[image shows the following text "Log in to use old Reddit
To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com."]
Thanks for forcing me reddit. Hello lemmy
Hi friend!
I can’t believe how bad it is now. There is no real news. It used to be interesting but it’s so watered down that it’s basically pointless. Couple that with the quality of major news outlets, and we’re basically experiencing a media blackout.
and the AI rage bait posts that are honey pots for pissed off venting that leads to Bans.
I’d add the ubiquity of paywalls these days contributes a lot as well. We used to have it so good.
Stop using platforms that are actively locking you out. The reason they keep doing this is because people keep complying.
Don’t log into an account.
Browse the Internet like normal.
If x.com or reddit.com won’t let you view without privacy, they’re dead and useless.
Have some spine; lead, and stop following and being led by evil people and companies.
This is true for YouTube as well.
You can view YouTube logged out
Yep, I do that. I don’t subscribe, I bookmark.
You can even get RSS feeds for channels. I use Miniflux, and it’ll make a feed just from the channel URL, but I think there might technically be a “proper” URL for the feed that other clients might need instead.
Probably should look into that actually.
I cant. Librewolf, adguard home and other stuff running. It asks me to log in every time. I dont know whats the issue and tbh i really dont care.
Freetube on linux solves that for me tho.
Google are becoming increasingly hostile, sometimes not age-restricted content will show the same if it flags your IP etc. and then login doesn’t even work, with multifactor errors if again IP limited or flagged you don’t even get your MFA options, passkey prompt not appearing etc all of it I presume in service of bot protection but definitely also ad and app blocking
Lol Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram with its nonstop log in request
Tumblr and Pinterest are on life support.
Insta and reddit still have enough inertia.
If they don’t make you log in, they lose sigint.
IF they do make you log in, they burn activity and users
Reddit will eventually fizzle out, Just another in a long chain of bad ideas trading short gains over long life.
Platforms with followers where it makes sense to have them, friends and followers on reddit always seemed odd to me
XCancel and redlib will let you browse both without an account, and while cutting out most of their ad revenue as well (bots/marketing accounts notwithstanding of course)
Firefox extensions:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/redlib/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/xcancel/
Redlib is also much easier to use on mobile than old reddit, but posts are rate limited to every 12 hours or something. So it actually helps stop you from doom scrolling a bit too.
reddit is a fucking dumpster fire if you aren’t logged in… when i first joined lemmy i would still occasionally visit reddit when i got bored, but i wasn’t logging in and holy shit its a fucking cesspool!
if you aren’t logged in
Ngl, you had me in the first half
It is all bots. The actual remaining humans are there to make the same recycled jokes and argue with each other.
It is nice to not be on it (or here) constantly.
Yeah, you can’t talk there without risk of getting banned off the platform by chance. Sucks because a lot of well-built communities are there and most of what you need to ask can be found there.
I just want to tell the entire Minecraft community to pick up and leave. Would make my life way better if they just migrated over here. There is, unfortunately, a rule against cross promoting non reddit sites on their discord. Probably Microsoft’s doing…
I used to hit reddit forums for internet queries because they are usually at the top of search engines. Now I blow right past them to the next in theme answers (steam for gaming for example) because the join us we are a cult splash screen is annoying. Anyone that is going to create a reddit account/use the app ALREADY IS. The enshittification is so painfully bad.
Try ro access Reddit through Redlib.
Use LibRedirect to make the redirect automatic.
Thanks for the content you createdfor us, now log in to see it.
The power move is to see that and never return. Let their analytics show you didn’t give in and won’t be giving them any more telemetry/user data/content.
Nice. That is just enough of a barrier to stop be using reddit entirely. Not posted in years but sometimes read when bored enough.
Same, I’m 100% here now.
I still lurked since the api bs and after close to 20 yrs on reddit they pull this crap. They can get fucked.
Exactly why I’m here. I used RIF exclusively for a decade, then they killed it. I suffered with their browser version, but now they killed r/all and I ditched for good.
Cant even read posts on the browser without being interrupted about a minute in saying to use their stupid fucking app. Reddit is trash.
Add " switch to Lemmy" to your reddit profile to drive more migrations.
If you use old.reddit.com, at least on chrome mobile, it doesn’t do this. That’s how I’ve gotten around that pop up. It’s more than mildly infuriating tbh.
They’ve recently started blocking access to old.reddit.com without logging in.
Almost like thats what this post is about.
I am quite literally on it right now and I don’t have a Reddit account.
Congratulations you’re on the B team of the Experiment.
Welcome to A/B rollouts.
