They've recently started blocking access to old.reddit.com without logging in.

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.

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.

Protections from.. users reading text?

I second some_kind_of_guy's comment. What exactly do you need protection from while just lurking?

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:

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.

You cannot, and never could, post without logging in.

Porque no los dos? Of course don't feed reddit with content for them to sell, or aimlessly browse the frontpage. If you need information on a niche subject, or refer to something that happened in 2011, don't burden yourself to avoid reddit. Just set yourself to be in read only mode with ad blockers to the max so you get more from them then they get from you.

It is still unfortunately the go-to landing spot for basically any “I’m having an obscure tech issue and only one person posted about this specific error code six years ago” type of search.

I use both redlib and piefed on a daily basis.

I haven't logged in to reddit for years, but there's loads more content there for niche topics.

If you host a SearXNG instance you can replace Reddit links with Redlib links, just add this to your settings.yaml.

 hostnames:
   replace:
     '(.*\.)?reddit\.com$': 'lib.your.domain'
     '(.*\.)?redd\.it$': 'lib. your.domain'

It’s clear that Redlibs maintainer is burnt out, as were the LibReddit folks who developed and maintained it initially before it was forked. Software like this is an endless cat and mouse chase, Reddit break something, the community works around it, rinse and repeat.

It’s why we don’t see Bibliogram around anymore, Instagram made their APi unbearable to work with.

In regard to the difficulty of keeping a Redlib instance alive, currently most of the discussion occurs in one issues post on GitHub, and people have suggested other docker images that currently work.

I think it has always worked for me. The instances break regularly, but I just redirect to another one with libredirect.

hyper-tls fork(pr#509) has been pretty stable for a few months now. But yes, it is unfortunate that it will succumb to cat and mouse game eventually

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.

Platforms with followers where it makes sense to have them, friends and followers on reddit always seemed odd to me

Exactly why I'm here. I used RIF exclusively for a decade, then they killed it. I suffered with their browser version, but now they killed r/all and I ditched for good.

But why. It's too much bullshit from reddit, just intolerable at this point.

Change your social media.

Why should I change when it's Reddit that sucks?