I think he might've misunderstood a message and thinks there's really that many people who want to have sex with him...

Fuck Spez

Don't fuck Spez actually, there's no doubt in my mind he's a terrible shag.

Greedy little pigboy

Fuck that twat. He did get me off of reddit, so credit there.

They'll still allow AI bots. Only the ones they authorize though. Without them their paying customers will realize how many people have left.

It's technically true. They want those bots to pay for that access.

I'm glad to hear that from someone that's as anti-ai as you

They killed access to old Reddit without an account a couple months ago. Also i saw some people can't access the new one without an account but i guess they are rolling out that one slowly.

They're making the website viewable only with an account.

I still go on reddit often since that's where most of the game communities I want to hear from are.

Unfortunately a good chunk of linux distro resources and troubleshooting, and also many hobby stuff is over there.

Seems like most people don't really care about or understand stuff like "private platforms enshittify". Certainly not enough to be inconvenienced. People will be like "that's where the good memes are" or "that's where my video games post". Heavens forbid you miss the hot memes.

Reddit at one point filtered millions of bots monthly and transparently filed public reports on the actions they had taken, even citing the source of these bot networks if a notable number of them came from places like Russia, China, Myanmar, etc.

That was a long ass time ago, though. Before they killed off the free API access in 2022, and the 3rd party apps and accessibility layers with it.

They're concerned about AI scraping. They want to sell access to users' content for training, not let the AI in for free.

I'm banned

Permanently

You are banned for this comment which you can't see

Bastards!

I think the issue is also related to how Reddit makes money. Reddit makes money from selling advertisement. I would guess they are charging a certain fee based off subreddit activity the ads are shown in. When most of that Reddit activity is bots and fake clicks on advertisement then the company won't see the return on their investment because they thought a million people would see their ad but only 100k real people actually saw it.

I use Red Reader to look at reddit for a few specific subs but I prefer hanging out here.

they never ever did anything to propaganda bots at least not recently, and since trumps 2nd win in the WH it was clear they were banning.

ublockorigin prevents those fake posts from my screen.

Never forget what made sites like Reddit popular in the first place. That can always be rebuilt. Reddit can die without it meaning we have to give up what Reddit was.

I mean reddit was just the domain name where real people shared that info. The real people who want to share knowledge are still out there, just wont be on reddit much longer.

Ending the public API also prevents reddit users from deleting their post history without manually removing each post.

If you want to scrub your post history and prevent reddit from profiting from your input, use Power Delete Suite while you still can.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

It is unlikely that reddit allows users to delete their content from the backend but this at least keeps your posts out of search results, which is a large part of their value.

People forget that before reddit became the default for this stuff, Quora and Yahoo Answers filled the same niche

This. It was a golden age of information and community availability, and it's going to be hard to put that back together. Especially since the prior eras of distributed sites, we had functioning search engines.

And yeah, sure, it can be rebuilt... but there's going to be a long time of awful isolation until it is.

People said that about Digg 15 years ago.

Things come and go, people make solutions

Yeah, I also find a lot of my most useful and specific web searches take me to reddit. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution. Hopefully a similar depth of information will start to accrue here, but if it happens it'll happen slowly. And it's hard to search.

I guess I will continue to hang out around here. There aren't many places on the internet left for such a broad range of topics and conversations with real humans. The sad reality is that the specialist forums are dying and being replaced by closed platforms and the large aggregators are getting shittier every day. The Fediverse seems like the only worthwhile investment of my time.

How are you guys gonna cope with this? What do you intend to do in the future I mean.

Books and that kind of stuff, for some of that. Most of the useful information on health, nutrition, sports and the like came from people because it came from books (that people read).

For the rest, hope that more people to community bootstrap.

Reddit bridged so many understanding gaps for me while i was in my early 20s things you could never talk about in real life. It was honest people talking in good faith. Now i look at the same places and they're full of the worst info and worst takes.

same thing here. certain job industry, which is worth getting into, how hard it is to apply,,,etc. and all the other subs. the least useful ones were politics and news. they had subs for people wanting to join the services, but could not find a place where they can discuss because it was originally concentrated in certain forums only.

got an appliance problem of a specific model, or electronic issue, the subs have it.

