They can tell abusive scrapers from regular users, they choose not to distinguish. I might give in and create an account eventually but damn. Had deleted my reddit about a decade ago.
How do you meaningfully use Reddit without an account? Do you really navigate to specific subreddits and read them one by one, rather than assembling a home feed of subs you have joined?
You never want to participate in discussion, or vote on comments and posts?
I don't really understand how you all were regularly browsing and using the site without an account.
> How do you meaningfully use Reddit without an account? Do you really navigate to specific subreddits and read them one by one, rather than assembling a home feed of subs you have joined?
Old is useful for posting to other places, like right here on HN, because the UI is not complete and utter garbage.
Old is also useful for quickly going to a particular sub-reddit if you just want to peruse around to quickly see what the current topics are (/r/worldnews, /r/country-i-live-in, /r/city-i-live-in).
Third party apps used to work fine without an account. They kept track of your settings and filters locally. My usage declined rapidly when reddit killed them.
if you don't give every iota of your physical makeup to our benevolent leaders, this is labelled as abusive behaviour. for example, talking over communication channels that aren't completely monitorable is clearly terrorist activity. using your brain is directly harmful to corporations, therefore unauthorized intelligence is harmful.
I'm starting to see a pattern here and it starts with reverse demonization, like a begging succubus. you wouldn't want to get hurt now would you. that's not in your best interests. now while you're in a fearful state, please give your responsibility to me. it'll be easier this way, I promise I have your best interests at heart.
I ~~can't~~ won't use the new ( decade+ old? )reddit.
From the Reddit Post announcing this, :
"In case you are wondering . . .
Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit?
A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever, but u/spez himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable."[0]
> it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable.
This is how you justify it to anyone who doesn’t know web dev.
For those who do, it’s an idiotic statement. The only difference between new Reddit and old Reddit is the visual styling and how content is presented. Both have all the same security.
Unfortunately, that does partially make sense about old.reddit security and is a slick way to push log ins.
But the thing about old.reddit, was you did not need JavaScript to use and browse, which is more secure. Looks more like reddit brass wants to find ways to squeeze old.reddit for more ad pushing and to suck up more user data.
That's unfortunate. Rather than using rate limiting or access control over a singular user which would have significant different usage to say scrappers ... I'm not making an account ... I guess I won't be visiting old.reddit threads ... the new makeover reddit moved to, never played well with my browser but died almost entirely some time ago one when I added one of the many PII scrapping trackers to my deny list -- maybe they'll give up on their usage of including a PII tracker ...
I stopped using Reddit daily when they killed Apollo. Now it looks like I’ll stop using it entirely. Good riddance, thanks for killing my doomscrolling addiction for me.
People saying they'll never use Reddit again is just noise.
I'm sure you've seen the "protests" and sub closures because of {$change}. Two weeks later the same mods and users realise they can't get their power trip or dopamine hit from anything else and are back on Reddit - with the mods proudly back working as unpaid janitors for a company with a billion dollars valuation.
Discussion for certain hobbies and interests, among those seriously interested in them, has long since moved to WhatsApp groups. Sure, WhatsApp is not a libre platform either and has its own dopamine-hit issues, but you’re underestimating how much Reddit has alienated its user base (namely that portion of it who care about close-knit community and skillsharing) since the 2018 redesign.
That reasoning is complete nonsense. If someone scrapes the data, that’s not a big deal, and Reddit has no more claim to the data than anyone else. The data is public and created by users, not by the platform itself. If the traffic is too much for them, they could use rate limiting or simply offer an archive of the data as a torrent once a month. That way, a company training an LLM could access a complete dataset without generating a lot of traffic.
In related news, Imgur seems to be a/b testing a website that just pushes you to the mobile app and doesn't allow you do anything in browser beyond viewing the one picture you clicked the link for.
If they wanted to actually prevent abusive users they would make the API more affordable. Its just sites like reddit, twitter/x, etc. storing valuable social data that can't be found elsewhere. It's the exclusivity and the difficulty to obtain the data that is being protected.
The only time I use Reddit is when I land there via a Google search. Posts get flagged as mature at the drop of a hat, so my go-to has always been to replace www with old. Now that it's gone, I'll just skip Reddit links.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.3 ms ] threadReally? How? Be specific.
You never want to participate in discussion, or vote on comments and posts?
I don't really understand how you all were regularly browsing and using the site without an account.
Old is useful for posting to other places, like right here on HN, because the UI is not complete and utter garbage.
Old is also useful for quickly going to a particular sub-reddit if you just want to peruse around to quickly see what the current topics are (/r/worldnews, /r/country-i-live-in, /r/city-i-live-in).
There is probably a point where all these platforms just get to big and can't hang.
I'm starting to see a pattern here and it starts with reverse demonization, like a begging succubus. you wouldn't want to get hurt now would you. that's not in your best interests. now while you're in a fearful state, please give your responsibility to me. it'll be easier this way, I promise I have your best interests at heart.
I had already deleted my account, and using the site has gotten far more hostile especially without willingness to use the app.
On mobile you now have to use incognito in order to not get cut off and told to download the app.
I guess I can’t complain too much. Old Reddit lost money for, what, a decade? Longer?. Public company Reddit runs a pretty good business.
From the Reddit Post announcing this, :
"In case you are wondering . . .
Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit? A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever, but u/spez himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable."[0]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
This is how you justify it to anyone who doesn’t know web dev.
For those who do, it’s an idiotic statement. The only difference between new Reddit and old Reddit is the visual styling and how content is presented. Both have all the same security.
But the thing about old.reddit, was you did not need JavaScript to use and browse, which is more secure. Looks more like reddit brass wants to find ways to squeeze old.reddit for more ad pushing and to suck up more user data.
I'm sure you've seen the "protests" and sub closures because of {$change}. Two weeks later the same mods and users realise they can't get their power trip or dopamine hit from anything else and are back on Reddit - with the mods proudly back working as unpaid janitors for a company with a billion dollars valuation.
the labs crawling for training content + agents have increased traffic 100x.
increased costs yet monetization remains low. no wonder you see firms like Cloudflare proposing x402 micropayments for content.