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  • kevinsky@feddit.nl
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    5 hours ago

    Stop using platforms that are actively locking you out. The reason they keep doing this is because people keep complying.

  • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net
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    5 hours ago

    Nice. That is just enough of a barrier to stop be using reddit entirely. Not posted in years but sometimes read when bored enough.

    • lepthesr@sh.itjust.works
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      2 minutes ago

      Same, I’m 100% here now.

      I still lurked since the api bs and after close to 20 yrs on reddit they pull this crap. They can get fucked.

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 hours ago

    Don’t log into an account.

    Browse the Internet like normal.

    If x.com or reddit.com won’t let you view without privacy, they’re dead and useless.

    Have some spine; lead, and stop following and being led by evil people and companies.

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        1 hour ago

        Tumblr and Pinterest are on life support.

        Insta and reddit still have enough inertia.

        If they don’t make you log in, they lose sigint.

        IF they do make you log in, they burn activity and users

        Reddit will eventually fizzle out, Just another in a long chain of bad ideas trading short gains over long life.

  • Rolivers@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 hours ago

    Reddit is such a disgusting shit heap these days. There are still some subreddits worth lurking in but the majority is flooded with AI posts.

    It used to be so nice.

      • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 hours ago

        To be fair, the likely reason in this case is AI companies mass-downloading Reddit posts for their training runs. You can’t really cache the internet, so from what I understand, every training run they scrape this stuff anew.

        For many smaller sites, it’s effectively a denial-of-service attack, which is why lots of them have put up this thing:
        Anubis bot protection screen

        For Reddit, it might just be additional traffic that they have to pay for and which doesn’t give them any profit. Although, if Reddit is still as unstable as it was years ago, I also wouldn’t be surprised, if they got DoSed by that a few times as well.

        • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          What you say is true, but not the reason. Part of reddit’s business model is selling its data to AI companies. So they just don’t want to give it away for free

        • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          I think it was a sarcastic attack on the claim that forcing you to log in for read-only access to the website is in any way keeping anything safer than it was.

  • laurenceOfSuburbia@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Yeah the level of bullshit from reddit is more than what I’m willing to tolerate so I’m permanently lemmy now. I ran reddit without apps, on firefox but they started blocking that. Every small thing results in a ban and I’m tired of changing accounts. Done.dont need it.

    I can change my mac, get a new IP, get a private VPN but it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore to have a normal discussions on reddit without getting banned.

    If I have a question - AI now resolves 99% of it. Everything else and discussions - Lemmy is fine and I can use a normal app with no ads

    • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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      49 minutes ago

      If you are getting banned from new accounts on reddit, you probably were saying or doing some pretty swarmy things.

    • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net
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      5 hours ago

      I wish AI could solve 99% of my questions. Asked it about growing some veg and it told me to plant seeds to a plant that isn’t even grown from seed.

    • Widdershins@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      After the API thing broke the moderator tools, abusing the report button was the only way to protest

  • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    They don’t even try to lie effectively. Why in Hell’s name would you need to log in to “keep reddit safe” just to lurk?

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
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      2 hours ago

      Easier to track users and produce verifiable "x potential viewers " to present to advertisers.

      They’ve wanted to kill old.reddit for a while. It doesn’t support advertisers or tracking the way they want. Also RES is still a thing on it. They’re too chickenshit to do so though, since the actual content generators and knowledgebase still use it. This is another attempt to slip the noose tighter

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      15 hours ago

      My only guess is because they want to force AI scrapers to pay for access. And most scrapers probably work best on old.reddit because they keep changing new Reddit’s layout. As a programmer, if you’re going to code something to access a site, (and you don’t want to constantly have to rework it every time they make a small UI update) you’re going to use the version that never changes. So by forcing them to log in, it makes tracking the individual users (and thus, identifying potential unauthorized scraper accounts) easier.

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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        8 hours ago

        But can’t you use very simple agentic AI to constantly update the code for web scrapers on new reddit? From what I understand that is the kind of coding LLM can do well and you can just unit test for errors and feed it back to the LLM until it works. Even requiring accounts, creation can be automated using LLMs too.

        This sounds like it a loosing proposition and will only piss off hardcore users. Not that this would stop them. But I don’t think protection from web scrapers is a good explanation. Probably it’s just enshittification, forcing users to use their new interface to optimize business metrics. Someone is going to get a bonus because they improved the short sighted metrics.

      • laurenceOfSuburbia@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        CPMs are better if traffic is not bots. Same at my company we have to use cloudflare. They essentially don’t know who is human and who is OpenClaw anymore or scraper.

    • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      It’s up to you on whether you believe it or not. But the reasons they’re giving are that they’ve got protections going on when you access new Reddit that they aren’t able to implement on Old Reddit. Again, this is coming from the announcement from the Reddit admins. It sounds plausible to me and I really don’t care to argue this. I’m just passing along what they actually said.

          • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            Malicious intent to sell the free content that reddit sells? The only thing this is protecting is profits. They’re just pulling up the ladder, that’s all.

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          Exactly. That’s why I mentioned lurking. I haven’t participated in reddit for quite awhile, not after getting permabanned for dubious reasons. But I’ll still lurk, especially on some of the niche community subreddits. I also cannot fathom what someone just reading text might need protection from. I can certainly see it for commenting, but you’ve always had to be logged in to do that anyway.

          • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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            47 minutes ago

            It’s to stop automated scrapping. Old reddit has less/little/no protections from that. New reddit has a lot more in place. So when you log in (which now you can only make an account with new reddit), it tracks a lot more information so it’s more difficult to get around bans. Basically stops the majority of automated scraping, which reddit doesn’t want.