Spyke
reddit·Redditbympa92643

Reddit now won't let non-logged in users see subreddits until they've been "reviewed"

This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.

Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it's only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.

View original on lemmy.world
lemmy.world

This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don't really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we're (along with other competitors, we're not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

423
lemmy.world

Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we're going to come out much stronger for it.

Imagine the alternative--the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.

That could've theoretically killed us. Now it won't happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking "yep, security is important, that's true..."

90
lemmy.world

Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it's much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what's happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.

55
toolreply
r.rosettast0ned.com

Future incidents probably will still happen

It's not a question of if, but when. The only secure computer is one that's a mile underground, encased in concrete, and with no network connection.

And even then, it's still not a 100% safe bet.

10

This right here is a big deal. Even if an instance goes down or gets attacked, the easy choice is to just browse from another instance till it is back up.

23

I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao

I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.

15
lobutreply
lemmy.ca

lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance

16
lemmy.world

spez and Musk burning their services to the ground

Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn't really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don't have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.

7
lemmy.world

The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.

Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn't particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.

There is already an army of repost bots which aren't going away. The bots don't care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.

And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can't repost the same stale content perpetually.

I don't think reddit is going to just die. But it's popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it's a shell of its former self.

16

Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.

What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn't important, then why have "valuable contributions" at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website's audience for this purpose. Reddit's users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.

There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.

We really can't assume that, though. Also, "maximum repost saturation" would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They're not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.

And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.

A huge portion of reddit's content links externally. It's literally a link aggregator. It's not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it's generated externally and then consumed by the system.

But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.

The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn't think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr's ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit's. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It's been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website's value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it's like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that's the case, it's hard to notice because it's always been happening.

0

It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.

7
lemmy.world

It's not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they've turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it'll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.

5
lemmy.world

It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Man, we don't live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it's in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can't say. But I can say that reddit's been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn't, but they seem to believe that it's more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they're probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as "Television 2.0" and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can't behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.

5
lemmy.world

History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.

But we'll see I suppose.

2
lemmy.world

It used to move quickly. We're not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There's a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that "won the war," so to speak. What's the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There's nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.

5

New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.

2

I completely agree. I hope Lemmy will steadily add features.

3
programming.dev

If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you'll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.

This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It's much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.

184
Totreply
lemmy.world

I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it's in beta, for those reading who haven't used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn't come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something

Here's a screenshot from Discord:

55
Vahtosreply
programming.dev

Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it's not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.

For example, you can't rotate your app UI if you're not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.

Not saying you're wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn't on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.

54
Funwayguyreply
lemmy.world

This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it's not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.

As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.

21
Metallibusreply
lemmy.world

This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn't mean that it's being used to track you down. It's probably just for crash reporting etc.

6

Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.

9

A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.

Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I'm sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn't mean that they're using it to track you.

14

Certainly not all scary. I don't work with these that collect the data but wonder if it isn't just some deviceData.collect() function or something.

6

Device boot time could be used for a user that clears their cookies to track and match sessions. Using that, and matching it with other information could give very reliable ways to fingerprint users.

1
kbin.social

Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.

27
RojaBunnyreply
lemmy.world

I don't have specific info on what's harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I'm at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It's absolutely wild.

Edited to add - they don't specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.

28

Yeah, don't be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.

Some apps won't work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.

4
kbin.social

Thank you! I can't believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That's so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.

I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.

6

Yea its pure insanity and greed. This is just one of many examples of why I have dual piholes on top of ad blocking extensions.

1
gruereply
lemmy.world

How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android's app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?

7

When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can't actually phone home.

21

Just wish duck duck go had PWA support. It would be my default browser if so.

1

I always hated that crypto shit stole the name web3/web3.0. I think for a short period it seemed decentralized apps were calling themselves web3.0 but now it's just the fediverse I think. I like calling it the true web because the fediverse is very much like the old days where we had niche sites with their own communities, it's just that the content isn't locked into each site and we don't need a million different forum accounts to participate everywhere. Like the old days but supercharged with new tech.

10
lemm.ee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.

16

Someone misspelled "predatory" at the start of that paragraph.

0

The emergence of every website being gated, requiring an account and sla subscription. Also the rise of rediculous personalized advertisements and user tracking.

13

Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.

