- cross-posted to:
- webdev@programming.dev
- reddit@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- webdev@programming.dev
- reddit@lemmy.ml
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“reddit has made a bad decision” is not news. it’s entirely what is expectable of them.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
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
The site is most hostile to visitors who aren’t logged in, and the users who comment probably mainly visit the site while logged in.
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.
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?
Or that site:url doesn’t return results it used too anymore.
100% bot ridden. However site:reddit.com is used for the types of questions where otherwise, you just get page after page of SEO sites, which are even wose.
wrong film
Second reality on your left, past the one where Santa Clause rules the world
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!
There’s actually a very big algorithmic difference in how the content is shown between old and new reddit.
I think that’s also why they keep trying to make old reddit unusable little by little.
Moreover, without RES, you can’t tag users, which has become essential nowadays (especially since users can now hide their comment history). It’s already known by now, but it’s super weird seeing people from one country pretending to be from another one.
tag users […] it’s super weird seeing people from one country pretending to be from another one.
I see issues.
Implementation A: automatic by IP)
- they moved
- they use a VPN
Implementation B: field in profile settings)
- can write whatever the fuck they want
- can probably change it
In this case, tagging is something done manually and locally by the user of the extension (aka me), by going to the various subs (they’re divided politically) and verifying what people are saying (non-English, local memes, culture, local news, etc.). Tags can be modified if I find out the user was badly categorized.
I’ve also tagged different users that were involved in viral incidents (unknown details beyond that), where it seems a whole lot of people decided to pile up on a topic.
It’s interesting to see how much manipulation is going on in reddit. I’ve stopped interacting over there because of this. You just never know who is real, or a bot, or someone paid to post propaganda.
Edit: something I forgot to mention, and it’s relevant to this blocking of non-logged in users, is that the RES tags are persistent and don’t depend on an account (on my end). So I could (in the past) delete my reddit account, and still be able to see and apply tags. But now I can’t do it unless I’m logged in.
Ahh, so jt’s you doing the tagging of others, only visible to you.
Yes, this is not me reporting people, or anything like that. Just something I started doing years ago when I noticed some users in popular, English-speaking subs saying things that were very similar to what was said in my country. Pretending, mostly by omission, to be from the US or other first world countries. It’s also not something I do 24/7 because I have better things to do, lol! But I do dedicate an hour every day to this.
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.
They are in the business of attracting new users into their new algorithmic engagement hellhole now. Show any propensity of interest, and you will get sidetracked to the most godawful side-communities that seem to have emerged to engage as many victims as possible. They do not want to focus on their old users as anything less than the content they already made that makes reddit show up as free advertisement to their new base in search engines. It’s all a game of “it’s the algorithm’s fault so you can’t blame us” now.
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.
I think they’re more upset AI companies scraped 'em and they didn’t get paid.
They told Google to pound sand and their stock took a hit. Fuck em
While I agree, More celebs than ever have been asking for comments and ideas on their reddit pages.
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.
if you are a bot
Or they’re bouncing banned people.
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
Reddit does provide RSS feeds, e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/SonicTheHedgehog/.rss
Frankly, I’m surprised they still offer RSS feeds. They’ve been slowly but surely killing off all ways of accessing their content for years. One day they’ll disable them, but for now they still work.
Well they had an API, but…
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.
Okay, if efficient APIs existed and they weren’t incompetently failing to use them, it wouldn’t be a problem. Happy now?
(I should’ve addressed that in my previous comment, as I was aware of how one of the Lemmy instances was taken down by scrapers the other day despite the fact that they could easily get all the content simply by consuming ActivityPub directly. But I was naively hoping it wouldn’t be necessary because, as you can see from this text, it would’ve cluttered up my writing with double the words.)
so why was I getting hit with over 1,400,000 request a day to the web URI and not the API by some bot farm in China the other week. They were also hitting other lemmy instances.
I blocked the fuckers, no qualms at all.
Even if they were using the API they were not being nice about their shit.
Reddit does have RSS feeds
But we all know AI companies are unethically scraping and selling shit back to us right? I just really need people to acknowledge that.
It is the “selling shit back to us” specifically, not the “scraping,” that’s the unethical part. If the AI companies were doing the same scraping (and destructive rare book scanning, for that matter), but were using the data to populate archive.org, would it still be a problem? I would argue “no.”
