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Reddit Starts Blocking Mobile Website, Pushing Users to App Instead (www.macrumors.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 182 points 6 months ago (65 children)

My theory is that they realize that a significant number of power users on the site are still using old.reddit.com, so they are keeping it going because getting rid of it would turn the website into a ghost town. They will continue to push their app and new website because they can push more advertising through it to the people that are just there to consume.

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  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of people that only interact with social media through apps in this day and age. Even on Reddit I would be surprised if the old design is more than a few percent of the user base.

    It honestly does raise the question of why they are still maintaining the old UI. It seems like it would be an annoying legacy product to keep alive for a tiny part of the user-base. Perhaps it’s used as an API stability canary or something though.

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Not at all. I'm comparing the vast majority that only consume to a small minority that actually interact and provide the content that others consume. Without that minority all that would be left is bot comments.

    Reddit pushes an ad and tracking infested app to make money off the consumers while doing the minimum to keep the content submitters on the site even if they make no money off them. I wouldn't be surprised if old reddit was a couple percent of users but 25% of the comments that aren't bots.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    I would like to agree that most of the original contributions on Reddit today come from people who use old Reddit.

    I know this because while I have not had an account there for a while; when I was there, I networked with others to know trends of how they connected

    I don’t think this preference has changed , and probably even more use old now

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  • [–] 65 points 6 months ago (40 children)

    You think there are still redditors around?

    I think it's just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.

    A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those "catch phrases" then I see a few votes.

    I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.

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  • [–] 31 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    One thing I've noticed lurking on AITA is that there's suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you'd see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.

    It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It's still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.

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  • [–] 28 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?

    I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.

    They can't use FACTS, their bible doesn't have any good ones.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    You think there are still redditors around?

    I think it’s just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.

    I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I've been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they're better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.

    * my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.

    Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.

    Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it's all speculation that can't be objectively disproven* so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (15 children)

    How would that work?

    We are all on different instances. With different algorithms, technology, and differing filters. The code doesnt support what your saying.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago (5 children)

    I dont understand. Can you point to where in the code it has this? The algorithm/stack is open to anyone.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

    Yep i can. Ive helped out on both lemmy, piefed, mastodon, gotosocial, peertube and others. Little things mind but yeah its my day job.

    Theres a queue that is part of different instances. What can happen is posts/comments get backed up and the queue takes them all in. When an outage or slowdown happens it can bog down certain servers. Threadiverse (piefes/lemmy/mbin/etc...) up/down votes, comments, posts, etc... it gets slower as more instances connect to others. Its unfortunate but its part of the fediverse protocol. Piefed has some advances there, but it can still get bogged down sometimes.

    Im not saying thats definitively what it is, but ive been on the other side of this phenomenon a couple of times when my lemmy and then later piefed instance had a new instance sync with it. Lemmy.world has had this issue for a while since its one of the biggest.

    The way to test is to sent the instance in quesion a POST request with a comment OR use a known good instance (like piefed) and check the logs. It usually comes back with either a 200 immediately (which is good) or theres a HUGE delay.

    Most of these instances are very much volunteer efforts.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    It would be VERY difficult. I have no idea what im looking for other than the delay or block. And im not seeing anything today. If you can give me an example, I can check in and reproduce. Otherwise its nettle/haystack.

    It might very well be a bug.

    I can see it being frustrating. But thats what community software is. The good news is that even just reporting the issue can help us all out!

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.

    Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md

    You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.

    I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc... but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).

    One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.

    Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That's quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they'd have to stream a bunch of fake events.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I think it’s just troll farms and bots

    It's mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    Of course there are redditors around; I'm another one of them. We frequent the cool subs like the very human /r/FreeGameFindings and ignore the rest of the noise. Milk Reddit for the best of what it has to offer and dismiss the rest. I see nothing wrong with this approach for as long as Lemmy is still budding, relatively speaking.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago*

    It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.

    Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    I haven't checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they're not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!

    On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming

    As well as flashlights.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Honestly I find the website borderline unreadable.

    On mobile website you haven’t been able to view and replies for a long time. On desktop it’s just so fucking stupid.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    Why do you think you're able to detect a bot by their Reddit comments? I strongly suspect you're assuming low-effort, poorly-written comments are bots, when in reality they're probably just dumb people.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    I am 72 years old and I have been on Reddit for 20 years.

    I can tell when key words are suppressed by posting the same thing without using those key words.

    I'm not just watching what they say, I'm watching what they do, and how FAST they do it.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    I've been on Reddit for decades too, and I disagree with you.

    1. Assuming that a post wasn't made and made visible because it has key words that were censored isn't based on logic; you're guessing.

    2. I type fast enough that to a 72 year old it might look like magic or a bot.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    I have the same thought. I still use Reddit, 100% on Old Reddit and I think objectively you could say I contribute a lot in terms of comments and participation. If old Reddit goes away, I'm done.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    they realize that a significant number of power users on the site are still using old.reddit.com

    Wonder how they feel about people like me, who use a third party Reddit app on Android? They get no ad revenue from me, and I don't contribute either.

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  • [–] 14 points 6 months ago (9 children)

    how are you still doing that, I thought they all shut down like three years ago with the whole API debacle

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Reddit blocked third party apps but they didn't block personal-use API access. With the help of some apk-editing tools that I won't mention here, you could import your own API key into a third party apps and continue using it fully (including posting and commenting). I'm using Reddit Sync still.

    My API key still works, but my understanding is Reddit recently blocked the generation of new keys. So at some point my key will probably die too. At that point, that's the end of Reddit for me.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I think there are still "read-only" clients. I haven't looked in awhile, but I know there were some available via F-Droid (alternative app store) long after the API was cut off. I assume they use standard web scraping for grabbing content.

    Also, I'm not sure if it still works, but I think you can still use open source clients that rely on the API, you just have to compile/build them yourself using your account's own personal API key.

    I haven't looked into either of these in a while and definitely not an expert on the topic, but I'm sure if you're interested there's enough info out there to find a solution that works for you.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Sadly this is (very popular, according to comments here and on Reddit) copium. old.reddit.com visits are a rounding error, per the traffic stats of the normie subreddit I moderate:

    Most people simply do not have the technical acumen and tenure on Reddit to know to type in that subdomain. As always, relevant XKCD (posted today on Lemmy, funnily enough):

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I said it in another response, it isn't visits I'm talking about, it's about who generates content on the website and what percentage of those users use old.reddit.

    It isn't copium either, we are speculating why Reddit keeps up the old version at all, after all this time they must have some analytics that it would significantly harm the site to disable it.

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