I don't hate Reddit, but it seemed to hate me and banned me for the most spurious reason.

They do seem to be making some baffling decisions against their own interests, though.

I've been wondering about something like this for years. Websites have been aggressively enshittifying for a long time now. Everything defends against accessing their content via any unapproved means. Getting a full resolution image from anywhere via image search becomes more difficult every day. If a search engine lands you on a site, the site deliberately withholds the content that brought you there and dangles the carrot to keep you using the site for as long as possible, always making sure you fall just short of what you're after so you keep looking. Most links that you share directly from your URL bar are littered with telemetry data so that unless you first sanitize the link, sharing it on social media means that now the site is able to link your session to the account that shared the link and map your social connections on platforms they don't even own.

I have a foreboding of a future internet where everything, even the structure of URLs themselves is obscured behind a layer that is opaque to the end user. People will be completely locked in to only using the site in an approved manner from an active account in "good standing" with the platform. You can use the site as normal as long as you're logged in, but the URL itself would only ever be something like website.com/sU6ecjejfE32Jy7w94. You could share that link as normal and people could click it and be directed to the thing you want to share, but they can't view the content without logging in, and even if they don't log in, the mere fact that they clicked it still links the two of you together in the user map. Nothing ever escapes the sandbox and nobody is able to share content from the site unless they accessed it from approved means, and they can only share it to others who are also using approved means. The more websites adopt this model, the more user-mapping takes place until eventually anonymity on the internet is completely dead. Every single site knows exactly who everyone is and every social connection that they have. Everyone who refuses to submit to this new paradigm is blocked from accessing the site at all, yet they are still mapped all the same. Making a new website that's this restrictive would probably mean that it never gets off the ground, but making that change on a platform where users are already dependent and tolerating increasing levels of enshittification just might work. If one major platform pulls it off, others will follow.

This seems likely? I’ve had several services that I used to use, which deprecated their website in favour of their app 🤮

That would be one way to force people to use their shitty app.

I mean yeah they literally will and force everyone onto the app.

I wish Lemmy was more popular. I still use Reddit for niche things; for example, I'm getting a new Pebble watch and I want to see posts about that. Here, the whole community has a small handful of posts. On Reddit there are new posts every day. Sigh!

Their automated filters seem to be designed to ban people and leave bots. 🤭

spammer bots, and propaganda bots, utilizing AI posting or using hundreds of account at once by 1 entity.

They own those bots though most likely.

Just like the same endless crap keeps showing up on my meta feeds from bot accounts because it gains traction

When I left Reddit years ago I was already convinced than more than half the accounts were bots.

Anything with an even mildly AI-adjacent topic is a solid 75% bots right now...

/r/nvidia, /r/amd, /r/hardware, etc, etc..

thats whats FB has become.

I want to believe. But X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook are still there. It may be a long death which is indistinguishable from (low-quality) life.

It will be Facebook 2.0. A place where boomers and bots dwell.

I'd like to believe it is but I also know that the majority of people online do not give a damn about user experience and things getting shittier. I do not understand these people, but its because of them this shit is still happening. If they all left sites like reddit there'd be no incentive to become shittier and shittier.

Not trying to shift blame though, in the first place its companies like reddit even coming up with strategy who are to blame.

I was chased out by admin in 2024, after a long line of accounts were violated for abuses that were falsely alleged. Because Israel I suspect.

See my Reddit alternative: Zyke Design was inspired by piefed. Had 3k hits last month

I often think about Swartz, and I wonder if he did what he did because he saw where we were heading and knew that they were never going to let him near a computer to fight it. I hope that he's at peace.

only to have the alien hybrid spez to thirst for musk and destroy reddit.

The only thing I miss about reddit is access to the comments. There was often valuable troubleshooting advice in the comments for a myriad of issues. It's a real shame that they've taken this stance. Just another mistake in a long line of mistakes that is going to result in the death of the platform.

I do. But not in the way you might think. I was on reddit since nearly the beginning. It was such a great place. But then spez ruined it :(

You do. It lives in your head rent free.

How much does it cost you to host?

