The entire fucking point of the Web was to make information as easily-accessible as possible, structured and semantically tagged, and consumable by humans and further machine transformation alike. “Scraping” is facilitated by design!
Using Javascript to deliberately break that is evil and every programmer who participates it is a piece of shit. No exceptions.
That’s true but they probably didn’t account for AI data scrapers ramfucking your server so they could steal all the value you assembled for general consumption and serve it themselves for profit.
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API. The “ramfucking” is caused by the attempt to block bots; it is entirely self-inflicted.
Remember, it’s all our content to begin with and Reddit does not have any right to try to lock it up for itself.
That doesn’t mean I like all the AI bullshit going on, BTW. But the problem is the generation of the slop, not the data accessibility.
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API
That’s simply not true. These bots are essentially DDOSing the entire internet, API or not.
Its amazing to me how consistently the shitty behaviours of these billionaire techbro oligarchs impact disabled or marginalised people… even when the point isnt to directly shit on them. Its fucking vile.
I honestly think many (too many, but certainly not all! I am one) programmers are some of the immoral, ethically spurious people around in the 21st century.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Quit using reddit. I don’t give a shit what your excuse is, you’re propping up fascism.
My cousins say they cannot find any discourse communities for their hobbies outside Reddit. I would respect the decision more if they only stuck to those subreddits but they don’t.
Again, I don’t fucking care about your excuses.
Skill issue
Yesterday, I visited new Reddit. No VPN, Chrome in incognito mode, so no extensions, clickedon a link directly from Google search. Got a message that my access was blocked for security reasons. Copied the link to Firefox (with uBO and a few privacy-centric extensions), changed it to old reddit (where I was already logged in), and it worked just fine. I found out that when Reddit kills old reddit, I won’t even have the choice to switch to the new one (not that I ever would) because I’d be blocked anyway.
seems like Old reddit is account-walled as of today maybe
It’s shitty moves like this that have me feeling deeply grateful about the fediverse. It’s NOT without its myriad of problems, but how lucky are we? We’re insulated from all this bullshit.
Mastodon is every bit as good (and better) as it was when I started using it in 2018. Can the same be said for Reddit, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube? Absolutely the fuck not.
I’ll admit I’m having trouble moving from yt to peertube :/ and still use the old gmail accounts
You can use something like GrayJay to watch YT and other sources (and have offline playlists and subscriptions) without a google account whatsoever. That helped me make the jump to fully degoogle.
The lack of a “cross-platform” (for lack of a better term) account is why I don’t use things like GrayJay because I watch on different devices and want to ensure they all have similar recommendations and a watch history.
I use SmartTube next on tv like 80% of the time I watch YouTube.
Recommendations are their method of control. Eshew the algorithm, curate your own choices of who you watch. also drastically reduces your exposure to slop.
My recommendations have been mostly fine and just keep the channels i regularly watch at the forefront. I’ve had my account for decades now so my subscribed feed is too much of a mess to wrangle now.
That saying, I do really miss the custom folders you could once make on YouTube. Back then I would categorise certain favourite YouTubers together and mostly use that. Using something like that again would be nice.
They also have this feature, you have subscription groups!
As for recommendations, it does one big sync once then anytime you open the app it seemed to sync everything (ime at least)
That alongside being able to sync a video to my PC at the exact timestamp is very nice for living room experiences. Bonus you can have peer tube sources show up next to your yt videos
I might have to properly spend some time to meeting about with it then. Is there an android tv app for it yet? (If you know off the top of your head, if you don’t i don’t expect you to do my research for me haha)
I don’t even understand how there are still so many comments on that site. How is anyone even accessing it anymore? I just assume it’s 100% bots
even logged in I can’t access old reddit anymore.
if you use the reddit enhanced suite extension you can get redirected
Fuck you spez.
This is because appending
site: reddit.comto a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.The article is from 2026, not 2016? That bot-ridden Reddit? Am i in the wrong film?
If you consider scraping a threat then yes plain HTML might as well be giving up. The advantage of new reddit for that is quite clear: they can collect a bunch of data about your browser before deciding if you are a bot and if the rest of the page should load. The embedded recaptcha call in the screenshots is a pretty good hint. I suspect blocking trackers on new reddit will break as soon as the scrapers move over.
As for why they don’t just kill old reddit: a significant chunk of their active posters use it and are attached to it. So if they kill it entirely they will lose content. Posters are of course logged in so this change is less likely to affect them.
SMHTML
Reddit seems to be in the business of extracting as much value as it can from said forums without completely destroying them.
I call bs. It’s been completely destroyed for a while.
I agree with you. But what’s important is if they can sell anything. They destroyed their own product but they’re still pretending it has value, and maybe they can fool some investors into paying for script and AI slop.
They’ve already disabled old.reddit for me. That makes it unusable, and thank you, Reddit. I actually used a domain blocker to block reddit, but generally would still be tempted to peek. Now, that is no longer the case. I, for one, am wholly in support of Reddit’s new anti-advertising stance!
Wait. How does that work? Wouldn’t plain html be safer because it’s JUST html?? Or are there vulnerabilities in just html that I’m not aware of?
It’s unsafe for their profits.
reddit stinks super bad