What's next in the Reddit bingo?

The removal of old reddit?

Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?

Buy upvotes?

The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn't count when there is actual factual evidence.

117

He's just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it's paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.

101
lemmy.world

No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it's a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative....

87
lemmy.world

One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.

19

His Royal Doucheness

I prefer King Steven the Turd....

9
lemmy.world

I'm now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I'm in a happy place.

85
sh.itjust.works

Still go to reddit sometimes. It's night and day compared to here. Everything on reddit is rage bait in one form or another.

26
Squidquidreply
lemmy.world

Make an account on lemmynsfw.com

It's just as good as reddits porn

10
lemmy.world

I'm gunning hard for Lenny, but let's be honest with ourselves, ok?

It absolutely isn't. Not yet. In both quality and quantity, we're still lagging way behind, especially for niche or non-straight content.

23

Lemmy very unfortunately doesn't have either the breadth or depth or Reddit porn yet. If it does get there it won't be for years yet.

3

That’s wild to me. I’ve been on Reddit for 17 years. And porn is not something I thought was such a huge point. Mothers same goes for this place. The platform just doesn’t seem to lend to that type of consumption. But never less, porns a huge part.

4
lemmy.world

I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped

I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC

65

I'd guess it does the news website thing. Scroll down and get meet with a create account blocking barrier.

17
lemmy.world

Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like "If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit's policies? Try c/[email protected]" and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We're growing still but it's not like I'm seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.

7
lemmy.world

”…I’m not seeing much Lemmy mentions….”

This is working as intended as Reddit is actively suppressing and shadowbanning any comment or post that mentions Lemmy or hyperlinks

21

Ah, trying to stop the Exodus by any means necessary. Lol. Time to find a good thread to get my old account banned on then!

6

F /u/spez is only following Twitter who've already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.

5

I'm not saying that isn't happening but it must be happening selectively because the small niche subreddit I moderate still has the post up where I announced and linked to the Lemmy community I made. I just went to the subreddit in my browser while logged out to verify that it's not in the shadows, but I could see it.

4

Yeah, it should be obvious that you won't have much success using Reddit as a platform to direct users away from Reddit. They've made it pretty clear by now that they aren't free or open. Makes me wonder what other topics they've done this more subtlety for, or will do in the future.

If you want to direct people to Reddit alternatives, you'll probably have the most luck on platforms that aren't Reddit.

Though I do wonder if Twitter and the meta platforms will also block it, since they are competing with the fediverse as well (though meta in a EEE kinda sense, so they'd need to walk a finer line since they are supposed to be embracing right now).

YouTube might be a place to do it.

2

Remember, corporations are never your friend. I remember when redditors thought spez was "one of them".

60

They're doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it's been shocking decision after terrible change

58
Sanelessreply
lemmy.world

All to make the company look like it has revenue so they can scam people on their IPO

33
paf0reply
lemmy.world

Isn't the stated reason to prevent AI scraping? As much as I dislike them both, given how these LLMs like ChatGPT work it actually seems reasonable.

-1
lemmy.world

eh I feel that excuse is bullshit - a scrape is the same as a web view. ai doesn’t need to scan the same content more than once. reeks of b/s to me

18

The content continues to change. When I have a specific programming question they don't help me figure things out based on the documentation alone. Seeing discussion about such topics definitely helps it as knowledge continues to evolve.

3

Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.

The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣

But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.

47

Having tried /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim, I was going to point out how I didn't get the screen you got. However, /r/nyt gets this message. As an aside, /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim are verified while /r/nyt is not is interesting to me. Upon further testing, /r/nytimes works. Seeing how /r/nyt has 411 subscribers, while /r/nytimes has 8,431 subscribers, I think smaller, less well known subreddits will run into issues while larger subreddits or subreddits that are more well known will have no accessibility issues.

It's also interesting that this block doesn't exist if you navigate to old.reddit.com/r/nyt instead of just reddit.com/r/nyt. You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.

old.reddit.com on the Firefox Android app looks bad, but I wonder if someone could make an extension to automatically redirect users to old.reddit.com when navigating to reddit.com, as well as an extension that changes the layout of the page to something more mobile friendly, similar to RES but for your phone's browser. That might make reddit usable on mobile without the official app until old.reddit.com goes away or they try to implement some sort of user agent string check.

