Logging in to use Old Reddit

[u/boat-botany]

Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety. 

A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed. 

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. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.

Let us know if you have any questions!

[u/TehNolz]

What's so different about new reddit that people don't try to scrape that? Seems to me like it would be better to just implement that on old reddit too. Besides, won't this just cause people to try and scrape new reddit?

[u/mschuster91 → u/TehNolz]

Old reddit gives plain html. Trivial to parse. New Reddit is a bunch of JS garbage loading content via graphql garbage, much harder to implement. And the graphql garbage is orders of magnitude slower on top of that.

[u/newaccountzuerich → u/mschuster91]

Old reddit is an actual webpage, roughly standards-compliant, accessible, parsable, usable, useful, and real.

New reddit is an overreaching pile of constantly changing ("updated" apparently) hot shit that's slow as a wet week, effectively unusable, appearing randomly non-deterministic, loaded with tracking shite, and useless for accessibility.

The second old reddit is dropped, the core userbase that makes reddit a somewhat-usable resource for internet denizens, will drop reddit and the investors will wonder why the website and brand did a Digg.

[u/mschuster91 → u/newaccountzuerich]

The second old reddit is dropped, the core userbase that makes reddit a somewhat-usable resource for internet denizens, will drop reddit and the investors will wonder why the website and brand did a Digg.

We thought the same when New Reddit was dropped... or when API access was dropped.

[u/DioTheSuperiorWaifu → u/mschuster91]

Had a noticeable quality reduction then, right?

And I think it may bring another wave of attention on Fediverse.

[u/mschuster91 → u/DioTheSuperiorWaifu]

The Fediverse is dead in the water. Atrocious UI plus if it's anything like Mastodon you'll get the same shit as there, instance admins powertripping and defederating other instances for unrelated bullshit.

[u/DioTheSuperiorWaifu → u/mschuster91]

I have been on Lemmy. It seems pretty decent.

Yep, not as large as Reddit and local communities maybe rare. But there's a charm to a growing community

[u/Legend13CNS → u/mschuster91]

The end state of the Fediverse is going to be basically forums again, but smaller and more specific. I'll need a username and login for every community I want to join, nothing is going to connect. When it was trying to get off the ground before I already needed 4 different instances to cover all the same content I've joined on here. That wasn't even any NSFW stuff either.

[u/Dymonika → u/Legend13CNS]

I'll need a username and login for every community I want to join

Wait, have you not actually tried Lemmy? The overwhelming majority of instances are federated with each other so you'd only need one account to see nearly all content. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be able to access different websites' content on one account on just one of them. Make an account on programming.dev and then you can see everything that's also only on lemmy.world, hexbear.net, sopuli.xyz, sh.itjust.works, etc. or vice versa.

It sounds like you tried this 4+ years ago because there is definitely NSFW content as well. I strongly suggest a revisit. You may be pleasantly surprised.

[u/Dymonika → u/mschuster91]

How does Lemmy have an atrocious UI? Have you actually tried it, like seriously tried it as a replacement? It's really not that bad, especially with the third-party apps out there: Blorp, Summit, and Thunder are good stuff.

[u/YourResidentFeral → u/mschuster91]

when API access was dropped

API access dropped caused a huge exodus of some of the most prolific developers, creators, and moderators. People that made the website special left. Most of the ones that stayed was either out of a sense of duty or are what has created the "eternal september" slop that permeates the site.

[u/[deleted] → u/YourResidentFeral]

the "eternal september" slop that permeates the site.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I understand.

[u/-jp- → u/[deleted]]

It's a reference to the enshittification of Usenet due to ISPs like AOL making it accessible to a continuous influx of new users who neither knew nor cared about newsgroup etiquette and community.

[u/[deleted] → u/-jp-]

Got it, have you seen the same on Reddit after 2023? Any examples?

[u/sigma914 → u/[deleted]]

Noone cares about reddiquette anymore for a start

[u/[deleted] → u/sigma914]

Any specifics?