Reddit signals ominous upcoming "changes” for old.reddit.com
arstechnica.com
Reddit says the beloved site is used for some "bad behavior."

As of a few minutes ago old.reddit.com now seems to requre logging in to access it.

Shame as it was still the best place to browse for info about some niche interests.

Edit: Seems like they might be testing the change as it is hit or miss at the moment.

Edit: Adding this to My flilters in uBlock Origin seems to fix the issue for the time being:

||reddit.com^$header=referer:

Edit: Best bet now is to use a proxy like safereddit.com.

  • captain_spicard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    259·
    29 days ago

    I discovered Lemmy last week. Lurked for a while, then finally created an account. The experience is much better than Reddit so I say good riddance.

  • BuckFutter@timeyak.comEnglish
    862·
    29 days ago

    Yep loved old.reddit but nope, no more. Happy to be a Lemmyor now 😀 or whats the correct term? Lol. Cheers!

  • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    67·
    29 days ago

    Fuck reddit.

    If you need the old info download the archive. 99% of anything newer than 3 years is going to be bot slop. There’s zero reason to go to reddit intentionally.

        • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          15·
          29 days ago

          I’d wager that older dumps are higher quality, before the mass redactions and deletions of the various exoduses. If you’re looking for up to date information on current topics, it’s time to look for (or build) other places.

          • trebach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            22·
            29 days ago

            These are Pushshift torrents from 2005 to 2025: https://sciop.net/datasets/reddit. There are two data sets, one by month and the other by subreddit. Each is about 3.5 TB compressed and based on the compression ratio I’ve seen, about 30 TB uncompressed. This is without any sort of media, just text.

            Reddit sent AcademicTorrents a request to take them down so AI models couldn’t use them as a way to avoid paying Reddit hundreds of millions of dollars for training data.

    • Redacted@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      17·
      29 days ago

      Agree.

      Most of it sure, but there are still some active subreddits with human involvement I wish would switch to Lemmy.

      • Blibly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        29 days ago

        Same. I have 1 or 2 subreddits I check for info/advice that I wish would just migrate over here. It just isn’t worth opening the reddit app and dealing with the worst of humanity being pushed on me anymore.

    • SnoringEarthworm@piefed.caEnglish
      4·
      29 days ago

      How feasible is it (legally, technically) to host a federated, read-only copy of Reddit data from before The Enshittening?

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        29 days ago

        It depends how mad Temu Elon aka Steve Huffman gets about it. He incorrectly believes everything belongs to him.

      • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
        4·
        29 days ago

        Why bother?

        Its all long since been injested by every gen AI model around, just ask one.

        • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          5·
          29 days ago

          The problem with AI is that while 80% of the time it will provide correct information, but 20% of time it will generate very convincingly sounded bullshit.

          This is the danger of it… You test it few times and then you start trusting it. Kind of like that farmer that destroyed his whole crop.

          • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
            2·
            29 days ago

            I agree. However I don’t think answers sourced from reddit are any more accurate.

            • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              3·
              29 days ago

              Yeeeesss…, but typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

              Since Gemini is fed by the reason directly or might be fun exercise to ask it about yourself and while in some questions it will answer correctly or just loves to invent new things.

              This works especially well if the person owning the account did not worry as much about privacy. So you hear many true things and also a lot of bullshit.

              • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
                1·
                29 days ago

                typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

                sure. that’s an advantage of reading off reddit.

                an advantage of asking an LLM is that it can consider multiple reddit posts and stack overflow and whatever else.

                you’re right that there’s an eternal problem of determining whether information is accurate or just confidently incorrect, but I don’t think that applies exclusively to chat bots.

    • mrbutterscotch@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      29 days ago

      Is there an easy way of doing that? As in is there an archive specifically for reddit or do you mean on one of the internet archive websites?

    • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
      2·
      29 days ago

      There’s zero reason to go to reddit intentionally

      Know of a viable replacement for r/bapcsalescanada?

      • db2@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        29 days ago

        Run your own discussion board and literally tell people about it.

        • iamthetot@piefed.caEnglish
          2·
          29 days ago

          I don’t really have an interest in running a public board, and the reason I use(d) that subreddit was because I am also not interested in looking for the deals myself.

          However, from another comment, redlib looks like a decent solution for the time being.

  • Samsy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    65·
    29 days ago

    Welcome to Lemmy for the last reddit users, that used old.reddit, looks like we are complete now. The rest of reddit are noobs and bots.

    • Mikekm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      41·
      29 days ago

      I came here three years ago when they killed the API and Reddit is Fun on mobile. I refuse to use their mobile site but still used their desktop. If they kill old.reddit I guess I’m done then.

      • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
        12·
        29 days ago

        You can do it. Just delete your account. I did it. I live without Reddit now, and I’m happy. After a while you won’t miss that cesspool

      • WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        29 days ago

        Same here but when they killed Joey App. But I haven’t gone back for anything and refuse to use it at all. It’s so bad every time my wife shows me shit on there.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        29 days ago

        Same as me, except I never went back. I don’t spend as much time here as I used to on reddit, but most of that was wasted time anyway.

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        29 days ago

        i only use it on the browser. got banned last year during the purges. you can make another acc after a while(unknown), with a fork, that reddit is not used to. i just use the niche subs, no interest in the main subs(where most are happening)

    • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
      6·
      29 days ago

      Used Lemmy for a while but still browsed reddit logged out a bit. I noticd this recently so its only Lemmy now.

      • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        29 days ago

        BTW: there is libredirect browser extension which redirects Reddit to libreddit instances.

        I am saying this, so people use that instead of giving up and logging in.

        • HerbGrower@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          29 days ago

          Nope, not listening. I am using the increased friction as a reason for giving up and not using reddit at all.

          • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            29 days ago

            Yeah that’s even better. I think the libreddit code could perhaps be used to also to help bootstrap some communities on Lemmy (by just posting the same links).

            Or maybe that’s already happening?

    • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      5·
      29 days ago

      Redlib still works, but it’s read-only (not a problem for me, I killed my Reddit account last year), and it’s probably a matter of time before that’s killed off too.

  • brownsugga@lemmy.worldEnglish
    431·
    29 days ago

    I knew it was over when the CEO payed himself 200 million the year before it went public (or whatever) he basically looted the fucking place cause he knew it’d be worthless soon after

      • eleijeep@piefed.socialEnglish
        7·
        29 days ago

        Yeah but the site is worthless now, so the stock price will follow when the market realises what’s going on.

        • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
          9·
          29 days ago

          Yes, Reddit now is truly worthless because:

          • it’s riddled with bots, so humans can’t have real conversations
          • AI companies already scraped all old content and now they can’t scrape the newer content because it’s poisoned by AI itself
          • Google won’t index subreddits anymore now that you can’t see the content unless logged in
        • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          29 days ago

          I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

          The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

          What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

          This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

  • eggpl4nt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    29 days ago

    This news finally convinced me to make a Lemmy account so I can participate a little more instead of lurk. That, and generally how awful Reddit has been becoming for like, several years at this point, since the IPO.

    I’ve swapped out RedReader on my phone’s home screen with Boost; though I think it’ll take some time to break the Reddit addiction.

    I am looking forward to seeing Lemmy’s growth!

    • auzy1@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      29 days ago

      I’m not sure we want a lot of the trolls or bots here… Fortunately, I feel like they’d go to instances which lemmy world is de-federated from fortunately though.

      It’s fairly obvious in a lot of the local subreddits that there are a huge amount of lobbyists (same as facebook). Like the gun/pro-vaping people posting at 2AM really stand out in them

  • Capybara_mdp@reddthat.comEnglish
    25·
    29 days ago

    While I’ve been on Lemmy for a while, I haven’t really seen any hobby - centric or geek centric areas.

    I’ll miss the movie threads in particular, but there were a ton of active crafts, art & ttrpg threads to get inspiration from. Any suggestions?

    • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
      5·
      29 days ago

      I’m concerned at redlib’s viability long term. There was anotherpost here a few days ago that said the whole of reddit was login only. If that happens Redlib is dead.

      That said, I can’t imagine why reddit would do that and it seems unlikely.

      • hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        29 days ago

        Can’t redlib operators just use a reddit account for? Login to get past the login wall, and then fetch requests for other users

        • m0stlyharmless@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          29 days ago

          RedLib presently spoofs the OAuth tokens and behavior of the official Android app to access the website, so they are kind of doing something like that already.

          The challenge for instance operators is routing the traffic appropriately to avoid the inevitable rate limiting from Reddit for popular RedLib instances.

          Instance operators end up using a variety of approaches to get around this such as having multiple RedLib instances each with its own IP so that if one becomes rate limited, their site can switch over to another instance while the rate limit cools down.

        • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
          1·
          29 days ago

          That’s a potential solution but there might be problems I haven’t considered.

          Presently that’s not how it works though, redlib doesn’t log in.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      29 days ago

      There is libredirect browser extension that allows to rotate between the instances offloading load (I think safereddit.com has highest because the URL is easy to change.