45
Geckoreply
lemmy.world

You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.

Doubt it was overlooked. I moderated a larger subreddit and I can tell you that the stats for old.reddit are tiny compared to the rest so it's not worth the cost of implementing. Further if you use old.reddit you probably already have a dislike for the app and will rather abandon the content then install the app. Finally old.reddit is used more by old-school redditors which tend to be the vocal minority that will complain about the change the loudest. So overall, ignoring old.reddit is propably the smarter decision from reddits perspective... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

20
lemmy.world

I always thought old.reddit going away was what would get me to leave the site...

Strangely impressed it managed to outlast me.

17
programming.dev

They're simply trying to prevent any nut job spinning up /r/watchpeopledie15 and generating a press wildfire again

3

That's not a bad thing. I wouldn't consider watchpeopledie healthy for anyone.

0

I have the extension "Old Reddit Redirect" in my firefox mobile. You need a version with custom addon collections enabled (beta or a fork like fennec on fdroid), then you can install every addon by adding it to your collection, and most of them work.
If RES or an equivalent addon could produce a good mobile layout you could use them in the same way, but I don't know about that.

3
lemmy.ca

Anyone noticed how Lemmy links are blocked and shadowbanned in Reddit?

43
Funwayguyreply
lemmy.world

Yep. There is a metric fuckton of tampering across the board, some of which is sub specific.

It's the same kind of things they pulled with WatchRedditDie a long time ago but now it's site wide with little to no subtlety. The rules are imaginary and meaningless, more so than they already were.

32
khajimakreply
lemmy.world

WatchRedditDie was an alt right shithole full of hate that needed to go. I clicked a link there once and it was nothing but trump supporters pissing and whining that trans people and women exist.

12

Oh absolutely. I just use it as an example because it's one of only a few heavily restricted subs that hasn't yet been purged by admins.

3

Turned?

Buddy, that fire was lit years ago. All that happened was Steve threw a gascan in

13

I moderate a small niche community and the post where I linked to the Lemmy version of the sub is still up and the link works. I logged out and checked it to make sure it's actually there and available. Are they doing this manually and focusing on larger subreddits?

4

I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.

Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.

42

Really trying to force people to install and browse with the app. I'll never do it.

Never installed the Facebook app either. Just too much data harvesting, too invasive.

Deleted Facebook, deleted reddit, deleted Twitter. Never looked back.

34
kbin.social

Glad to be free of my Reddit addiction as well. I miss /r/truegaming but hoping we can build it here!

12
lemmy.ml

With time people will start getting frustrated with all the inconvenient features that Reddit pushes out. Slowly but surely the communities will rebuild here, just like Digg to Reddit.

5
kbin.social

Honestly, in my ideal world, all the communities I enjoy will be somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people (if I had to put a number). I don’t want a Reddit replacement, I want something a little more akin to the forums I used to enjoy. I don’t want an algorithm trying to upset me or force me to doom scroll and I don’t want trolls/“karma farmers.” We’ll see if we can build that. For now I’m just content not to see a bunch of NFT “snoovatars” (cringe) everywhere.

17
lemmy.ml

I hear that. The general difficulty of setting up a Lemmy account will detract many low effort users (at least I hope)

Do you remember something awful forums? Think it was $10 for an account and it was amazing. I wouldn’t mind having to pay for an account to keep bots and trolls from infiltrating

3

as long as users that previously joined get grandfathered in and can use the platform for free

1
wswegreply
lemmy.world

It’s the only way Reddit is even usable since they removed the third party apps.

15
lemmy.world

You can use it on mobile by using Firefox Nightly, enabling the add-ons collection workaround, and installing the old.reddit redirect addon (and uBlock).

Granted, browsing old.reddit on a mobile screen is not a great experience but it's leagues better than the alternative.

4

At that point I'm more comfortable on Lemmy instead of bending over backwards to accommodate for shitty Reddit UI anymore. I used to use old reddit but that was when I actually had time to waste in highschool pretending to do work on the school computers, now I have a newborn and would never scroll on my PC to just browse Reddit, or any social media for that matter..

1

Weeks maybe a month before old reddit goes away. Reddit has to as it loses them advertising money and those that use it are those Reddit dislike.

