There’s actually a very big algorithmic difference in how the content is shown between old and new reddit.
I think that’s also why they keep trying to make old reddit unusable little by little.
Moreover, without RES, you can’t tag users, which has become essential nowadays (especially since users can now hide their comment history). It’s already known by now, but it’s super weird seeing people from one country pretending to be from another one.
Fuck you spez.
Apart from all that, what would prevent an AI knowledge thieving tool from using an actual account on Reddit?
One would need more than 1 account…
Reddit seems to be in the business of extracting as much value as it can from said forums without completely destroying them.
I call bs. It’s been completely destroyed for a while.
While I agree, More celebs than ever have been asking for comments and ideas on their reddit pages.
I agree with you. But what’s important is if they can sell anything. They destroyed their own product but they’re still pretending it has value, and maybe they can fool some investors into paying for script and AI slop.
I think they’re more upset AI companies scraped 'em and they didn’t get paid.
If you consider scraping a threat then yes plain HTML might as well be giving up. The advantage of new reddit for that is quite clear: they can collect a bunch of data about your browser before deciding if you are a bot and if the rest of the page should load. The embedded recaptcha call in the screenshots is a pretty good hint. I suspect blocking trackers on new reddit will break as soon as the scrapers move over.
As for why they don’t just kill old reddit: a significant chunk of their active posters use it and are attached to it. So if they kill it entirely they will lose content. Posters are of course logged in so this change is less likely to affect them.
if you are a bot
Or they’re bouncing banned people.
It’s shitty moves like this that have me feeling deeply grateful about the fediverse. It’s NOT without its myriad of problems, but how lucky are we? We’re insulated from all this bullshit.
Mastodon is every bit as good (and better) as it was when I started using it in 2018. Can the same be said for Reddit, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube? Absolutely the fuck not.
I’ll admit I’m having trouble moving from yt to peertube :/ and still use the old gmail accounts
You can use something like GrayJay to watch YT and other sources (and have offline playlists and subscriptions) without a google account whatsoever. That helped me make the jump to fully degoogle.
The lack of a “cross-platform” (for lack of a better term) account is why I don’t use things like GrayJay because I watch on different devices and want to ensure they all have similar recommendations and a watch history.
I use SmartTube next on tv like 80% of the time I watch YouTube.
Recommendations are their method of control. Eshew the algorithm, curate your own choices of who you watch. also drastically reduces your exposure to slop.
My recommendations have been mostly fine and just keep the channels i regularly watch at the forefront. I’ve had my account for decades now so my subscribed feed is too much of a mess to wrangle now.
That saying, I do really miss the custom folders you could once make on YouTube. Back then I would categorise certain favourite YouTubers together and mostly use that. Using something like that again would be nice.
Grayjay allows you to sync between devices if desired, including platforms. I have a desktop, laptop, and a phone, and I can sync everything locally by just pairing the devices and having them at least 2 active for the transfer.
So another has to be active at the same time as accessing another? I can’t always guarantee that so that’s a bit too much of a faff around and having to do that multiple times a day would be annoying. I’m glad it’s there for those if works for, if it works that way though still think it’s not right for me sadly.
PT, nebula, loops, odysee, and floatplane together can’t fill the yt content gap.
You can start with moving to newpipe/grayjay and curate your own content which will lower your surface area.
At some point YT will manage to widevine and we’ll be torrenting the best of that shit.
Ahead of the curve, already downloaded all of the greats onto my selfhosted storage.
reddit stinks super bad
a corpse of a platform
I now browse Wikipedia. Please don’t screw me over Wikipedia, I donated five bucks to one of your nags once.
For anyone who doesn’t know, you can download Wikipedia and host it yourself! I got the top 50k version (~7G) on my RPI3 and now no matter what fuckery they pull or the government pulls, I’ve got a pretty decent source of general information.
Could you share what you did to achieve this? I’ve been planning on doing just that, and have it auto-update every week or so (keeping the previous versions archived, of course) by using kiwix-serve for a static ‘.zim’ file and maybe a cron job for the auto-update. But if you have a better solution, I’d love to know. The deployment I am planning is kind of convoluted to be honest.
No, that’s exactly what I did, I’m running kiwix-serve, but I’m not going to bother updating it because I’m really worried about information degrading now that fascists are basically calling the shots on everything (and WP’s jackboot co-founder has a hard on for it). If I feel enough time has gone by to warrant an update I’ll just do it manually.
What year was your cutoff?
About 6 months ago.
How do you do that?
You run a server on a machine inside your house, it can be any computer on your local LAN/wifi, but it’s obviously best if it’s a machine that’s always on. I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (these can be had for about $50) that I have plugged into my wifi router and it’s running a little program called Kiwix-Server (free and open source). You download the WP file (it’s a huge single file with a .zim extension) and point the server to it and boom.
