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.
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.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck 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?
Fuck you spez.
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.
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.
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.
even logged in I can’t access old reddit anymore.
if you use the reddit enhanced suite extension you can get redirected
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.
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.
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.