4

It's only a great experience for some. The vast majority of people, attention, eyeballs, and money go to things like tiktok and Instagram.

1

My operating assumption here is that Reddit can collect more data to sell if people are logged in and use their app.

Does not matter if you destroy 75% of the usefulness of the system if the remaining 25% can be more effectively monetized.

33

Yeah this move has killed all interaction with Reddit for me. I only open a reddit page now if it's in my google results for something I'm searching, but the last few times I've hit this message. There's thousands of subs that are never going to get reviewed because they're small and I'm sure at the absolute end of their queue.

32
monero.town

Old.reddit is next, the new Reddit design is shit on purpose to make you use their app.

30
randintreply
feddit.nl

They've promised to not remove old.reddit ("old.reddit isn't going anywhere), but who knows whether they'll keep their promise. At the end of the day, if it actually is removed, it'll likely draw even more people to Lemmy

13

This promise was made by Steve Huffman. You’ve probably heard the name before as the dude that blatantly lied, then doubled down on the lie even AFTER audio recordings were released that completely refuted his lies.

He and all of Reddit corp are not to be trusted.

23

Knowing Spez and Knothing track record I seriously doubt it.

1

reddit and twitter are literally competing to see who can destroy their platform first and unfortunately they're both winning

30

I’d posit they went Digg v4 when they updated the site to remove the ability to see upvote and downvote counts for posts and comments, and artificially inflated scores on the same day. /all/ went from interesting stuff to… promotions, ads, and rubbish. Also when they made /popular/, then turned /all/ into… the same thing.

6

It's interesting because they justify it by saying it's for compliance (eg, because logged out users haven't answered affirmatively that they're over 18). Gives them cover when we all know the real reason they're locking it down

26

Wasn't one of Spez's bucket list to have his own private bunker for the apocalypse? This is it. Secured. Contained. Protected. Isolated. But also dead.

25
lemmy.world

Try old.reddit.com in the browser. It is not pleasant but it works on mobile.

24
Magnetarreply
feddit.de

What do you mean, old reddit has been the only usable reddit for years now.

73
Hrrzreply
lemmy.world

Of course. And Altavista the best search engine for 486.

-23

don't you dare bad mouth old.reddit...ah, who am i kidding, idgaf about reddit anymore.

17
lemmy.world

Has Elon Musk secretly bought Reddit as well?

22

You say idolises. I say can only climax now to watching the Tesla truck launch video on full volume with a 1:100 scale model of space X rocket up his anus.

Your way is more succinct I admit.

6
sh.itjust.works

Search is broken in Reddit right now (for me at least). Best part is, it doesn't always report an error, just pretends there are no results.

Oh, and Reddit Status doesn't know yet.

21
programming.dev

Lol reddit search has always been almost entirely worthless. I know search can be hard, but it has to be by design.

29

I'm not talking about inherent brokenness that was always there.

There is a specific search with a non-dictionary word, and limited to specific sub, that always worked, but it's not working right now, returning zero results. Reddit search is fully broken right now (except for finding sub names if you don't limit the search to a sub).

Problem is still persisting btw. And Reddit Status still reporting no problems.

7
lemmy.world

Ironically, if they spent a lot of time improving it, Reddit might've been far more profitable. A big advantage Reddit has is all of the genuine conversation and questions for things people Google. Reddit could have weaponized it by becoming a direct competitor to Google, and I think they would've actually done really well.

6

Right? They could have done a billion things to become profitable, they're a top site for traffic for multiple countries. The fact that this is all they could muster just proves their incompetence.

1
Anders429reply
lemmy.world

Search was always broken. When have you ever found anything you were looking for with it?

2
ebits21reply
lemmy.ca

So it’s improved? Always had to use google to search Reddit. Ridiculous.

1

I only use(d) it in a specific way. For example searching for a sport club (non-dictionary) name, limiting the search to that sport's sub, and sorting by new).

For general search, a search engine would indeed probably work much better.


Problem found and solved according to Reddit Status btw, and confirmed by my own tests.

1
lemmy.world

Did Elon Musk enforce post view limit ? I don't know about that

21
Shialacreply
lemmy.world

I think its at 1.000 posts per day for regular people, 10.000 for Twitter Blue Subscribers

And People without an account cant see any posts anymore

17
murphyjreply
lemmy.ml

He backtracked the last part, I think because Google was started to delist Tweets from Google searches. You can see a specific post, but not the comments to the post.