The idea is that instead of making a sweeping change for every single user, you roll a feature/system/UI update, etc out to a small number of users, to see how effective it is. It gives you time to see how those users react to it, how they interact with it, how it impacts their broader site usage, etc… And then once they have had time to gather some feedback and work out the bugs, they push it out to the rest of the users.
Most big tech companies use A/B rollouts nowadays. YouTube, Meta, Reddit, TikTok, etc all give users access to different updates at different times. Because it allows them to gauge how their users are actually interacting with the updates before they accidentally tank their entire system with a bad update.
For new features, it can also give the company time to properly scale their backend systems to accommodate a new feature. For instance, when Tiktok rolled out images in comments, they likely had to do some work on the backend to ensure their systems could handle the added load of suddenly downloading a bunch of images any time a user opened a comment section. By phasing the rollout in multiple steps, they didn’t have to upgrade all of their systems up front before making the feature available to some/most users.
Using this post as an example, imagine if there was a bug that didn’t allow users to log in after they got this prompt. Or didn’t allow logged in users to access the site, because it kept redirecting them back to this page. Or it allowed users to continue browsing without a login, as long as they were in Dark Mode. Or any number of other potential weird issues that could arise. The A-users are essentially pushed into beta testing the new feature, before the B-users get the update. In this case, you’re simply a B-user who hasn’t been scheduled to get the update yet.
Damn. And I was really starting to feel like “the chosen one” 😅
Sorry little Neo, once again you just weren’t picked first.
I just wanted to be special for once in my life :( ah well. Maybe in another life
Or they could just do it to regions/ips which are more suspicious.
It’s rolling out, so it just hasn’t hit you yet.
Yes, this has been suggested to me. Multiple times.
You have a short while left. I heard about this a few weeks ago and just started getting the block today.
That’s annoying as shit. Welp, guess I’ll be visiting Reddit even less lol
Conclusive proof that you aren’t one of the ones that it has rolled out in. Interesting…
IM READING REDDIT without a account, got swept in the purges last year.
Fuggem
spez loves Musks, thats why he implented all those bans and the pervasive AI moderation.
Yep, just checked it as well. Clearly it’s not across the board.
What about comment sections?
You can’t comment though, right?
Lurker only
I don’t have an account. So, no.
Must be sectioned rollout or some shit weird
Guess so 🤷🏾♂️
Hopefully I stay on the unblocked side of old. Though I keep adding things like ?utm=fuckspez to the urls
“request desktop site” usually gets rid of the app nag.
I never post there anymore but there’s a lot of useful stuff from the old days.
I use uBlock origin to block the pop up, works great
Don’t you understand? Reddit is in DANGER from users NOT BEING LOGGED IN!
It wants you inside of it
Think of all the horrible CSAM posts I can flood reddit with while NOT LOGGED IN! They must be in shambles!
To be fair, the likely reason in this case is AI companies mass-downloading Reddit posts for their training runs. You can’t really cache the internet, so from what I understand, every training run they scrape this stuff anew.
For many smaller sites, it’s effectively a denial-of-service attack, which is why lots of them have put up this thing:
For Reddit, it might just be additional traffic that they have to pay for and which doesn’t give them any profit. Although, if Reddit is still as unstable as it was years ago, I also wouldn’t be surprised, if they got DoSed by that a few times as well.
What you say is true, but not the reason. Part of reddit’s business model is selling its data to AI companies. So they just don’t want to give it away for free
selling its data
Correction, selling its users’ data.
Reddit doesn’t make content, it just hosts content that its users submit for free and charges other people to access it.
I mean, that’s a lot of companies that do this.
Oh, well, if lots of companies do it, I’m sure we’ll all be fine.
Lol reddit’s already a mined wasteland.
You cannot, and never could, post without logging in.
I think it was a sarcastic attack on the claim that forcing you to log in for read-only access to the website is in any way keeping anything safer than it was.
That’s not really what that means, they don’t want people scraping reddit, which is much easier on old reddit.
Yeah I know I just thought it was funny that the first line is, we need to keep Reddit safe.
They don’t even try to lie effectively. Why in Hell’s name would you need to log in to “keep reddit safe” just to lurk?
My only guess is because they want to force AI scrapers to pay for access. And most scrapers probably work best on old.reddit because they keep changing new Reddit’s layout. As a programmer, if you’re going to code something to access a site, (and you don’t want to constantly have to rework it every time they make a small UI update) you’re going to use the version that never changes. So by forcing them to log in, it makes tracking the individual users (and thus, identifying potential unauthorized scraper accounts) easier.
