While your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future and 'drink verification' copypasta[1].

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...

My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future.

I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.

(13 years ago)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

I really wish there was a way for the electorate to preempt the votes of their representatives, so this kind of lobbying would be less effective. Sure, they might try carpet bombing the airwaves with PSA campaigns, but if the people really really don’t want what the lobbyist is selling, they would still be able to rip the ballot out of their congress critter’s hands and change the vote.

Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying.

That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed.

That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.

And ~20 years ago computer riddled with porn malware was kinda normal.

Times change, so does certain expectations.

I would view a website that requires users to go through a lengthy verification process.

Given all the astroturfing from companies and governments, this would give a bit of trust.

> "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit"

the second old.reddit goes is the second I stop using that site

it's already very obviously chock full of slop and AI bullshit, with some subs having long unavoidable lists of "your post was removed because you did not verify" trails that imply that automated posters found a thread and went hard

but add in privacy crushing bs -- no reason to be there anymore. Back to old school forums

Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.

You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.

Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?

that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI

You can still use old.reddit, you just need to be logged in. That said, if old.reddit ever went away altogether I would stop using it too.

I still use "RedReader" on mobile, this works. If that client would be gone, I'd also say goodbye to Reddit.

Well Reddit would have a lot less scraper traffic if it hadn't shut down the feed API 3 years ago in an attempt to keep its data closed and only distributed to Google (which paid money for it). Self-inflicted. No sympathy.

I don't understand why sites like reddit need to do any work on (unauthd) GET. They are not instant messaging platforms, they are forums. You can live with a ~1-2-5 minute delay on forums. So POSTs (from logged in users) append to a queue, and a worker does work at regular intervals, creates the HTML and that gets sent to a cache + distributed to a CDN if needed. There's no need to do work on unauthd GETs for a forum.

I know I'm not arguing with you personally here since it seems we both have a bone to pick with Reddit, but I don't understand why they can't use Anubis or whatever captcha thing I may or may not have seen on New Reddit. It irks me that they've decided they will keep hosting it (for now), but they're just going to close the gate.

And dang it, I swear to god they put in a 2s rate-limit on the page, which it seems they have left in after the transition (perhaps because it's being rolled out still, although they could be so kind as to not rate-limit me now that I've logged in). Was that all they tried??

Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.

I personally don't like it, but hard to blame them.

Outside some Stoic altruists, this is their advantage and I'd do the same.

What niche are you looking for? I usually append "forum" to topic searches when I am looking for humans with similar interests. I have found communities for all the niche topics I have looked for so far.

Let’s bring Stack Exchanges back!

IRC

I spent my whole childhood without computers and a good chunk of my teenage years without stable internet connection. Now, I have both, but due to the state of the internet, I'm returning to my old routine: A load of books to learn from and hopefully finding some time to apply the knowledge.

I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.

It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). I neglected to mention/link to this news article.

I hope the day never comes that you are booted off, however.

> For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.

I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit

> to give some examples of mod abuse

You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/saas based subreddit.

Other subreddits like /r/worldnews are clearly propaganda operations.

All of these are solvable problems but Reddit simple has no one left who'd care to solve them.

I suggest decentralized Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy https://lemmy.world/ as Reddit will never get better.

You can still enjoy Reddit and it's still a useful source of information. Just avoid the popular subs (including those you mention) or anything with 100k users or more. It's not difficult.

Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.

Powertripping mods have always been a problem with Reddit ever since they had user-created subreddits. The real problem is that Reddit has been very two-faced with what their expectations on moderators are. If we take "the purpose of a system is what it does[0]" then Reddit moderators exist primarily as unpaid volunteer employees, paid in control over the narrative of certain communities.

The flipside of powertripping mods is that Reddit does not support their moderation teams properly. Actually, that big stink people made over killing third-party Reddit client access was all powermods, because doing your job as a moderator is nigh-impossible with the standard Reddit tools. That's why we had so many subs get blacked out in protest, and why Reddit's response was to start deposing moderators until they caved.

As an example of what I mean by "do not support moderation teams", Reddit still has no good tools to prevent brigading. That is, the vaccination subs that want to talk about vaccines have no tools to prevent people from the antivax subs from coming in and changing the narrative by downvoting everything vaccine positive[1]. You generally can't stop someone from voting in your subreddit. But if they comment, you can scrutinize their post history and ban them from commenting if they're from the other sub that's brigading you.

There's also that video[2] that did the rounds a while ago of a Reddit mod trying to explain how them promoting a scam is really Reddit's fault for not paying mods. Despite the fact that this person is incredibly cringe, I actually do think he's grasping at an actual problem - it's just not one that exonerates him in any way. Reddit wants it both ways, and as a result, they get the worst people.