16

Oh really? Last I checked I couldn't see anything whenever there is a Twitter-Link anywhere

2
sebinspacereply
lemmy.world

I generally refrain from considering myself more intelligent than others, because.. well, it’s just a safe bet, but also because they probably have optics on something and know something I don’t.

But this.. what the shit is actually happening? It’s like they’re watching everything Musk does and just.. decides to copy it?

They saw Musk admit Twitter is income negative, right? Right?

Guys?

39
NightOwlreply
lemmy.one

Amusing thing is a company being unprofitable never seems to be lacking in money to use it as their own personal piggy bank to live lavishly and climb up the wealth rankings. Always get reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley.

7
graphitereply
lemmy.world

That was then; this is now. A lot has changed in the last few years.

0

I think corporate executives are still raking in a ton of money as opposed to a companies profitability reflecting their pay scale.

1

Of course it's not, if it was he wouldn't be following the steps of daddy Elon. It's just two like-minded tech-bros who want to turn other people's unpaid contributions into profit for themselves.

5

That's not the problem. Most in development tech companies aren't in profit mode. The problem for reddit is that they have no way to generate revenue to attract investors

2
sheilzyreply
lemmy.world

Mark Zuckerberg was planning on introducing some subscription service like Twitter checkmarks to Meta, but at least he responded to questions about it in his comments section. Iirc the program might even have been delayed due to its apathy from users, but I haven't heard much about its plans lately. At least he understood how stupid he sounded once he spoke with consumers.

8
kavareply
lemmy.world

I don't even think a subscription model is a bad idea. Right now you pay with your data - ie you are the product. Therefore the website you use (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc) has the primary incentive to please their customers - the advertisers.

When you have a subscription model, the user becomes the customer. Any changes would, presumably, be made to improve the user experience. Right now that isn't really the case. As that now famous enshittification article from January elaborated on - websites are nice to the users until they feel like they have the users captive.

The moment that happens, they pivot to extracting as much as possible out of the user.

Would this happen at the same rate or at all in a subscription format?

Having said all that, I would only ever consider subscribing to something on one condition

  • the only revenue stream is subscription. You have a free tier paid with ads and all of a sudden the incentives remain identical for most of userbase M
7
SailorMossreply
sh.itjust.works

I think the Patreon model would work best for a social media network. There are a few patreons that make on the order of 10s of thousands of dollars per month. That seems like that would be enough to pay for hosting and wages for a few coders and admins*. Not everyone would have to pay so it could be a free public service for everyone else. The people who fund a social network need to be funding it because they see there is a societal need for such a network not because they expect a return on their investment; or because paying gives them some special privilege within that social network.

*Or even better several separate patreons for the coders and admins in a federated network.

3

Right now you pay with your data

When you have a subscription model, the user becomes the customer.

You'll still pay with your data and you'll still be the product when you pay. The statement of if you don't pay you are the product is outdated for the present day when it comes for for profit companies. You can drop thousands and you'll still be getting data collected on you.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/6/23673339/tesla-camera-privacy

Stuff like YouTube premium don't opt you out of getting data collected on you either. Data harvesting is a core foundation of these services that isn't going to go away no matter how much you pay. You aren't paying to not be the product but for additional features.

5
lemmy.one

Who are these people that will fund a social network, with no expectations of a return on that investment, so that people can fill it up with memes and porn for free?

3
lemmy.world

People that want there to be a platform they can enjoy using. There doesn't have to be a monetary gain for your life to be enriched by an investment you make. I mean, people make donations to wikipedia, how is that any different?

5

I've given money to both Wikipedia & Lichess on multiple occasions.

Gotta support these types of things. They are the shining gems of what is possible online.

6

Wikipedia seems to be a non profit and doesn't seem to be in the business of harvesting user data seems to be a difference, or constantly chasing after unlimited growth that leads to constant growing expenses due to expectations of shareholders that leads to focus on sustainability not being a priority.

