Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included

We were told that the boycotts last year were the end of reddit, or at least a substantial brain drain. Reddit was going to be a lawless wasteland because no mod would accept tending the garden anymore.

Reddit is now a public company with a CEO that just got a huge compensation package while mods still work for free. Far from lawless, far from being a wasteland.

Even the hacker community is still using reddit despite everything that's happened. This probably means that it hasn't lost any of its value.

Blocked VPN access or not, reddit already won.

handsclean · a year ago

Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were before the exodus, and bot content is visibly more prevalent. If you expected the website to die overnight, that was just an unrealistic definition of failure for a large website. Digg, the failure that founded Reddit, is still alive today. MySpace still exists. AOL is still selling dial-up internet. Failure at this scale is a slow slide to irrelevance, and Reddit is well on its way. The only winner here is the CEO.

pmdr · a year ago

> Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were

Is that really a reliable metric for activity there? Genuinely curious. What if more content is being published and popular posts don't get as much voting because of the churn?

> before the exodus

Exodus to where, exactly? A few thousand users switching to some obscure alternative isn't much. Sure, people left Twitter, but Threads and Bluesky are way bigger than any reddit alternative.

rkagerer · a year ago

The only winner here is the CEO.

And the whiz kid who launches the new and improved competitor. Every failure story like this is also a seed of opportunity.

aitchnyu · a year ago

Digg became a newsletter with cat pics, cute "you matter, don't give up" messages and other assorted clickbait. And it was forced upon the former userbase.

dotnet00 · a year ago

I do still insist that they've suffered a brain drain that has not recovered. A lot of niche communities are instead mainly on discord now (which is arguably worse due to no search engine visibility) and when I stumble onto reddit looking for info on something technical, I often see deleted/edited out comments instead of potentially useful responses.

Sleepful · a year ago

For anyone reading this and wondering about other good platforms... Discourse [1] is awesome. Of course, someone has to pay for the hosting. Can't have someone else's cake and eat it too.

[1] https://discourse.org/

illiac786 · a year ago

That. So much deleted content…

echohack5 · a year ago

Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.

What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.

NegativeK · a year ago

Respectfully, this is a small sampling of what's happening.

Reddit and Twitter, the two posterchildren of poor management, have plenty of actual interaction. They also have a significant amount of shitty noise, which is incredibly off putting, but the average person is still more likely to go there than where our niche communities end up.

They might be dying slowly, but they're not even on life support yet.

codingdave · a year ago

Sure, it is public, but the price is going down, not up, as the IPO was just the exit strategy for all the investors who funded a site that never made a profit. And the overall vibe of the contents is bots and memes, not substantial content. There are exceptions to that, but that is exactly what they are - exceptions.

I'm not saying it'll be dead next week or anything... on the contrary, it probably will find a groove to survive in. But "substantial brain drain" sounds like a perfect description of what it really is.

Intralexical · a year ago

Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities.

What, you want tumbleweeds to physically roll across your screen when you look up "reddit.com"?

It's just a website. Use it, or don't. Save what you want, knowing it won't last. Sucks, but the Internet was meant for document delivery, not to become the one and only permanent home of certain social interactions.

rchaud · a year ago

> Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities

Which would make it completely useless as an ad platform, which is the only way Reddit makes money.

add-sub-mul-div · a year ago

The vast majority of people turned out to be highly passive and docile in the face of extreme enshittification. Sad, but that's where we're at.

Reddit only "won" the Eternal September types. The others have moved on.

itsoktocry · a year ago

Uh, reddit already won what exactly? How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special

Communities come and go. They are 95% reliant on the members, and some of their recent moves are adversarial. Everything there is becoming corporate, even the porn.

asdff · a year ago

More active users than ever before just in the last 2 quarters of 2023 after stagnating for years. Its almost like the API thing backfired and that bad press was in fact good press and got more people onto reddit.

pmdr · a year ago

> Uh, reddit already won what exactly?

The right to do whatever they want and still keep the communities and content with pretty much no impact on their bottom line thereafter.

> How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special

You raise capital if investors believe in the direction the company is heading. They're betting on reddit to make them money.

