Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely trying to keep other AI companies out

https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...

This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their profiles (like facebook) instead of subreddits set up by the existing userbase. It hasn't been reddit since. And they're making that very clear as of yesterday.

This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.

I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open reddit clients there is no alternative.

I am not logged in into Reddit at work or on my phone. But I have redirect to old.reddit.com enabled.

> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.

I don't think this has been true for a while now. Reddit has been filled with bots and shill accounts for a while.

I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.

I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a legal identity.

Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems.

In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...

For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.

It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post).

The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a shame because at some point I really enjoyed participating on Reddit and it was a good source of valuable information.

to give some examples of mod abuse:

- /r/energy used to (or still does?) ban anyone in favour of nuclear power

- /r/ubisoft and /r/assasinscreed do not allow any posts criticizing the writing or characters, these are clearly run by the company

- /r/unitedkingdom is famous for shadow banning everyone who's critical of some government program (I got a ban for criticizing motability cars)

- /r/europe banned me 1 minute after submitting a chat control post that got 1.5k upvotes before it was removed

- some vaccination subs ban anyone who posted in anti-vaccination subs (irrespective of what they post)

I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations / guides? Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for niches you're newly learning about. Discord is it's own problem. I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while. Do we have to find an old dump of reddit html, and self host a snapshot of days before the front page of the Internet went behind a login page?

It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.

The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.

The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.

Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.

YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community".

I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).

If the login nag bothers you, narrow the screen until it disappears. You'll then have access to a hamburger for navigation

I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.

I noticed they logged me out when I happened on a link recently. I don't think this change will make me log back in. The value of the site has already crashed, now the only question is which site will manage to capture the mainstream link/image discussion next.

> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.

This hasn't been true for a while now. A lot of what you find on reddit these days feels incredibly fake. It's like there should be a variant of Goodhart's law: Once a forum becomes known for genuine human writing it stops being a forum for genuine human writing.

Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.

There is a Nitter for Reddit, called Redlib, correct?

Best to treat Reddit archives as read-only and modern Reddit as a marketing slopfarm. It mostly consists of bots trying to get their brands into AI training data.

old reddit is broken... the message/mail notifications don't work/go away.

> is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans

Was a surefire way?

“Safety” is overloaded here. I agree with the author; the new front end doesn’t seem safer for end users. It probably does make it safer for Reddit in that it’s harder for scrapers to do their thing.