And they've been doing this since they were a start-up. Remember when one of Reddit's most popular subs was /r/jailbait, a forum dedicated to trading suggestive pictures of young women around? That forum was kept around because its top mod, /u/violentacrez, was doing basically all of Reddit's CSAM compliance. That's the business model of Reddit in a nutshell: find the scummiest people who are still capable of doing the job and give them total power over their domain so they don't question the lack of pay. The IPO was only tangentially related to this, in that it's when a lot of less power-trippy mods jumped ship.

[0] This is a big part of systems theory but it equally applies to critical theory

[1] The pattern is generally always "small group of people holding heretical opinions joins forum with orthodox opinion to agendapost", I've never seen the other way around - i.e. I haven't seen militantly "pro-vax" people going on anti-vaxxer subs to downvote everything.

[1] https://youtu.be/67CXV4o4dYM

Still works as long as you don't care about recent results and are okay with filtering for pre-2023 answers.

(So like, 20% as useful, but still...)

The problem isn't "Is this human or AI?" it's "Do we trust the entity with this identity or not?" meaning it's entirely possible to be anonymous but use a web-of-trust style system to promote/demote stories.

Part of the problem with that suggestion is everyone likes to tell everyone else who it is they should and shouldn't be trusting, so that dataset and acting on it would become a huge hot potato.

> They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.

I neglected to editorialize this part, but I suspect this is because *they don't have to*. I don't doubt that there are some new things on Reddit that people like, but Reddit was functionally complete as a place to interact with other people when it was launched.

I'm not an internet historian, but sites akin to Reddit have existed for a long time, and my understanding is that it happened to take over when the last forum aggregator died for whatever reason.

same. already looking into private forums for if/when that day comes.

some of them, like old homebrewing ones, are puttering along just fine

They're requiring "age" verification via Persona on old.reddit now for some accounts.

> The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.

A failure in what sense? That they can't pay the bills or that they can't see the VC-desired 10X ROI? Because my impression (as a layperson) is that the Reddit of yore could have stayed afloat from ad revenue + user donations, but it wasn't turning a huge profit. Anyone else remember the sidebar with the quota for Reddit gold for server costs? I don't remember it being short that often...

Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid for by the highest bidders.

I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.

Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.

It still works for me too (I have no account on Reddit and have no intention to have an account, even if they try to insist), and it is also possible to add .json on the end of the URL for JSON data (although, so far, I only use this feature to view pictures at the original size that are too small if I do not do this).

Yep. In 2023. Now it's an AI bot farm

I always considered the massive digg.com revolt to be the "beginning of the end". It was between Reddit and Kuro5hin in those days. Who was going be the next "Slashdot"? It's the same story over and over though. Site reaches critical mass, it needs to afford hosting, infra, salaries.... what do they do? Monetize.

iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/<n-word>s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children

new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there

I've been on there too long, it feels like they died several times over:

* CEO changes

* Creation of new / infinite scrolling UI (and app)

* Restricting content (banning racist subreddits, hiding NSFW from /all)

* Removing popular "AMA" mod (AMA subreddit is kinda dead now, it used to be a huge event)

* introduction of paid APIs / "fuck spez" campaign

I'm sure there's many more but my point is it's "died" many times over yet still it exists; the drama passed, the baseline remains.

I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point. That's the first time they tried to block the site from being mirrored.

i feel like the old.reddit feeds lately are.....engineered to be slower refreshing throughout the day? does this make sense

How did you do this? The in-house setting will revert back to new reddit.

Its the same on Android now. Just another self inflicted gun shot from reddit. I now actively avoid reddit search results. Its unfortunate. Reddit had some toxic subs but at least you could expect mostly humans participating.

If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch many YouTube vids embedded

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos

Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.

It's particularly sad when its institutions doing that who should really have the capability to host their own videos.

It's being rolled out only to some people, as noted elsewhere in this thread (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-...). Sorry, I neglected to mention/link to this news article.

They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.

Then they should nuke Old Reddit rather than offer a wishy-washy "we're being scraped" explanation. My beef is that under all of the layers of PR this ultimately comes down to an engineering liability --- which is not my problem. If they can't deal with *their* problem, don't pretend like it's *my* problem.

I'm even fine with them saying "because old.reddit.com is used by scrapers, we're locking it down" which I would still contest the need to do when other sites can use e.g. Anubis, but I probably wouldn't write a rant about it.

> Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.

To be pedantic, it is accurate, but missing context. Please forgive me for doing the same thing the Reddit PR team has done, I am not so morally just.

Arguments aside, this is a touchy spot for me because I really do view my time spent on Reddit positively, and seeing where it has gone makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.

The new interface is filled with dark patterns meant to make you waste as much time on the site. The huge amount of wasted white space making you having to scroll more and constant clicks ensures you spend more time on site and this watch more ads.

> Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs.

For the backend, sure. But HTML is HTML. HTML doesn't have "vulnerabilities" (unless you want to count javascript, which can be updated without changing the HTML) and doesn't have "maintenance costs." Nothing about updating the site for vulnerabilities requires changing the actual layout of the site.

I look forward to New HN.

Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.

Name one vulnerability