I am currently pretty tapped out on all storage and backup drives but if I had space this post would have motivated me. Just sayin
Yeah, I did that about 20 months ago (wonder why?) and the problem is, there it sits but I forget where on my LAN I stored it, how to access it - I suppose, were I absolutely desperate, I could launch a several hours research project and find it, maybe even figure out how to access (I believe I stored README with it about how to do all that), but… why? And, even worse, one why? might be to see how articles have drifted over time, which I guarantee they have and continue to do, Wikipedia is actually quite fluid, but does knowing how current articles compare to the ones you archived in 2024 do anything of greater value for you than the negative value of being pissed off at how the world is lying to itself (same as it ever has…)?
I have my Pi-Hole doing DNS for me so I just set up an easy to remember redirect, wikipedia.local. I did it more for independence. I got Home Assistant and Voice PE so I could have a local smart speaker to get big tech out of my house. I don’t do anything on the cloud, so it stands to reason that if I want to make sure I always have access to rudimentary information, having my own version of WP is nice. I also just think it’s kind of cool and it never begs me for money.
funny, that comes just on the heels of my deciding that reddit is unsafe.
You’re just now realizing it?
not really but it make for good joke pacing.
i’ve been here for a while. and not there for a while.
The entire fucking point of the Web was to make information as easily-accessible as possible, structured and semantically tagged, and consumable by humans and further machine transformation alike. “Scraping” is facilitated by design!
Using Javascript to deliberately break that is evil and every programmer who participates it is a piece of shit. No exceptions.
Its amazing to me how consistently the shitty behaviours of these billionaire techbro oligarchs impact disabled or marginalised people… even when the point isnt to directly shit on them. Its fucking vile.
I honestly think many (too many, but certainly not all! I am one) programmers are some of the immoral, ethically spurious people around in the 21st century.
That is why they want AI to replace programmers. AI morals are programmed, so they can be designed to do shitty things that a normal person would refuse.
That’s true but they probably didn’t account for AI data scrapers ramfucking your server so they could steal all the value you assembled for general consumption and serve it themselves for profit.
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API. The “ramfucking” is caused by the attempt to block bots; it is entirely self-inflicted.
Remember, it’s all our content to begin with and Reddit does not have any right to try to lock it up for itself.
That doesn’t mean I like all the AI bullshit going on, BTW. But the problem is the generation of the slop, not the data accessibility.
Well they had an API, but…
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API
That’s simply not true. These bots are essentially DDOSing the entire internet, API or not.
Okay, if efficient APIs existed and they weren’t incompetently failing to use them, it wouldn’t be a problem. Happy now?
(I should’ve addressed that in my previous comment, as I was aware of how one of the Lemmy instances was taken down by scrapers the other day despite the fact that they could easily get all the content simply by consuming ActivityPub directly. But I was naively hoping it wouldn’t be necessary because, as you can see from this text, it would’ve cluttered up my writing with double the words.)
so why was I getting hit with over 1,400,000 request a day to the web URI and not the API by some bot farm in China the other week. They were also hitting other lemmy instances.
I blocked the fuckers, no qualms at all.
Even if they were using the API they were not being nice about their shit.
Reddit does have RSS feeds
But we all know AI companies are unethically scraping and selling shit back to us right? I just really need people to acknowledge that.
It is the “selling shit back to us” specifically, not the “scraping,” that’s the unethical part. If the AI companies were doing the same scraping (and destructive rare book scanning, for that matter), but were using the data to populate archive.org, would it still be a problem? I would argue “no.”
I think it would be a problem because the scrapers are hammering all types of websites from small forums to reddit with tens of thousands of unique ip addresses at a time. Websites that have neither the money, hardware, or protection had to figure out solutions really quick or suffer what is essentially a constant ddos attack. This is the reality of the web now, it’s just an incredibly hostile place.
deleted by creator
Hmffh, anti-copyright. After all, every view is a copy to your machine. Just information being free.
Whether or not it requires a login for old.reddit.com depends on client IP. I see this on a few networks, not on others.
Whats reddit?
typo, it’s spelled “read it”.
even logged in I can’t access old reddit anymore.
old.reddit redirect addon just got a update that deals with that problem.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/
if you use the reddit enhanced suite extension you can get redirected
If I wasn’t permabanned I might bother trying work arounds.
I just checked my old.reddit login on the desktop… still working just fine today. I don’t think you need work-arounds, you just need to access it without any work-arounds.
You think that if I do the thing that’s not working that it will somehow work.
working for me
How dare you question King Steven the Turd, Greediest of Pigboys? If he proclaims HTML to be unsafe, it must be so. That’s a King’s job, to tell the Landed Gentry how to behave…
I’m not forgetting or forgiving that shit either.
I get blocked and asked to login to reddit no matter if it’s old or new. safereddit still works though so I’m using that for now.
