Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
I regret every time I revisit Reddit. Them shutting down old.reddit will certainly keep me from ever going back. It’ll be a blessing in disguise for me.
I was addicted to reddit for over 10 years when they shutdown the RIF app. At first I felt like an addict detoxing and it hurt. but now I can look back at those times and say good riddance to Reddit.
I still enjoy this format of social media, and therefore use Lemmy a lot. It’s clear there’s no algorithm or bots upvoteing trying to make me angry or keep me on the site. There’s less bots here trying to steer the conversation or promote their product. I’m happy with Lemmy. Fuck reddit to death.
Honestly, Lemmy has been good for me in some ways because it isn’t as popular and doesn’t have the deep niche communities reddit has that I was super active in.
I get more accomplished now because I essentially “finish” my Lemmy browsing and move on, whereas reddit always had something else for me to dive into.
Yup.
‘Boredom’ is important. The various endless scroll platforms are not good, for a great number of us at least.
I’m the same with you. I was on reddit nearly since the beginning. It was my entire social life, well, mostly. As soon as they killed off TPA, I don’t bother anymore. obligatory, fuck spez.
Evidently not enough people left Reddit due to their last enshittification measure, so the enshittification will continue.
If I’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that people in general will put up with an astonishing level of enshittification
Most people seem to not even have any notion of how things can be better. They never even think to look up like “block ads”. They just take whatever fuckery they get
I really like listening to Amy Poehler’s podcast, and there is a running joke that whenever she pulls up YouTube on air, she has to sit through ads.
And guests will kind of rib her for it, but they do it because she hasn’t paid for YouTube to get rid of ads. Always like, “omg you still haven’t just paid for YouTube?! I can’t believe you have ads!”
Like… Are most people simply unaware that ad blockers exist? I’ve never watched a YouTube ad, nor have I paid a dime to them for anything. I will simply not use YouTube before ever sitting through a single ad.
I just don’t understand how people can be so strangely incurious as to not even wonder if there’s a way to stop this bullshit.
Another reminder that the average IQ is 100.
They don’t even notice in my experience.
They think people like us are losing it for even noticing.
Can confirm. Blew a fuse when Spotify started sneaking AI generated music in my playlists and my whole family said I was overreacting and that it didn’t matter
Yep, they’ll hit you with the:
🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
people in general will put up with an astonishing level of enshittification
If they didn’t, it wouldn’t happen (so much). It’s like: we get the government we deserve…
People on average will literally put up with anything. You can charge them $10/month for their email and you see 90% or so of all people just shrug and then pay it.
Enshittification will continue until morale improves
they have too large of a presence of many of the main subs, like sports, celebrity gossip, movies/shows,etc, the og news and politics sub too, and then every new sub that popped up related to news or politics, thats probably where all the anomisity is coming from since the bans are likely coming from these giant subs. sports being another one, and now INDIA too. plus tons of porn subs, and OF peddling subs.
Yeah, mainstream folks like mainstream social media.
Enshitifcation everywhere!
Fuck you spez.
You can still visit - and scrape - the new Reddit without logging in, so the scraping is obviously just an excuse for what everyone saw coming from the start: the gradual complete shutdown of old Reddit.
Yeah, this is them closing holes in their blocking browser access over a VPN. And also tracking their users so they can sell data to advertisers.
Actually new reddit page source doesn’t load comments anymore. You need to execute JavaScript in the page for comments now. Old reddit still gives you a simple page with comments, so probably why they made it login only. You can’t legally scrape pages behind login because you agreed to their tos by logging in
I think scrapers typically run with javascript disabled, and new reddit doesn’t load at all that way
New Reddit is such a shit tier interface though.
This is presumably because they’ve been boosting their anonymous agitator account with their profiles set to private, and there are tools out there that reveal said hidden comments like arctic-shift which I assume utilise old.reddit. They are trying so desperately to curate a rightwing majority narrative that simply isn’t true.
What do you mean try? They are not desperate. They just are doing it. On every platform. The left is absolute cooked. There is no defense from the left against this. The left saw the writing on the wall and shot themselves in the foot over this decades ago. Now the right have the tools that the left used and because the left gave out to capitalism and profit seeking, the right was able to co-opt the platforms and use those same tools to accomplish a hostile takeover. Just wait until the kids today who experience the internet and the views spread on these platforms become adults. Maybe we can make some bean and moth memes until then.