4
lemm.ee

A subscription model just means you'll pay them to aggressively collect and sell your data. There might be a different service somewhere that will do one or the other, but there's no way reddit is gonna give up an established revenue stream

1

Sure, I don't think I would trust reddit or any other established company to change. But for an example, look at Kagi. You pay a monthly subscription but you don't get served ads and your data isn't sold.

1
feddit.nl

Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.

10

I genuinely believe that Reddit and Twitter are concerned about AI scraping their website thus allowing users to access the data without visiting the actual websites.

This, to me, is another benefit of the fediverse. These instances don’t care if AI is scraping their data because they aren’t in it to monopolize the user created content. They don’t create the content and they recognize they don’t own the content.

So long as the instances are financially solvent, they are happy.

9

In other words, "censorship" -- "We shape this site our way and there is nothing you can do about it."

Aaaand that is the final nail in the coffin for me. Rip in pepperonis plebbit.

9
lemmy.ml

Hear me out.

Elon destroys twitter and eventually makes it a joke and no one can be trusted cause the process of verification for that is a joke now.

Spez destroys reddit. Shuts down 3rd party apps. The majority of people have to decided whether to stay or leave.

The SAG and WGA go on strike because of wage issues, now shows like Last Week Tonight and other shows that take deep dives into the problems of government can't make shows that inform people.

All of this is, in my opinion, to shut down public conversations about many issues and the timing is also coincidental since the 2024 election is coming up and in a time everyone is divided, there is no comfortable place to communicate. The curiosity is if trumps social media and other right leaning communities are facing the same disruptions. Not saying reddit and twitter are bastions of the "left" but twitter and in particular reddit have been a place for public good. Now twitter is a hallway that is almost completely covered in fecal matter and reddit is a poorly designed website that blinds you with advertisements and OF spam bots.

Elon I can see doing it maliciously, because he benefits from a Republican government. Edge Lord Jr has probably doing it because Senior told him it was a good idea. The survivability of these companies are not in their interest because why care if you can just close it down claim the sale and go make more money somewhere else.

But the biggest one is the "Late Night" shows. Most of them are the way some Americans get informed about some of the more deeply rooted problems in America. You can look at shows like John Olivers, Last Week Tonight and maybe Late Night with Seth Meyers. Shows very critical of Republicans and trump in particular, completely crippled by the SAG and WGA strikes.

In total the information delivery systems we are all used too, have been dirupted and I'm seriously questioned its timing.

8
Zormatreply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

You think the writer's strike is part of a conspiracy to prop up Republicans for an election in a year and a half?

29

No, I'm saying the people that control their wages have been slowly moving towards the point of protest so the shows they write for don't air because they are fighting a noble battle against shitty wages.

4
lemmy.world

Seems more simple and likely to me that the "normal" corrupt and crony capitalism we've allowed to take over our government and big businesses is just reaching even more for the next dollar, like they always do. Although the leadership at Twitter and Reddit seems particularly bad, maybe because their product would appear even more unsustainable with proper transparency.

17
lennybirdreply
lemmy.world

It's true that capitalism and public interest are generally incompatible. Though this seems a bit more nefarious, considering that actions at both Twitter and Reddit have only continued to devalue these institutions, no?

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, though. America will escape this rut when people realize it's Big Cor'prit that we should be afraid of and not so much Big Guv'mint; the former is a virus that corrupts the body. And the immune system (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, etc.) have largely failed.

6

I can't speak for Twitter, but from a shortsighted business standpoint, the third party Reddit apps weren't generating any revenue for Reddit, and were shut down to drive more traffic to the ad-filled app

1

From my readings in the last few weeks, there does seem to be some sort of coordinated effort to control public messaging. There was/is a discussion about how the right wing is suing and chilling any and all efforts to expose and educate about disinformation. The lawsuits were so menacing that they even wanted to go after the students of the classes run by professors they were suing for teaching about present day disinformation in our society. It isn't just professors, it includes writers and journalists and groups that targeted disinformation. This is being done under the banner of 'bias'. Opposing, criticizing, or pushing back against far right wing messaging is attacked and sued as intolerable bias.

It's believed that this is to clear the way for a massive onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories entering into the 2024 election cycle. As far as what's happening to some social media sites, the timing is suspect. Reddit and Twitter were among the most effective at getting out the blue vote. Now they are in shambles.

