned years and years ago.
Along with chapotraphouse but the Donald did quite a bit of damage. I swear the Donald was pushed as a honeypot to enrage users who hate the fucking right to get them to engage and then get banned
Frankly I’m surprised they didn’t ban a ton of users, myself included, when they nuked CTH.
I didn’t understand CTH so I never joined it. The only reason I knew of it was due to the dollop podcast and they don’t even reference that much. I think I just saw it mentioned in a comment
Oh I never listened to the podcast, it was mostly a refuge for people who got banned from LateStageCapitalism for whatever garbage reasons. (In my case, it was suggesting that just because North Korea was at odds with the Capitalist West didn’t mean we had to take their propaganda at face value.) So it was a place where non-tankie leftists accumulated. Mostly meme trash and simmering resentment.
In 2020. So way, way too late.
Nah, I think that when Trump won, reddit and other platforms realised there was no need to pretend to be apolitical or balanced.
Was always going to happen.
The most valuable data is always going to be on open platforms that prioritize ease of use, because that’s where people will go. But then the company starts looking at all that data and how much it’s worth.
Before they can charge people for it, they have to make sure no one can get it for free. But in doing so chase off the users who were making that content.
Leaving them with a locked down worthless ecosystem.
Nothing is meant to last forever tho, and reddit won’t be the last.
reminds me of how Gaia Online’s user run economy crashed so hard due to Admin mismanagement that it became a cautionary tale in economy textbooks. https://youtu.be/vyzQnsa8SA0
The Gaia economy shitshow is absolutely crazy. I had quit before it really fell apart but even in like 2006 it was clear the market was unhealthy.
I actually walked away when i got big into Minecraft and mostly switched to reddit because the Minecraft community is truly gargantuan over there. Infact, it’s one of Reddit’s main pillars of user engagement and the de facto off game community connection. I rewatched that video and the whole time I was going “Reddit is doing the same thing! Reddit is making the same mistakes! HOLY SHIT HISTORY IS REPEATING!!” When the owners of any social media platform stops listening to their user base, or worse, thinks they know what’s “better” for them, it’s the beginning of the end. It’s like all those Celebrities that start resenting their fans or think they (the fans) OWE them (the celebrity).
I wonder? Just before I was banned, I used a third party app to scrap 14 years of my data and delete it all. Not long after that I was banned for some truly innocuous post.
Your last paragraph is a major point that I think a lot of people don’t think about, and I’m surprised Reddits executive team didn’t bail as soon as the AI was finishing the scrapes.
They didn’t need to bail since they did the IPO and could just sell their shares. I haven’t kept an eye on how much insider selling has gone on but I am sure they all have made bank over this past year, it is public info if anyone feels like looking it up. I would expect if the stock prices continues to tank and stays down you will start seeing executives abandon ship for greener pastures.
They have their own AI, but it’s an eyesore that undermines searching in a mobile browser. They added it after an update further deteriorated the Reddit App experience.
So they:
- further enshittified the app,
- put AI in the search bar.
And that’s within the last year or so.
not to mention the NSFW purge. Like it or not, that was a HUGE part of reddit’s success.
I hope they purge piracy, roms, emulation. Currently that is a huge valuable resource, and getting rid of that might lead to those users coming here. Those types of contributors are the ones who add value with their content.
Wait what did they do to the NSFW subs? They were still active when I was banned a few years ago
they removed the r/nsfwrandom search string, and banned hundreds of the NSFW subreddits due to “lack of moderation.” You can still go to many of them, (that remain) but you have to actively punch the subreddit into your address bar, and then you can only link to other related subreddits through the Subreddits’ own link list (which is only up to date if you’re lucky). Searching for them is still possible but access is a crapshoot due to the aforementioned subreddit bans.
i heard many of them got purged from another forum. some people make it a business to push or promote thier content/agency on these subs. funny how reddit target these people and not the propaganda bots.
What? I remember years ago when making maps of Reddit community connections was all the rage. On the maps weighted by posts and subscribers, it looked like Reddit had a sizeable NSFW section. On the ones weighted on traffic it looked like Reddit was a porn site with some other special interest forums.
They killed off the old ones by timebombing the subs with strict requirements for activity. They started complying with takedowns, which nuked wide swaths of NSFW reddit. The death of gfycat was another sudden and massive removal of content.
The NSFW part of reddit didn’t go away though. It’s transformed into OnlyFan spam. So it’s not really porn. It’s redlight district ads. Hot local girls want to meet you!
Woah! Fractal Internet!
Makes sense, Reddit feels like a shell of it’s former self.
man, reddit was fucking awesome when it was open source and they actually card about users. Spez has made his billions. He really doesn’t give a fuck about reddit anymore. Just milk it for whatever is left.
It pains me, because I was on reddit since a year after it was founded, and i left when they blocked TPA. It was such a big part of my life for so long. And now it’s just bots and AI. Fuck reddit, and fuck spez
Redit is Fun app was the best times. When they killed off third party apps it pushed me into a lurker, since I refused to use the official reddit app and didn’t want to go to the effort of patching old third party apps to get them working.
RIF was epic. I believe the dev moved onto tildes.net after reddit screwed him over.
Thirst traps, obvious bait posts, and peter explaining the dumbest fucking things on earth.
alot of the repost on the “insteresting type subs, are AI”. some of the news are reposted as well.
I did not know what Lemmy was a couple weeks ago. Reddit pushed me out. I don’t want to be logged in or have an account with the way they harvest data. I got tired of weekly rotating ublock origin scripts and using incognito mode. You don’t want me if I’m not a willing data whore? Fine, I’m gone! I am now actively trying to NOT even look at reddit when a random Google search sends me there!
Reddit Drives away Their entire user base.
Reddit - “oh no what happened to my user base?”
Fuck off reddit
1% of people actually contribute. Many of those 1% have left or were banned for criticizing the president and ICE. The comments I see lately are becoming more like instagram. Just easy observations and drivel. Some of them are like paragraphs of AI slop that hurts my brain trying to comprehend.
reddit" lets increase the amount of bots to fake the engangement like facebook does"
So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.
First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.
Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.
Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.
Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