This is short-term thinking. We’ve got the far-right in my country (Not the US) starting to flail at scrutiny, we’ve got Trump’s attempting to rig the midterms hitting roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. We’ve got civil disobedience, sabotage, subtle dissent increasing in volume and frequency throughout the western world. Outside of the US the far-right is emboldened by the regime but its increasingly looking like trump’s got no clothes.
Russia, one of the main sponsors and recruiters of these fucks are enduring devastating losses on a daily basis, to their infrastructure as well as their citizenry they send in waves upon waves of futility, its only a matter of time until they fall.
The only reason things appear ‘cooked’ for now, is because of the massive sums of money from the Epstein-adjacent tech overlords desperately trying to escape scrutiny, trying to buy out and control the narrative but it just ain’t happening… Bubble’s fit to burst.
Choose hope.
edited - Its happening RIGHT NOW. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/palantir-alex-karp-interview-openai-anthropic-b3007175.html
So basically every link in Google will be login gated now?
Also easier to track users, incase they want to look for potential “bots”, GOOGLE is quite intimately intertwined with reddits operations.
Do I have to login to use Lemmy? No, no I do not.
Bruh you don’t even have to be using lemmy to use lemmy. I seen @mastadon people all the time up in here.
piefed too.
And mbin!
And my axe!
Sorry its a old one.
Thas the best thing about the fediverse. As long as your on, you can communicate with others.
That still only counts as one!
Hello from piefed
How do you like it? I’m thinking about trying it out.
It’s nice and has some interesting features, like when there’s a crosspost, it show comments from all communities discussing the same post, or the possibility of following topics
This is amazing. Really brings together the different instances
I like it better than Lemmy. There’s more features, and, maybe I’m weird, but I like the Piefed web interface better than Lemmy’s.
@TropicalDingdong @Lexam damn right!!! lol
There’s even an instance that pulls in Reddit posts, but it’s a one way bridge unlike mastodon.
lemmit.online
Gotta hand it to Reddit though.
Somehow they keep coming up with ways to piss off more people.
Enshittification. They have their users locked in, and now it’s about trying to make money for their advertisers.
Oh this is nothing. They’re currently testing identity verification. As in, “send a pic of your government-issue ID to Persona so they can check who you really are” (and cross-reference you with other sites that use Persona, like LinkedIn etc.)
I’m also surprised they’re still allowing old accounts that don’t have an email. Or that they’re not mandating everybody to add and verify their phone number “for security and 2FA” – another excellent way of cross-referencing people against all kinds of databases. Just imagine what they can get if they work out a deal to share your phone number with Google, or Amazon.
Disabling mobile browser users with an unclosable popup was the drop for me lol
Are they? It seems like reddit’s main user base is bots and AI.
All to feed false information to news outlets LLMs, and search engines.
Which will then be regurgitated on reddit’s front page. A human centipede of enshittification.
Model collapse.
with them going public with the company, it was a death knell. and constantly trying to appease MUSK has caused a lasting effect. he was the reason why so many people got banned in purges last year.
Going public = enshittification. As in the former is a direct cause of the latter
What a sad day. The platform that exposed me to overseas opinions. 🫡
It was ICQ for me but this ain’t a grumpy old timer contest
Oh they dont like people using their website as a website? Guess this is an issue that will solve itself.
old.reddit is the only way I use it. this goes away, I delete my account.
The support forums like r/stopdrinking and r/CPTSD have been lifesavers for me, but reddit just keeps finding new ways to be terrible. RIP Aaron Swartz
I spent months deleting my old reddit comments. And I’d have to type in my username on a search engine after about a month or two and find more of my old comments and delete those too.
I know the bots already scrapped my contributions. I wanted to say fuck off to to Reddit and take back my contributions.
I requested my data via https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request, and used every ID on that list to delete the comment via a small Javascript script I used in the browser (so I didn’t need to log on via their API, as I already was logged in).