6
lennybirdreply
lemmy.world

Glad I'm not the only one considering this. Been in conversation with another long-time user of Reddit (>15 years) and let's just say that if the goal was to suppress grassroots mobilization of progressive coalition, this is what you would do. We already know how compromised the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg are... And we saw just how much we had to pull the teeth of Reddit to do something about The_Donald...

I often wonder if Trump would have been elected in 2016 if Jon Stewart was still on the air. Now imagine if right-wing groups controlled Reddit, Twitter, and clamped down on all late-night talk shows that help pierce right-wing ignorance chambers of this country.

6

I'm glad I'm not alone either. I'm thinking he could of swayed the independent voters who were confused but, to be honest things have changed in such a crazy weird way, I don't think it would of mattred. His faithful friend John Oliver was doing his absolute best but the message fell between the mass noise brought on by the maga crowd.

Some people suffer from reddit nostalgia and forget some of the most disgusting subs and activity during the early days was common place but as time went on it rooted them out and forged a better sense of community. Then trump emboldened idiots to be idiots and cultists obey their leader. Questionable people bought up share and spez suffered a stroke after Elon gave him the boner after telling him how much power he has.

3
Leyla :)reply
lemmy.fmhy.ml

Twitter was ruined for the reasons you state, but thinking it was for the west is untrue. One of the biggest investors was the Saudi king, a ruler in an area where Twitter was used to organize actual revolts and revolutions. The destruction of social media is definitely being done in prep for elections. The strikes seem like coincidences as far as the election goes.

4

Buy it, kill it. 44 bill is chump change to the

Many people benefit from its downfall, its not exclusively to the election i just used it because I live in the "west" and I can see it disrupting a very critical election because 4 more years has of trump is gonna be bad for everyone....

2
mrmanagerreply
lemmy.today

I think the reason is something much bigger than the American election. Just not sure what yet.

The election is rigged anyway. Choose between turd and asshole, both of which are selected by the establishment.

Until people can vote with cryptographically safe identity control, there is no reason to trust manual vote counting in my opinion.

-5
mrmanagerreply
lemmy.today

"Enemies of Democracy" :) That's a nice one. I want the membership card!

0

I go there for a couple of smaller subreddits I still visit (barely starting out on Lemmy, tough). But a lot of content seems to be slowing down, like 2 day-old threads on the home tab (I only go on desktop with adblockers).

This is obviously anecdotal, and have no numbers to back it up. We'll have to see how it goes into the future. Reddit just keeps pissing off their core users time and time again.

7

Just use old.reddit.com if your still going to view reddit...

Yeah, it is not as nice as the modern version (modern version iscomplete and total garbage imho), but the old.reddit.com still functions and gives you the exact same content without the hassle of the modern site. Just not as nicely formatted for mobile...

But it is only a matter of time till they get rid of it too.

7
Hexticreply
lemmy.world

Old is next, no fucking way is that shit surviving the rest of the year.

20
ewereply
lemmy.world

You also have to be logged in, in order to automatically use old.reddit.com (without an extension to auto-route links back to it, at least). I know because when I used reddit in...erm, private mode, it would always route me to the new, awful ui which didn't support RES.

11

From what I tested, that is a problem with Chrome itself. That problem does not seem to exist on default Firefox for Android, default Edge for Android, or even even default brave for Android.

Then again, why bother in Reddit's case when majority of people use Chrome?

Don't have anything iOS to test. But the problem could exist on Safari, but without iOS I couldn't say.

2

Reddit on mobile browser is actual dogwater. Tho most social media apps are extremely hostile towards non-App users.

7

Sounds like a good reason to delete all your content that they profit off of and stop using it...

7
lemmy.world

You can use old.reddit.com without issue.... for now.......

6

Is this for posts that mods haven't manually approved, or is it completely random which posts have not been 'reviewed'? I swear I've seen this on posts with thousands of upvotes that surely must have been approved by then...

4

This isn't new, tell your phone to show desktop site to bypass all their mobile bullshit.

4

They’ve made it impossible to browse on mobile without the app. I keep getting Reddit posts as google answers that I can’t open

4

Degenerate rich kids don’t like how they’re being talked about. The only worse thing than elites is their children.

4

Last I checked, you can just change the url to old.reddit.com to get around stupid shit like this. Does that no longer work?

