I haven't maintained my personal website in ages. That, of course, means it loads instantaneously, in comparison to all these Library of Congress websites.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Yesterday, I visited new Reddit. No VPN, Chrome in incognito mode, so no extensions, clickedon a link directly from Google search. Got a message that my access was blocked for security reasons. Copied the link to Firefox (with uBO and a few privacy-centric extensions), changed it to old reddit (where I was already logged in), and it worked just fine. I found out that when Reddit kills old reddit, I won't even have the choice to switch to the new one (not that I ever would) because I'd be blocked anyway.
It works through Tor, by the way. I had the same experience can't look at it but I can through Tor. They even have a .onion.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
"reddit has made a bad decision" is not news. it's entirely what is expectable of them.
I don't even understand how there are still so many comments on that site. How is anyone even accessing it anymore? I just assume it's 100% bots
The site is most hostile to visitors who aren't logged in, and the users who comment probably mainly visit the site while logged in.
Nah I have been banned loads for insanely minor stuff. I got a sitewide ban having appealed a ban for some star trek opinion I cant remember.
My account was eight years old with a decrnt history and contributions. They give mods too luch sway because mods are losers doing work for free.
Wait. How does that work? Wouldn't plain html be safer because it's JUST html?? Or are there vulnerabilities in just html that I'm not aware of?
They could use a WAF to block AI scrapers, and both Cap and Shieldstral together to block most AI posters but they won't bother.
It's unsafe for their profits.
This is because appending
site: reddit.comto a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.
The article is from 2026, not 2016? That bot-ridden Reddit? Am i in the wrong film?
Hey, those are real human made bots. Not shitty ai generated bots.
Meanwhile, I use -site:reddit.com more and more.
We are not the same. ;)
100% bot ridden. However site:reddit.com is used for the types of questions where otherwise, you just get page after page of SEO sites, which are even wose.
Or that site:url doesn't return results it used too anymore.
wrong film
Second reality on your left, past the one where Santa Clause rules the world
They've already disabled old.reddit for me. That makes it unusable, and thank you, Reddit. I actually used a domain blocker to block reddit, but generally would still be tempted to peek. Now, that is no longer the case. I, for one, am wholly in support of Reddit's new anti-advertising stance!
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.
tag users […] it's super weird seeing people from one country pretending to be from another one.
I see issues.
Implementation A: automatic by IP)
- they moved
- they use a VPN
Implementation B: field in profile settings)
- can write whatever the fuck they want
- can probably change it
In this case, tagging is something done manually and locally by the user of the extension (aka me), by going to the various subs (they're divided politically) and verifying what people are saying (non-English, local memes, culture, local news, etc.). Tags can be modified if I find out the user was badly categorized.
I've also tagged different users that were involved in viral incidents (unknown details beyond that), where it seems a whole lot of people decided to pile up on a topic.
It's interesting to see how much manipulation is going on in reddit. I've stopped interacting over there because of this. You just never know who is real, or a bot, or someone paid to post propaganda.
Edit: something I forgot to mention, and it's relevant to this blocking of non-logged in users, is that the RES tags are persistent and don't depend on an account (on my end). So I could (in the past) delete my reddit account, and still be able to see and apply tags. But now I can't do it unless I'm logged in.
Ahh, so jt's you doing the tagging of others, only visible to you.
Yes, this is not me reporting people, or anything like that. Just something I started doing years ago when I noticed some users in popular, English-speaking subs saying things that were very similar to what was said in my country. Pretending, mostly by omission, to be from the US or other first world countries. It's also not something I do 24/7 because I have better things to do, lol! But I do dedicate an hour every day to this.
Fuck you spez.
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.
I think they're more upset AI companies scraped 'em and they didn't get paid.
They told Google to pound sand and their stock took a hit. Fuck em
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.
They are in the business of attracting new users into their new algorithmic engagement hellhole now. Show any propensity of interest, and you will get sidetracked to the most godawful side-communities that seem to have emerged to engage as many victims as possible. They do not want to focus on their old users as anything less than the content they already made that makes reddit show up as free advertisement to their new base in search engines. It's all a game of "it's the algorithm's fault so you can't blame us" now.
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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.
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.
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API
Reddit does provide RSS feeds, e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/SonicTheHedgehog/.rss
Frankly, I'm surprised they still offer RSS feeds. They've been slowly but surely killing off all ways of accessing their content for years. One day they'll disable them, but for now they still work.
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.
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Well they had an API, but...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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