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Reddit has disabled copy/paste on right click

48 points by viridian ↗ HN
...completely breaking accessibility for people who primarily, or solely use a mouse.

As of about a day ago they decided to hijack the right click to take focus away from whatever you selected, possibly to support this new "Embed" feature that overlays a button that opens a new tab, any time you select new text.

I wonder what the hell the end goal is for them? I can't imagine this could have any sort of positive business outcome associated with it.

22 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] thread
rice7th
Reddit seems to be trying really hard to destroy themselves these days
mhuffman
I think they are banking on size. Like some companies have so many customers and there isn't a readily available alternative that it really doesn't matter how they abuse their customers. They will be turbo-fucked if an alternative pops up, but until then, they can do what they want with minor ablative loss.
throwaway12245
Copy still works on old.reddit.
theossuary
I bet old.reddit doesn't last 3 more months at the rate things are going.
EA-3167
That would be it for me, I find the new format long on noise and short on signal.
viernullvier
I heard from a mod of a large sub that old.reddit is not going anywhere - apparently all of the admin tools are built on old.reddit, so shutting it down would not be feasible without a huge engineering effort.
roflyear
Make it available to mods-only. That isn't hard.
viernullvier
Please don't give them ideas.

OTOH, I've already stopped posting and commenting and will only resume once they change their stance on moderation tools and third-party access. If old.reddit goes for good, I'll go as well.

roflyear
I realized they are making it worse and worse to use for mobile, like the browser version barely works anymore on mobile, and sometimes forces you to go to the app :(
codegeek
Not sure if it's just me but old.reddit is no longer mobile responsive for me.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
mvdtnz
Still works fine for me, even on new reddit.
andyo
It's on new new reddit, the one that looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/fp8iUGj.png If you select text, an "embed" button comes up and if you right click on the selection, it and the highlight just disappear and the generic context menu comes up (not the text one where there is "copy", "select all", etc.).

This UI only shows up for me when logged out but they said it'd roll out eventually: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11zso11/an_improved...

mvdtnz
Wow that's shocking. What are they thinking over there? Thanks for the follow-up, at least I know to look out for this abomination.
sp332
You can get this at new.reddit.com if you want to skip ahead.
throwawaymobule
does right clicking a second time, or holding shift and right clicking work?

I've always relied on this behaviour in firefox when sites try to be too clever for their own good. I think ctrl+right click is the chrome equivilant.

sp332
It looks like it de-selects the text when the menu comes up. So there’s nothing left to right-click a second time.
JauntTrooper
This has been driving me crazy, I thought I had accidentally broken something on my end.

Why would they do this?

shortrounddev2
I'm not sure what you mean. It works for me

edit: oh, when I do it in incognito (not logged in) I see the new UI. I guess I haven't logged out of reddit in a while

koverda
there's also no mention of this at all on reddit.