The “scraping” part becomes unethical when the scraping is so aggressive that it takes down the website (or severely impacts its ability to serve actual clients).
Archive.org scrapes the web all the time, but it doesn’t do it so aggressively that it becomes an issue for the websites they’re scraping. The same cannot be said for AI scrapers.
I think it would be a problem because the scrapers are hammering all types of websites from small forums to reddit with tens of thousands of unique ip addresses at a time. Websites that have neither the money, hardware, or protection had to figure out solutions really quick or suffer what is essentially a constant ddos attack. This is the reality of the web now, it’s just an incredibly hostile place.
deleted by creator
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 is why they want AI to replace programmers. AI morals are programmed, so they can be designed to do shitty things that a normal person would refuse.
Hmffh, anti-copyright. After all, every view is a copy to your machine. Just information being free.
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
Yeah that’s the killer. Just not enough content yet. I think it’s cause video hosting is expensive. My hope is that individual youtubers start hosting their own peertube instances. But they’d never do that because they’d lose money.
If peertube could get functionality which would allow creators to hide videos behind a subcription which could be paid in fiat/crypto that would be a game changer. Easy to donate to your favourite creators while keeping federation.
Maybe one day.
Defo would recommend changing your email though. Takes a while to do all your accounts but once it’s done you’re free! Feels good.
Defo would recommend changing your email though. Takes a while to do all your accounts but once it’s done you’re free! Feels good.
And if you move to provider that will let you use your own domain, you won’t need to update your accounts next time you switch.
PT, nebula, loops, odysee, and floatplane together can’t fill the yt content gap.
You can start with moving to newpipe/grayjay and curate your own content which will lower your surface area.
At some point YT will manage to widevine and we’ll be torrenting the best of that shit.
Ahead of the curve, already downloaded all of the greats onto my selfhosted storage.
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.
Grayjay allows you to sync between devices if desired, including platforms. I have a desktop, laptop, and a phone, and I can sync everything locally by just pairing the devices and having them at least 2 active for the transfer.
So another has to be active at the same time as accessing another? I can’t always guarantee that so that’s a bit too much of a faff around and having to do that multiple times a day would be annoying. I’m glad it’s there for those if works for, if it works that way though still think it’s not right for me sadly.
You can use a “routing server” from FUTO (the guys behind it) to make it happen as well, although obviously that just means shifting traffic through a benevolent third party rather than only the devices you own and manage.
reddit stinks super bad
a corpse of a platform
I now browse Wikipedia. Please don’t screw me over Wikipedia, I donated five bucks to one of your nags once.
For anyone who doesn’t know, you can download Wikipedia and host it yourself! I got the top 50k version (~7G) on my RPI3 and now no matter what fuckery they pull or the government pulls, I’ve got a pretty decent source of general information.
Could you share what you did to achieve this? I’ve been planning on doing just that, and have it auto-update every week or so (keeping the previous versions archived, of course) by using kiwix-serve for a static ‘.zim’ file and maybe a cron job for the auto-update. But if you have a better solution, I’d love to know. The deployment I am planning is kind of convoluted to be honest.
No, that’s exactly what I did, I’m running kiwix-serve, but I’m not going to bother updating it because I’m really worried about information degrading now that fascists are basically calling the shots on everything (and WP’s jackboot co-founder has a hard on for it). If I feel enough time has gone by to warrant an update I’ll just do it manually.
What year was your cutoff?
About 6 months ago.
I ended up using mediawiki instead of kiwix-serve. Left my proxmox grabbing the data and its at around 170,000 pages right now. I’m still going to be versioning to make sure I keep the most up to date data, but still have access to the previous versions, as well as getting new articles, and keeping any removed ones if it happens.
How do you do that?
You run a server on a machine inside your house, it can be any computer on your local LAN/wifi, but it’s obviously best if it’s a machine that’s always on. I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (these can be had for about $50) that I have plugged into my wifi router and it’s running a little program called Kiwix-Server (free and open source). You download the WP file (it’s a huge single file with a .zim extension) and point the server to it and boom.
Wow, neat! Thanks for the explanation
I am currently pretty tapped out on all storage and backup drives but if I had space this post would have motivated me. Just sayin
funny, that comes just on the heels of my deciding that reddit is unsafe.
You’re just now realizing it?
not really but it make for good joke pacing.
i’ve been here for a while. and not there for a while.
