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.

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.

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.

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.

even logged in I can't access old reddit anymore.

Fuck you spez.

This is because appending site: reddit.com to 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?

How dare you question King Steven the Turd, Greediest of Pigboys? If he proclaims HTML to be unsafe, it must be so. That's a King's job, to tell the Landed Gentry how to behave....

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.

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.

reddit stinks super bad

Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

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!

funny, that comes just on the heels of my deciding that reddit is unsafe.

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.

I get blocked and asked to login to reddit no matter if it's old or new. safereddit still works though so I'm using that for now.

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

Whats reddit?

I am so glad I'm off reddit. Even though I could use their help on a great number of subjects. Neverheless, because Isreal I can't use reddit apparently. Not permabanned yet but they are on my shit with fake violations like right away now. I abandon them after a 2nd violation, go through one every 3 to 6 months when using it.

Every single company that goes public gets worse, reddit will be no exception. Those craven amoral cockscum are not to be trusted, nor patronized with our words they can use for their own benefit.

this is like when in a community i am looked at as a criminal because i don't drink alcohol.