This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
Good. This further hinders their ad revenue.
No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it’s a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative…
I read this as Stephen King and became very confused
One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.
His Royal Doucheness
I prefer King Steven the Turd…
It’s always been like this for potentially nsfw subreddits
It hasn’t always been like that. They only changed the NSFW pages viewable from the app a few years ago. Used to be able to browse porn to your hearts content on mobile web.
Which makes sense. This is completely different.
How so? It says the subreddit is unreviewed and could potentially contain inappropriate content… Same thing as nsfw
No, NSFW is a subreddit marked as NSFW because it allows NSFW content.
This is Reddit blocking EVERY subreddit but a select few, including ones that are not NSFW because NSFW content is not allowed.
Son, what you’re saying could be applied to the whole internet… and we ain’t putting walls for “potentially inappropriate content” everywhere. That’s what fascists nations do.
There is a huge difference between “unreviewed” and NSFW. Unreviewed is very nebulous and inexact, and let’s reddit effectively censor huge swathes of the website…unless you use their shitty app, ofc! NSFW is a very specific designation that can easily be backed up with evidence
I’ve seen this for entirely harmless subreddits and I always wondered what they meant by “unreviewed”. It’s not new in any case.
Ehhhh. This could just be their current stopgap because of all of the NSFW swaps happening. I think you are extrapolating too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I could totally see Reddit enacting this policy in their “infinite wisdom” and quietly rolling it out. But you are drawing too much from this screenshot. We need more context.
Nope. It’s because it’s easier to harvest data through the app, so they funnel people towards it.
Oh there’s no doubt they’ve slowly made it more of a pain in the ass to not use the app (while also making the app worse) but this specific screenshot is too much missing context for OP’s claim to be assumed. It could be true but we don’t know enough.
I do remember seeing this popup way before the whole API & protests debacle. The warning doesn’t even make sense, how will switching to the app to see the same content be safer?
I figured you needed to login (to apply your block list, filters, NSFW prefs, etc), but merely seeing the desktop mode of the website lets you through (not even using old.reddit). So this is another cheap way of forcing you to their cancer app.
Now you can’t even SORT comments without using the app. They are really taking all pqges off Elon’s book on ruining a website.
That was specifically for NSFW subs. What OP is showing us is not an NSFW sub. Hence the post.
I do not know why people think I tacitly approve of these changes. I do not. But what OP is claiming may or may not be true. We do not have enough information. It’s a completely separate matter from whether or not I think Reddit has been trying to funnel people towards their app, which clearly they have been for quite some time.
To be clear I just tried what the OP showed and could see the same thing, i forgot to add it in my comment
I’m not saying the screenshot isn’t real. I’m saying we don’t know what is causing that modal pop-up necessarily. It is totally possible OP is describing the exact reason, but we just don’t have enough information.
It has been like this for like a year
Yes with NSFW subs specifically. OP did not post a NSFW sub.
And I didn’t say it was specific to NSFW subs. It’s been like this for most subs since like a year. They restricted nsfw subs years ago.
Edit: It might not be exactly a year, but the point is I faced this restriction on sfw subs many times in recent memory and it’s not remotely new.
I have seen it prompt me to go do the app but never seen it require so it might be in A/B testing or a partial rollout phase. Who knows? Point is we don’t have enough info here. Either way obviously they’re going to try and drive folks to the app. Frankly i don’t care though, I purged my account and moved on. If people want to suffer reddit’s increasingly poor decision making and changes they can be my guest.
Yeah this is par for the course on NSFW subs, which are it’s makes partial sense (log in to see it). But having this on just random subreddits is a pretty terrible development. Sounds like they’re just testing the waters before every subreddit requires an about l account
How exactly does it help if I install the app and go to that subreddit? NSFW is still NSFW.
This might just be morning brain, but I honestly don’t understand the question I’m sorry
they mean why is it even necessary to use the app
Because Reddit wants us to use their app. I don’t think it should be necessary so I’m not sure why that question is directed at me or if that’s even what they’re asking tbh. But yeah obviously they want folks on the app.
I think their point is, if you’re correct and this is to protect people from unexpected NSFW content, viewing through the app would still just expose them to the unexpected NSFW content anyway.
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Centralized control and ad based model ensures this always happens… Cable teevee, now web2.0…
About time the pleb base start thinking bigger picture and voting with their feet and wallets.
What is the alternative to web 2.0?
What is web 2.0?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.
Someone misspelled “predatory” at the start of that paragraph.
The emergence of every website being gated, requiring an account and sla subscription. Also the rise of rediculous personalized advertisements and user tracking.
fediverse… you are here
We can go back to old HTML4 and CSS1 websites without any JS. What a sight to behold
I always hated that crypto shit stole the name web3/web3.0. I think for a short period it seemed decentralized apps were calling themselves web3.0 but now it’s just the fediverse I think. I like calling it the true web because the fediverse is very much like the old days where we had niche sites with their own communities, it’s just that the content isn’t locked into each site and we don’t need a million different forum accounts to participate everywhere. Like the old days but supercharged with new tech.
apace? I’d say it’s breaking new speed records
For now old.reddit still works.
Honestly I’m amazed. Old Reddit is still functionally unchanged over the past several years and honestly a great experience. And Reddit must know exactly how many people are using it because they’re visiting an alternate domain.
