Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
I'm unable to access reddit via browser when using VPN. I see an error message both on regular 'reddit.com', as well as 'old.reddit.com' subdomain.
This is new develompent. They started blocking VPN access on their regular website three months ago[1], but back then 'old' subdomain still worked; today it no longer does.
I'm testing with desktop Safari and NordVPN from EU; curious if others are seeing similar results.
[1]: I posted about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38666028
341 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadhttps://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!
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)".
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/login/
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
"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
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.
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.
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!”
“Please wait and consult your operators manual: 0x0A”
Worked similarly for the twitter addiction.
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.
Maybe it's more common with VPN:s, though it's not with the provider I use.
Reddit also blocks a lot of Ukraininan IPs
Is that an acronym?
In general, Tor exit nodes are quite well known and blocked to a greater degree than VPNs.
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.
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).
Why is that? If you don't have enough self-control to not use Reddit, a login wall won't stop you.
Honestly, they jumped the shark years ago. It’s Digg 4.0 at this point.
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.
So perhaps it’s not VPNs that are blocked and instead the traffic you’re sharing an IP with.
Thresholds, location constraints, or ab testing could be at play too.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39884164
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.
If you find that you must do this, could you at least re-host your answers elsewhere and link to them?
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.
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.
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.
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…
Main site:
https://pullpush.io
Frontends:
https://undelete.pullpush.io
https://search.pullpush.io
https://ihsoyct.github.io
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.
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.
There are many many users who were not early users who find Reddit very useful and a positive in their daily lives.
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.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...
Not the "nothingburger" establishment Dems like to claim.
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.
Nobody is actively hosting it with a frontend though.
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.
Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like someone has made an autoposter. Maybe someone could have a look to extend it.
Might as well quit using Internet.
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?
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.
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?
Now that those mods have left, the value of Reddit has too.
I donated my content without which they would never have gained any traction online.
>If you could do the same on HN would you? How is your action not petty and trolling?
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.
>No matter what excuse you make, you’re still being part of the problem.
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.
>And exactly how was Reddit suppose to be an ongoing concern without monetization?
This has never been my problem. It is a problem that they should have had the foresight to solve before they launched.
Do you feel the same way about HN? You are posting here for free and providing value.
> This has never been my problem. It is a problem that they should have had the foresight to solve before they launched.
Do you feel the same way about all of the companies that YC funds?
If so, why are you commenting here “adding value”?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensi...
How do you propose Reddit make money?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don’t like a restaurant, don’t go. Don’t go there and shit on the tables.
A restaurant was also “meant” for you to go in. But not make the experience worse for everyone else because you don’t like it anymore
However I found recently there are websites that have every single one of my old comments accessible and I'm sure reddit itself does to. Once you comment it's there forever.
There's really nothing to see here. This is standard expected behavior baked into reddit from day one. Not even /u/spez or /u/kn0thing wanted everything they ever posted to be perpetually available. They had multiple discussions early on about how some of it might appear years down the line.
I'm not making reddit worse for anyone. I'm the guy who saw the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" sign and made sure I wore my best t-shirt and a pair of boots so I could enjoy the facilities.
The only ones who might get their feelings hurt are those who are actively using reddit content to train their LLMs or those who decided to invest in reddit's IPO and who see any modification of posts as potentially damaging the value of the content.
In the end, it has always been my content and their aggregator. The shear volume of traffic they have seen makes anything that I do functionally irrelevant.
Did you also go back to the old Usenet groups that you use to post in and pollute the few rensining good ones with useless garbage?
If you are that old, you should know better
I am that old. I've learned a lot over the years. The most important thing that I have learned is that I'm not alone. I am one of many - unique, like everyone else. In the grand scheme, nothing that I post anywhere is very important. Threads go stale, subject matter becomes obsolete, community knowledge fades as new fads appear, and it's all part of a normal condition. If I completely delete or edit every comment I have ever made under all my former usernames it will only affect a very tiny part of reddit's accumulated content.
> Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. (Heller, '61)
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
This suggests that you need others to join you in quitting. Why not simply quit yourself?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Basically, most of us haven't figured out how to meaningfully make the switch from real-life communication to online.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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?
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.
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib?tab=readme-ov-file#inst...
[0]: https://libredirect.github.io/
Reddit otoh started to become boomer-Facebook-meme-town some time around the onset of COVID and then hockey sticked last year.
Though you can subscribe to different communities and customize your experience, often what you can experience from specific community depends on which server it is located.
https://programming.dev/ and https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/ might be good for technology related communities.
As for fediverse a lot of depends on the server you chose, for example https://beehaw.org is much friendlier.
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