But can’t you use very simple agentic AI to constantly update the code for web scrapers on new reddit? From what I understand that is the kind of coding LLM can do well and you can just unit test for errors and feed it back to the LLM until it works. Even requiring accounts, creation can be automated using LLMs too.
This sounds like it a loosing proposition and will only piss off hardcore users. Not that this would stop them. But I don’t think protection from web scrapers is a good explanation. Probably it’s just enshittification, forcing users to use their new interface to optimize business metrics. Someone is going to get a bonus because they improved the short sighted metrics.
New reddit is really weird, it’s all html (even pagination/apis) with no clear consistent structure.
The mobile apis are easier to scrape
CPMs are better if traffic is not bots. Same at my company we have to use cloudflare. They essentially don’t know who is human and who is OpenClaw anymore or scraper.
Easier to track users and produce verifiable "x potential viewers " to present to advertisers.
They’ve wanted to kill old.reddit for a while. It doesn’t support advertisers or tracking the way they want. Also RES is still a thing on it. They’re too chickenshit to do so though, since the actual content generators and knowledgebase still use it. This is another attempt to slip the noose tighter
It’s up to you on whether you believe it or not. But the reasons they’re giving are that they’ve got protections going on when you access new Reddit that they aren’t able to implement on Old Reddit. Again, this is coming from the announcement from the Reddit admins. It sounds plausible to me and I really don’t care to argue this. I’m just passing along what they actually said.
Protections from… users reading text?
Exactly. That’s why I mentioned lurking. I haven’t participated in reddit for quite awhile, not after getting permabanned for dubious reasons. But I’ll still lurk, especially on some of the niche community subreddits. I also cannot fathom what someone just reading text might need protection from. I can certainly see it for commenting, but you’ve always had to be logged in to do that anyway.
It’s to stop automated scrapping. Old reddit has less/little/no protections from that. New reddit has a lot more in place. So when you log in (which now you can only make an account with new reddit), it tracks a lot more information so it’s more difficult to get around bans. Basically stops the majority of automated scraping, which reddit doesn’t want.
Not users - people/bots with malicious intent against the site.
Malicious intent to sell the free content that reddit sells? The only thing this is protecting is profits. They’re just pulling up the ladder, that’s all.
tHe ChIldREn
I second some_kind_of_guy’s comment. What exactly do you need protection from while just lurking?
Not users - people/bots with malicious intent against the site.
And the garbage finished taking itself out. Wonderful.
Red reader on android works great.
Mine stopped working yesterday
if you just want to browse, redlib is amazing, and even more with the libredirect extension on desktop.
or, you know, don’t use reddit
Porque no los dos? Of course don’t feed reddit with content for them to sell, or aimlessly browse the frontpage. If you need information on a niche subject, or refer to something that happened in 2011, don’t burden yourself to avoid reddit. Just set yourself to be in read only mode with ad blockers to the max so you get more from them then they get from you.
It is still unfortunately the go-to landing spot for basically any “I’m having an obscure tech issue and only one person posted about this specific error code six years ago” type of search.
Everybody in here that’s saying “don’t use Reddit” is either posing, or never has to troubleshoot or research anything.
they’re the type that uses reddit the same way they’d use instagram or 9gag so it doesnt have any particularly unique value to them
“That never happens to me”.
But so many searches i do these days have the answer on reddit
I use both redlib and piefed on a daily basis.
I haven’t logged in to reddit for years, but there’s loads more content there for niche topics.
I went one step further. uBlacklist works wonders from removing reddit from search results. No point in seeing results from a site that won’t let me in.
If you host a SearXNG instance you can replace Reddit links with Redlib links, just add this to your settings.yaml.
hostnames: replace: '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'lib.your.domain' '(.*\.)?redd\.it$': 'lib. your.domain'
redlib is amazing
two weeks goes by and it breaks
Not worth the effort. Been down that road. Redlib fixes, Reddit breaks again, over and over and over.
Huh? My redlib instance broke maybe once this year because I didn’t update it for months. And once I did, it immediately worked again.
It’s clear that Redlibs maintainer is burnt out, as were the LibReddit folks who developed and maintained it initially before it was forked. Software like this is an endless cat and mouse chase, Reddit break something, the community works around it, rinse and repeat.
It’s why we don’t see Bibliogram around anymore, Instagram made their APi unbearable to work with.
In regard to the difficulty of keeping a Redlib instance alive, currently most of the discussion occurs in one issues post on GitHub, and people have suggested other docker images that currently work.
I think it has always worked for me. The instances break regularly, but I just redirect to another one with libredirect.
hyper-tls fork(pr#509) has been pretty stable for a few months now. But yes, it is unfortunate that it will succumb to cat and mouse game eventually
Does it work again?