> Everything there is becoming corporate

Reddit didn't start out that way, at least it wasn't the impression that seasoned internet users got. It used to be developer-friendly and open, whether you were using Tor, a VPN or a datacenter's IP.

It's, of course, their right to steer the company as they see fit and towards profitability. My only wish is that people providing valuable content and moderation work would start to see that the company's values have changed.

Takennickname · a year ago

Reminds me when someone declared that phpBB won.

commandlinefan · a year ago

Well, that’s just it - we can have a lawless wasteland, or we can have arbitrary and capricious censorship. There’s no in between. If prefer the lawless wasteland (I remember them, they were much better than what we have now). Unfortunately, I’m in the minority.

wolverine876 · a year ago

The only thing stopping people is defeatism. People organized effective mass movements before the Internet - now it's infinitely easier, and so is the defeatist propaganda.

The Reddit CEO has been successful - one absolutely necessary reason is a lack of defeatism.

JeremyNT · a year ago

It's just so much better than anything else even despite it all.

Which, honestly, is perplexing. It doesn't seem like it would take much capital to replicate Reddit pre-enshittification, but nobody seems to even be trying.

I guess nobody can imagine making money off of a less shitty Reddit. Maybe the things about it that suck for users are the only things that make business people excited.

al_borland · a year ago

Before Reddit (and digg, and Facebook groups), forums were pretty popular. I was on many of them and they were simply run by passionate members of a community, not someone looking to scale to a multi-billion dollar company. It was just some guy willing to burn a little time and a little cash to talk to like-minded people about stuff they found interesting. It’s expensive when consolidated into one mega-site like Reddit, but very manageable for a smaller site. The people I know/knew running them were average people with average jobs.

commandlinefan · a year ago

Lots of people tried (voat comes to mind), but they ran into the same advertiser pressure monetization problem that pushed reddit to become the abomination that it is today. For whatever reason, hosting is expensive, and too few people are interested in making it truly accessible.

yieldcrv · a year ago

Populist protests usually fail, they only get their way when moneyed special interests are also lobbying for the same policy change out of coincidence, their interests usually pass regardless of public interest or not

People waste their energy and call it “using their platform”, or just reminding people how irrelevant and inconsequential they are but bragging about it

Yes, same here.

Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.

And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.

doodlebugging · a year ago

>it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.

Very true. Over the last few months as more bots and reposters come online you have seen the subreddits bleed back into related subreddits. Most of the posts on /r/popular (landing point for navigating to old.reddit.com when not logged in) come from subs that never appeared before last summer's mod rebellion about 3rd party apps. Subs like /r/AITAH, /r/SipsTea, /r/TikTokCringe, and several others hit /r/popular regularly.

/r/news will see stories that are functionally dead with no comment activity hang around for multiple days. The sad fact that the mods for the sub require you to have an email associated with your account keeps me from adding any content there since I don't give that out.

A lot of content that rightfully belongs in one sub is cross-posted to related subs for additional karma. /r/pics is one targeted sub that catches a lot of content that normally one would only find on /r/oldschoolcool.

It's almost like reddit is returning to the pre-subreddit days where there were no boundaries on the content that one would see on the main, and only, page as it updated. Memes, rick-rolls, news, questions, etc all just fell into line and as the site grew, faded quickly into the mist.

With all this in mind I have been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.

If the post involved answering a question commonly encountered on the sub, one that would be easily discovered if reddit had a high-functioning search functionality, then for the most part, I leave it in place. Most subs I interact with are DIY type subs for automobiles, home projects, etc. and there are problems common to some models of car, truck, etc that people always ask about so removing that content seems wrong.

It is sad to see a tool like reddit become such an enormous pile of suck but I think it was inevitable.

Y_Y · a year ago

> Yossarian's censoring rules

> Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. (Heller, '61)

asdff · a year ago

Kind of a waste of your own effort going through your post history when everything is crawled already

Deleted Comment

scarface_74 · a year ago

> been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.

So you don’t see that you are being part of the problem?

goplayoutside · a year ago

If Lemmy had an automod I'd happily try to move the niche communities I help mod over, but without even the basics (regex rules + mod queue) attempting to mod any sizeable community is ime an exercise in frustration, making Lemmy essentially useless for us.