4

There’s a setting to opt out, you can use old.Reddit, you can use desktop request, there’s probably three or four browser plugins

1
lemm.ee

This isn't new. It has been this way for like a year.

3

I'm sure this has been said, but they did that for a while at least on my end. Mostly big front page content was blocked in my experience

3

I'm not seeing this message on any subs, including the small subs I frequent.

3

Press the dots in the top corner and see if there's a "desktop version" button. That gets around the block for me.

2
lemmy.world

Are we certain the Muskrat isn't involved with Reddit in some way or is it just u/spez emulating his hero?

1

Libreddit and Teddit may be dead, but Kddit still works. Eddrit also does the trick, but occasionally gets overloaded.

1

Old thread, but as best I can tell, old.reddit.com is still going strong. No forcing you to sign in, no padding out the ass.

1

My goodness, if only you knew her many times I clicked to view the content before I realised it's an image!! What an idiot :P

1

Musk is getting all the publicity when it comes to boneheaded ways that he has ruined Twitter, but Spez doesn't get the same attention.

I say he is booted from the top job by the time Fall comes around. They will say he is stepping down for personal reasons.

1

It hasn’t always been like that. They only changed the NSFW pages viewable from the app a few years ago. Used to be able to browse porn to your hearts content on mobile web.

48
_sideffectreply
lemmy.world

How so? It says the subreddit is unreviewed and could potentially contain inappropriate content... Same thing as nsfw

-20

No, NSFW is a subreddit marked as NSFW because it allows NSFW content.

This is Reddit blocking EVERY subreddit but a select few, including ones that are not NSFW because NSFW content is not allowed.

27

Son, what you’re saying could be applied to the whole internet… and we ain’t putting walls for “potentially inappropriate content” everywhere. That’s what fascists nations do.

16
ZapBeebz_reply
lemmy.world

There is a huge difference between "unreviewed" and NSFW. Unreviewed is very nebulous and inexact, and let's reddit effectively censor huge swathes of the website...unless you use their shitty app, ofc! NSFW is a very specific designation that can easily be backed up with evidence

6

I've seen this for entirely harmless subreddits and I always wondered what they meant by "unreviewed". It's not new in any case.

1
kbin.social

Ehhhh. This could just be their current stopgap because of all of the NSFW swaps happening. I think you are extrapolating too much.

Don’t get me wrong, I could totally see Reddit enacting this policy in their “infinite wisdom” and quietly rolling it out. But you are drawing too much from this screenshot. We need more context.

-13
lemmy.world

How exactly does it help if I install the app and go to that subreddit? NSFW is still NSFW.

29
kbin.social

This might just be morning brain, but I honestly don’t understand the question I’m sorry

-3

I think their point is, if you're correct and this is to protect people from unexpected NSFW content, viewing through the app would still just expose them to the unexpected NSFW content anyway.

7

Because Reddit wants us to use their app. I don’t think it should be necessary so I’m not sure why that question is directed at me or if that’s even what they’re asking tbh. But yeah obviously they want folks on the app.

2
kn0wmad1creply
programming.dev

Nope. It's because it's easier to harvest data through the app, so they funnel people towards it.

14
kbin.social

Oh there’s no doubt they’ve slowly made it more of a pain in the ass to not use the app (while also making the app worse) but this specific screenshot is too much missing context for OP’s claim to be assumed. It could be true but we don’t know enough.

-5
kbin.social

That was specifically for NSFW subs. What OP is showing us is not an NSFW sub. Hence the post.

I do not know why people think I tacitly approve of these changes. I do not. But what OP is claiming may or may not be true. We do not have enough information. It’s a completely separate matter from whether or not I think Reddit has been trying to funnel people towards their app, which clearly they have been for quite some time.

-1
Lojcsreply
lemm.ee

It has been like this for like a year

0
Lojcsreply
lemm.ee

And I didn't say it was specific to NSFW subs. It's been like this for most subs since like a year. They restricted nsfw subs years ago.

Edit: It might not be exactly a year, but the point is I faced this restriction on sfw subs many times in recent memory and it's not remotely new.

1

Yeah this is par for the course on NSFW subs, which are it's makes partial sense (log in to see it). But having this on just random subreddits is a pretty terrible development. Sounds like they're just testing the waters before every subreddit requires an about l account

1