Can’t imagine it has much longer…
It’s only a great experience for some. The vast majority of people, attention, eyeballs, and money go to things like tiktok and Instagram.
Weeks maybe a month before old reddit goes away. Reddit has to as it loses them advertising money and those that use it are those Reddit dislike.
It’s the only way Reddit is even usable since they removed the third party apps.
You can use it on mobile by using Firefox Nightly, enabling the add-ons collection workaround, and installing the old.reddit redirect addon (and uBlock).
Granted, browsing old.reddit on a mobile screen is not a great experience but it’s leagues better than the alternative.
At that point I’m more comfortable on Lemmy instead of bending over backwards to accommodate for shitty Reddit UI anymore. I used to use old reddit but that was when I actually had time to waste in highschool pretending to do work on the school computers, now I have a newborn and would never scroll on my PC to just browse Reddit, or any social media for that matter…
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
I completely agree. I hope Lemmy will steadily add features.
There were weekend ddos attacks?
lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance
Well there’s your problem right there
Also blahaj or something
I think that was due to an update, not an attack.
Lemmy.ml also apparently went down for some amount of time.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
But we’ll see I suppose.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.
New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.
What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.
But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.
Don’t hate us cuz you ain’t us reddibros.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don’t bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie’s stream…
This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
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I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao
I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.
This right here is a big deal. Even if an instance goes down or gets attacked, the easy choice is to just browse from another instance till it is back up.
We’re kinda get vaccinated for the future with all this stress testing
Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.
Future incidents probably will still happen
It’s not a question of if, but when. The only secure computer is one that’s a mile underground, encased in concrete, and with no network connection.
And even then, it’s still not a 100% safe bet.
The most secure computer is one that’s turned off.
The spice must flow
He who controls the memes controls the universe
It does help when your opponents are stupid
Has Elon Musk secretly bought Reddit as well?
They’re following the same model of (attempted) monetization.
Meanwhile Elon admits advertiser revenue is down 50% from before, when they were already losing money.
Spez admittedly idolises Musk.
You say idolises. I say can only climax now to watching the Tesla truck launch video on full volume with a 1:100 scale model of space X rocket up his anus.
Your way is more succinct I admit.
Which like how‽
Yeah. He is literally that Twitter meme of
Elon: slams door on dick
Elon Fan boy: “masterful gambit sir”
“Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.”
Bahahaha this is GREAT! What a dipshit.
The second Digg 4.0 speedrun any%
I’d posit they went Digg v4 when they updated the site to remove the ability to see upvote and downvote counts for posts and comments, and artificially inflated scores on the same day. /all/ went from interesting stuff to… promotions, ads, and rubbish. Also when they made /popular/, then turned /all/ into… the same thing.
Just use old.reddit.com if your still going to view reddit…
Yeah, it is not as nice as the modern version (modern version iscomplete and total garbage imho), but the old.reddit.com still functions and gives you the exact same content without the hassle of the modern site. Just not as nicely formatted for mobile…
But it is only a matter of time till they get rid of it too.
Old is next, no fucking way is that shit surviving the rest of the year.
A year isn’t a long time, and old Reddit doesn’t have much traffic
Yeah they’ve been wanting it dead for years
You also have to be logged in, in order to automatically use old.reddit.com (without an extension to auto-route links back to it, at least). I know because when I used reddit in…erm, private mode, it would always route me to the new, awful ui which didn’t support RES.
From what I tested, that is a problem with Chrome itself. That problem does not seem to exist on default Firefox for Android, default Edge for Android, or even even default brave for Android.
Then again, why bother in Reddit’s case when majority of people use Chrome?
Don’t have anything iOS to test. But the problem could exist on Safari, but without iOS I couldn’t say.
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Looks like they’re using a bullshit excuse to funnel people into their mobile app.
How else are they gonna track you if you don’t use their shitty app
Somehow the same content become appropriate just because some people know how to download an app.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you’ll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It’s much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
Just search TrackerControl on the Fdroid store.
The Mozilla VPN app has a feature to block some ads and trackers on your internet connection. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features
How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android’s app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?
When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can’t actually phone home.
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.
Examples: I turned on the duckduckgo protection, opened the official app and visited a couple posts.
https://files.catbox.moe/sqbg87.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/nj7y8d.jpg
Thank you! I can’t believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That’s so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.
I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.
Yea its pure insanity and greed. This is just one of many examples of why I have dual piholes on top of ad blocking extensions.
I don’t have specific info on what’s harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I’m at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It’s absolutely wild.
Edited to add - they don’t specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.
Yeah, don’t be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.
Some apps won’t work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.
Just wish duck duck go had PWA support. It would be my default browser if so.
I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it’s in beta, for those reading who haven’t used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn’t come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something
Here’s a screenshot from Discord:
Christ.
Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it’s not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.
For example, you can’t rotate your app UI if you’re not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.
Not saying you’re wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn’t on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.
Certainly not all scary. I don’t work with these that collect the data but wonder if it isn’t just some deviceData.collect() function or something.
A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.
Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I’m sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn’t mean that they’re using it to track you.
Device boot time could be used for a user that clears their cookies to track and match sessions. Using that, and matching it with other information could give very reliable ways to fingerprint users.
This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it’s not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.
As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.
This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to track you down. It’s probably just for crash reporting etc.
Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.
Old thread, but as best I can tell, old.reddit.com is still going strong. No forcing you to sign in, no padding out the ass.
Stop. Its already dead.