That's a real shame, because otherwise it looks like great software. I've got an offline instance sitting on AWS since last summer just waiting for any bit of progress, but gave up hope some time ago.

culopatin · a year ago

Maybe if I was a teenager again I would spend the time to figure out how to use Lemmy, but at this age: I go in, curiosity takes me to “instances”, I see a million. Click a few, many are dead and I start wondering “wait, I have to navigate through this sea of non descriptive URLs that tell me nothing about the instance to get to the data?”

And even if that’s not true, that’s about where I drop it, because it seems like a big climb for something I already know won’t work as a Reddit replacement because there is no way my friends will be convinced to put this kind of effort, and because it’s hard to discover.

dhalucario · a year ago

https://github.com/hjalp/automod

It seems like someone has made an autoposter. Maybe someone could have a look to extend it.

rglullis · a year ago

Please tell me which communities you mod, and if it's not anything 18+ I can help you with moderation and use it to guide the development of the moderation dashboard I started working on.

danslaboudoir · a year ago

The day Apollo ceased connecting is the day I deleted my account. I wish Steve and the crew my very worst.

marcrosoft · a year ago

I thought we all quit when they disabled API access and ruined Apollo. People are still using Reddit?

EasyMark · a year ago

tens of millions a day, I sometimes wonder why people take on these false "people are still using __________?" when they know that people are still using twitter and reddit and facebook. Do you have any explanation as to why one would act pseudo-shocked? Is there a point?

bluish29 · a year ago

Apollo can still be used with sideloading a patch that allows you to enter new API key. As a single user it is hard to get to the limit.

badrabbit · a year ago

What is the alternative? lemmy and mastodon are protocols, what specific site with high engagement and good (not over zealous) moderation is worth checking out?

HN is nice to lurk but you really gotta be a conformist. It all just feels like tribal bubbles. It really is making me appreciate free speech, I prefer the days when horrible people were allowed platform/reach. The state of society right now (not just on the internet) is not compatible with liberty and free thinker idealisms.

smokel · a year ago

The alternative is to simply not use it. Read books, hang out with friends, do some tinkering.

Free thinking is perfectly well possible without Reddit, in our very society. Unless you have some really weird thoughts? Rubbing these thoughts in other peoples faces may not be viable, but it has never been, as far as I recall. And I'm glad for it.

al_borland · a year ago

X/Twitter is supposed to be the free speech platform.

A course I’m taking told students to post daily updates there for some accountability and community. I signed up to do that. I followed some normal stuff as part of the onboarding (some tech people, some local news, a couple podcasters… only 17 people) and the “for you” feed it gave me is nightmare fuel. To be fair, I turned off the content filters, as I do on every site, but it’s usually not that bad. I’m thinking of turning the filters back on to see what that looks like. So far it hasn’t really been a community I want to get invested in. Not to mention the comments on posts are littered with completely unrelated posts. A 3rd party app would go a long way, but like Reddit, Twitter killed that off.

rrr_oh_man · a year ago

I love /r/askhistorians, though. Excellent posts.

blakblakarak · a year ago

This (and r/stopdrinking and r/peloton for race feeds) are my only reasons to visit nowadays.

ktosobcy · a year ago

Unfortunatelly it won't work/happen... even after huge protest and backlash reddit is still strong and go-to-place :-(

gamepsys · a year ago

I hear a lot of people talk like this, and I understand that reddit has huge traffic numbers. However, for me Reddit peaked in interesting content around 2013, and I stopped daily browsing in 2015. Sometimes some subreddits have interesting posts, but interesting content is far from the norm. Now each subreddit feels like it is having the same discussion again and again, and the median post is a meme or some chat-gpt generated text dump. As Reddit became more and more popular the most upvoted posts became more and more mass-appeal and easily digested content.

Other platforms have taken it's place as where the truly interesting discussions are happening. Twitter and Discord being the biggest two.

omoikane · a year ago

I have observed a recurring pattern of "this popular place is doing something I don't like! Let's all move to a less popular place, that will show them!" Time and time again, the people who made the move learned that they were the minority in what they didn't like. Also, while the old place might have a greater variety of people (good and bad), the new place is often filled with many people who were angry about the old place (maybe mostly "good", but makes a lot of angry posts).