It took a while because I had a 1 second delay between each delete. Before deleting I had actually replaced the last 1000 comments with some AI slow to poison their DB a little, before I decided to just slowly burn it all.
I’ve now been reddit free for a year, after having browsed the gods-forsaken site since 2008.
Yup.
I only use old Reddit at work on a computer now. I create a new account every day as it takes that long for them to shadowban me. I get a handful of comments in, get a number of upvotes/downvotes and influence opinions, then I create a new account when I get into work the next day.
Don’t have time for a shitty platform on weekends as I have better things to do and I don’t care to use it on mobile, even though RedReader still works and looks like old Reddit.
You can’t comment or post, but being banned doesn’t actually prevent you from logging in and viewing. Well, unless they change that too.
im surprised they , havnt shadowbanned every acct you made the moment you created it, since they often will link your IP and device and automatic ban news ones. unless your IP or device changes everytime.
the others way they ban is through pattern of behaviour, your fingerprint, canvas size, device components.
me as well - although, I’m generally logged in. The change is supposed to require you to log in, so… deleting your account in response is a bit of a strange reaction.
Darn. Old Reddit is the last way to access NSFW subreddits without logging into Reddit.
Yeah, this will be quite a loss… genuinely a shame. It sucks that we can’t scrape and rebuild a copy of the whole site…
With the Redlib instances, RedGifs, Scroller and Reddtastic, you won’t have to!
There’s a website called Reddtastic that works great!
Yes, this is exactly my use case for Old Reddit. For obvious reasons, I use private browsing mode when viewing NSFW stuff. Private browsing mode does not retain my logged-in Reddit session, so that’s where Old Reddit comes in.
Guess you might have to join the untold numbers of throwaway accounts made for that specific purpose
Huh, I… didn’t even think of that. I suppose people could download all the old content before this kicks in, at least, but yeah, that’ll be the loss of new stuff moving forward, unless people can sway them over to nsfwlemmy.
When they close old.reddit will be the best time to advertise the lemmy instances that use that similar looking theme by default
Keep in mind that rystaf/mlmym has been last updated years ago. old.lemmy.world uses the FHF’s fork, which has had a few fixes made to it.
self promotion
I actually have a fork of that fork at mschae23/mlmym which is significantly different (in terms of new features and bugfixes) from the others by now. In fact, this is what’s deployed by your instance at old.lemmy.today :)
Though it unfortunately seems to be having issues with rate limits at the moment.edit: This should be fixed now!
If only they’d integrate the RES features
Man for real, what I would give for a RES “show images” button to expand all images on the page…
In listings? mlmym already has that. I see the button also exists on comment pages on reddit, but that’d be less useful on lemmy where inline images are already expanded by default.
mlmym
I’m not familiar with what this is, but on desktop going to my instance, lemmy.zip to login definitely does not give me an option to expand all images when looking at the front page or any community page.
If you mean in the comments on a post page, yes those are expanded, but I mean without having to open the post.
mlmym
I’m not familiar with what this is
mlmym is the old-reddit-like frontend discussed in this thread.
If you open https://old.lemmy.zip/, there is a “show images” button next to the nav links for the different sort orders. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually work there because lemmy.zip has the image proxy enabled, which the old version of mlmym they’re running does not support.
Wow, I only knew of the
p.subdomain, haha. This is great, thanks! That’s hilarious that they copied the same subdomain, even… I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.I love how the GitHub entry just calls it “a familiar desktop experience” and nothing more. Perfect. 👌🏻
I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.
They don’t have to stick it at the same prefix, so there’s no reliable way to check by just guessing the name.
It looks like p.lemmy.world is running the Photon frontend. On lemmy.today, we have it at photon.lemmy.today.
Lemmy.today lists the alternate frontends in the instance sidebar, but there’s no requirement for an instance to do that.
this is the first steps to require facial recognition and ID down the line, much like FB does.
No, the first step was all the governments literally forcing them and all the other big social media sites through legislation to add age verification. It makes it much easier to throw people in jail for online wrong-think if they have to verify who they are.
I haven’t touched reddit in years, and I have no sympathy for anyone still using that garbage site, so doesn’t bother me that they’re getting rid of the only good way to view it on a desktop. It won’t change anything, most reddit traffic is through the apps.
