This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
That's simply not true. These bots are essentially DDOSing the entire internet, API or not.
Okay, if efficient APIs existed and they weren't incompetently failing to use them, it wouldn't be a problem. Happy now?
(I should've addressed that in my previous comment, as I was aware of how one of the Lemmy instances was taken down by scrapers the other day despite the fact that they could easily get all the content simply by consuming ActivityPub directly. But I was naively hoping it wouldn't be necessary because, as you can see from this text, it would've cluttered up my writing with double the words.)
Well they had an API, but...
so why was I getting hit with over 1,400,000 request a day to the web URI and not the API by some bot farm in China the other week. They were also hitting other lemmy instances.
I blocked the fuckers, no qualms at all.
Even if they were using the API they were not being nice about their shit.
Reddit does have RSS feeds
Its amazing to me how consistently the shitty behaviours of these billionaire techbro oligarchs impact disabled or marginalised people... even when the point isnt to directly shit on them. Its fucking vile.
I honestly think many (too many, but certainly not all! I am one) programmers are some of the immoral, ethically spurious people around in the 21st century.
Quit using reddit. I don't give a shit what your excuse is, you're propping up fascism.
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?
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.
Hey, those are real human made bots. Not shitty ai generated bots.
wrong film
Second reality on your left, past the one where Santa Clause rules the world
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.
I'll admit I'm having trouble moving from yt to peertube :/ and still use the old gmail accounts
PT, nebula, loops, odysee, and floatplane together can't fill the yt content gap.
You can start with moving to newpipe/grayjay and curate your own content which will lower your surface area.
At some point YT will manage to widevine and we'll be torrenting the best of that shit.
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.
seems like Old reddit is account-walled as of today maybe
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.
Fuck you spez.
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.
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.
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 is like when in a community i am looked at as a criminal because i don't drink alcohol.
"reddit has made a bad decision" is not news. it's entirely what is expectable of them.
even logged in I can't access old reddit anymore.
if you use the reddit enhanced suite extension you can get redirected
old.reddit redirect addon just got a update that deals with that problem.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/
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!
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.
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....
I'm not forgetting or forgiving that shit either.
SMHTML
funny, that comes just on the heels of my deciding that reddit is unsafe.