So now, people who are at this newer, possibly better, but quieter and angrier place, they have to wonder if they made a good move. Sometimes, with enough patience, the new place do eventually turned out to be just as great. But usually my observation is that people just give up and leave, possibly returning to the old (still popular) place.

Tijdreiziger · a year ago

Ain’t that the truth.

I tried moving to Lemmy, but turns out that the only people there are other techies who are mostly interested in techie topics (and I already have HN for that).

If you want a broader perspective or you want to discuss non-techie topics, Reddit is still the place to be, for better or worse.

Dwedit · a year ago

The protest was done in the worst possible way.

You don't PRIVATE the subreddits. You keep them visible, lock out new posts, and direct visitors to a successor website to continue the discussion.

bwanab · a year ago

All true, but I haven't found any forum that works for very localized (geographically or otherwise) interests than reddit. I've long ago stopped looking at or participating in any non-localized subreddit.

redox99 · a year ago

Around 2 years ago I got incorrectly banned site wide for 3 days for "ban evasion". Haven't used it ever since (except through google searches). There's no downside to leaving reddit really.

EasyMark · a year ago

probably the cabal of mods that run the more popular subreddits. I deleted an account because of that; I had posted in one of the antivax subs about how stupid people in there were being and the popular reddit mod cabal sentenced anyone who posted ever in a slew of those antivax subs to "bans" and if you used a different account you were "ban evading". It's a petty power play by very small minded people to hurt those even though reddit possesses no mechanism to know you are "banned" in a sub other than a one time message. It just shows how pathetic and small their lives must be to try and reach out and cause other folks trouble

butz · a year ago

There still is a lot of useful information posted on Reddit. Was it scraped somewhere for preservation purposes?

rglullis · a year ago

https://lemmit.online and https://zerobytes.monster mirror the posts into their own instances

https://alien.top mirrors the posts and comments from some communities into a set of topic-specific instances and is my project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy. Visit https://portal.alien.top to get started.

no_time · a year ago

Actually yes, the entire thing: https://academictorrents.com/details/9c263fc85366c1ef8f5bb9d...

Nobody is actively hosting it with a frontend though.

tootie · a year ago

Losing the VPN crowd will cost them next to nothing.

hipadev23 · a year ago

A vast amount of reddit “users” are persona bots behind proxy and vpn networks.

lxgr · a year ago

Only because they've already lost most of what is actually valuable (to most early users; maybe not to advertisers).

someonehere · a year ago

I gave up over a year ago. Best decision ever. It’s just garbage now that gets posted.

kilroy123 · a year ago

I did several years ago and it's been great.

I'm still a bit hooked on HN. But not nearly as bad. ;)

My strategy was to slowly unsub from everything until it got so boring I just stopped visiting all together.

itsoktocry · a year ago

That's why reddit, as an investment, is so strange.

Running forums as a business is antithetical to the needs of the community. Fortunately, there's always "another forum". Quitting is really easy. I know because I've been doing this for almost 30 years.

smokel · a year ago

> Let's just QUIT using Reddit.

This suggests that you need others to join you in quitting. Why not simply quit yourself?

mitthrowaway2 · a year ago

People want to talk in the place where other people will listen. People want to listen in the place where other people are talking. If you walk out by yourself and end up standing in an empty room, you'll just end up turning back.

smolder · a year ago

More people leaving means less FOMO. Or perhaps they want to harm reddit in some karmic justice way.

racked · a year ago

If not site:reddit.com, what am I going to type into Google to get any kind of reasonable search result?

swed420 · a year ago

Agreed. The manipulation became obvious with the capital fueled shareblue / "correct the record" campaign from Dems years ago and has only gotten worse since.

The stated purpose of CTR was to defend against Trump, but it was of course also abused to help sabotage Sanders. A tool like this will always be abused to perpetually elevate capital interests over human interests.

Whatever solution everybody jumps to, it needs to somehow prevent this behavior because it's not going to stop on its own.

tomrod · a year ago

Is this "CTR" from the world of alternative facts, or a real thing?

weregiraffe · a year ago

>Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.

Might as well quit using Internet.