I was in a discussion on the post election political situation in Sweden right now and from nowhere my five year old account got flagged as "suspicious" and locked until verified. For whatever reason it refused to hit me with CAPTCHA and the likes. I had no email registered previously and could not verify. I tried a couple of temp email but got no verification sent there. So I registered a throw away at a legitimate email provider and changed it there. Nothing there either.

But I also have mods and at least one admin that doesn't like me from long ago because I make fun of Nazis. So maybe I am "suspicious".

Eventually, all these tech companies scale up to a size where they don't have to give a shit about people anymore. They only care if you're a celebrity or somehow manage to create a big PR show that they have to respond to. But at this point, regular people are just like blades of grass that will eventually get mowed down somehow and there's nothing you can do about it.

Now it's dead and time to move on.

Reddit has become unusable. It has moderaters that are censorious, sactimonious, petty and do not care about. free speech. Adverts are becoming unbearable and the riculous time limits drive me mad! The inane Avartars are imbecilic too.

large subs are too infested with moderation and bots.

It's ridiculous. The bots ban and then they guard the mods (humans), who could review the case(-s). Support is pretty much non-existent.

It's both. The LLM scrapers are now relentless. They are also closing the door so they can sell the data to Google.

and people who buy ads on Reddit thinking it's going to get a certain amount of views but they don't know most of those views are bots until after they paid for the ads. Then they have to prove to Reddit they were tricked and good luck with that unless your a corporation Reddit wants to have a good relationship with.

reddit also wants GENUINE human generated content, not AI-generated posts or comments that poisons thier data, thats why the forced logins. im in another forum where the spammers, have to "make genuine' content to evade thier spam/bot filters.

Thats like nice and all and thanks for saying the truth but my question ks what can we actually do?

(And you better not say 'just write to your representatives' 🫩 please)

The only time it comes up in conversations is because my buddy discovered reddit only like 3 years ago, when I had just moved to lemmy. He still sends me reddit links several times a week.

Then there is the tech support side, because name it and it’s been posted on reddit, usually with the solution, but now everybody just AI’s the shit out of that so that has become less relevant.

And that’s it. Everyone else that I knew that used reddit has moved on years ago.

Reddit never came up in daily conversation for me. It came up only occasionally, and it actually seemed to do so more often after it went public.

It was a weird coincidence

Extra hilarious because they just invested so much in ads to try and rope in every day people.

I also noticed the youtube rss feeds are returning 404s now as well.

They are still working for me. Example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC5rT7F0PGNuD54rJ9kzgWzw

EDIT: This is the command I use to convert YouTube channel URLs into RSS URLs:

curl --silent "https://www.youtube.com/@thecodyreeder" \
    | grep -Po '"rssUrl"\s*:\s*"[^"]+"' \
    | cut -d : -f 2- | tr -d \"

They're very much making it hard to be a mod. I wish my community would follow me here.

Go for PyLova instead please (the fork of PieFed without a diva dev that implements hidden blocklists and gets pissy if he gets found out).

Um, excuse me, this post is promoting violence against bots. That'll be a lifetime ban for you and your old ass account.

Imagine thinking that a super intelligence is going to emerge from reading reddit comments.

Thanks for fixing it

Only for us plebs providing reddit with free high-quality content.

Nope: https://developers.reddit.com/docs/capabilities/server/reddit-api

its clearly a combination of shitty decisions frrom the executives at reddit, the mods, the massive invasionn of bot users and restricting API access.

You can use the old Reddit extension of Firefox but yeah, the latest changes suck.

it still works on FF. on mobile its a little trickier, you use the old reddit extension and sink it or oldyesterdayreddit extension as well.

They just need to die & let either open-sourced, decentralized & federated social media platforms like Lemmy, Discuit, Loops, Pixelfed, PieFed, PeerTube & Mastodon thrive, or bring back old school, traditional forums that were popular befote the big, social media boom that had happened since 2010.

more like them being on the titanic, that being reddit when its about to hit the iceberg, they keep taking more and more people onto the ship, overfilling it.

The hitting of the iceberg is the death of Aaron Swartz.

It is literally a corporation.

Digg'ing their own grave.