Privacy

51777 readers

552 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 7 years ago

MODERATORS

205

github/redlib: Reddit has decided to force everyone to log in · Issue #609 (github.com)

submitted 10 hours ago by FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,

And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.

Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it's very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.

Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.

In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.

We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.

"Ppl will figure a way around" you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 11 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

I guess redlib could use a login cookie with a dumb reddit account ? Less privacy focused but still accesible without all the bload and stupid ads.

[–] communism@lemmy.ml 12 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 8 hours ago

IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.

Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.

In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There'd be challenges for sure.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 7 points 8 hours ago

Thousands of people all browsing the site from the same account? Yeah Reddit would pick up on and ban that in a heartbeat.

[–] brackled@lemmy.world 12 points 10 hours ago

I dont think that would work. Not a programmer in the least bit but I'm sure Resist would recognize when a single login cookie is pulling and unreasonably amount of request from the website.

[–] nfreak@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

There's a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.

[–] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 hours ago

Yah ... I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world's point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.

There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.