Social network Reddit recently began blocking mobile visitors to its website while pushing them to download the official Reddit app, and it's fair to say that the move is not going down well with users. If you visit reddit.com on your iPhone today, you may see a new popup that can't be dismissed, asking you to "get the app to keep using Reddit".
My theory is that they realize that a significant number of power users on the site are still using old.reddit.com, so they are keeping it going because getting rid of it would turn the website into a ghost town. They will continue to push their app and new website because they can push more advertising through it to the people that are just there to consume.
Sadly this is (very popular, according to comments here and on Reddit) copium. old.reddit.com visits are a rounding error, per the traffic stats of the normie subreddit I moderate:
Most people simply do not have the technical acumen and tenure on Reddit to know to type in that subdomain. As always, relevant XKCD (posted today on Lemmy, funnily enough):
You think there are still redditors around?
I think it’s just troll farms and bots. Every once in a while someone stumbles into the site and says something. THEN there is a whirlwind of answers/speculations/theories/lies.
A.I is running the show. If I use a certain word or phrase I get filtered. If I say the exact same thing without those “catch phrases” then I see a few votes.
I treat the site as a test site for trying language that gets PAST the trolls.
There’s no objective data to confirm or dispel your suspicion that there are
zerofew human Redditors (your hyperbole aside).There’s definitely tons of bots posting and voting (and likely always has been), but I really doubt a large percentage of commenters are bots.
- A non-bot redditor
It really depends on the subreddits I think. It was starting to really go downhill before I was booted, but most of the issues floated around political, news and general subreddits from what I could tell.
Get into interests, like football or music and there seemed to be less rubbish and bot accounts so to speak. I guess this makes sense but that’s what I noticed going out the ban door as I was.
I just left last month, I’d say 30% users and rest bots
One thing I’ve noticed lurking on AITA is that there’s suddenly more people casually talking about being religious. Not like overtly preaching like you’d see in the past, but more people referencing going to church or doing things for religious reasons.
It just seemed out of place and weird. Like the tone of that part of the internet suddenly changed. It’s still more liberal than conservative, though that conflict seems to be mostly just not present, perhaps in part because of their rule against political topics, though even when some slip through, it does seem to lean more liberal or even progressive than conservative. Like plenty of abortion support, no broad support for tribal or hierarchical judgements. But it suddenly seems more religious. Christian, specifically.
While church attendance is NOW declining rapidly?
I suspect a Christian troll farm at work here. They NEED to indoctrinate at an early age to survive.
They can’t use FACTS, their bible doesn’t have any good ones.
It’s mostly the most frequented subreddits that are being brigaded and farmed.
I can guarantee you the Argentina subreddit is heavily brigaded by the extreme right. That’s the case I know, but it’s easy to imagine it happening in a lot of not so popular subreddits
I guess it depends on where you look. All the subs I’ve been visiting where people actually hang out, rather than just a handful of karma farmers spamming, are still flourishing*, so I never fully switched to Lemmy, but use both 🤷 Reddit subs have a magnitude or two more people, so imho they’re better for news, memes and technical advice, while for the past couple years Lemmy feels better for insightful conversations.
* my main subs are for specific games and apps, a few countries/regions, and r/BestofRedditorUpdates, so ymmv
I think the bot percentage is proportional to how big a subreddit is and how profitable influencing people browsing it is.
Niche community about how to proplift (stealing small cuttings to grow your own plants)? Zero or close to zero bots.
Crypto community with thousands of comments a day, where it’s all speculation that can’t be objectively proven so bots stick out like a sore thumb and tons of money flying around? You better believe the bots are all over that.
Of course there are redditors around; I’m another one of them. We frequent the cool subs like the very human /r/FreeGameFindings and ignore the rest of the noise. Milk Reddit for the best of what it has to offer and dismiss the rest. I see nothing wrong with this approach for as long as Lemmy is still budding, relatively speaking.
I haven’t checked how big the ones that I still frequent there (like /r/manybaggers and /r/onebag) but they do still have organic real people posts. Anything news, tech, or politics, anything of that size, I just abandon any hope they’re not troll infested and LLM bots. Not to mention meme subs and themed artwork subs. Just full of vote farming bots. I need the art source, you dinguses!
On the bright side, /r/sbcgaming have a comms here and can also tie into retrogaming
As well as flashlights.
Lemmy world does the same thing, but to a lesser extent. Since they have so much of the users on the fediverse, them controlling their front page really controls the votes and who sees what.
How would that work?
We are all on different instances. With different algorithms, technology, and differing filters. The code doesnt support what your saying.
I know nothing about Lemmy’s architecture, but how does my instance tally votes on a post from another instance?
Does it trust that instance? Does it only take into account votes cast on itself? Does it ask every federated instance for their vote totals?
Good questions. Its been a bit since ive looked at lemmys code so im going to dive in again.
Here is the docs for the votes themselves. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/main/src/users/03-votes-and-ranking.md
You can see this in action here: https://lemvotes.org/ if I recall.
I know the vote model is here . You can see the logic here. It checks to see if the post is actually available in the community with other functions and other such checks. It doesnt ask any lemmy instance for totals (unless theres something im not aware of), it tallies based on real time data. Which can also include fediverse actions(not necessarily lemmy/piefed/mbin/etc… but also mastodon, gotosocial, and other such services).
One of the things piefed does a bit differently is it bunches up votes for sending to other instances. And there is a backfill operation when puling from new communities or users. I would argue its a bit better than lemmys system at least from a technical perspective. But its a VERY minor one. Its nice we have multiple ways of getting to the same result-ish.
Hope that helps! I dont know everything but I know a little bit.
That’s quite interesting, thank you! So for an instance to manipulate votes, they’d have to stream a bunch of fake events.
Essentailly. Theres a couple of peertube instances that had that issue if i recall. Filters started to go up a coupke of years ago. Admins can see it pretty easy in the logs most of the time once its pointed out. Its a timing thing. Some software is beyter at it than others.
If an instance has the most people and blocks those people from seeing your post, delays it from posting, or downgrades it as a source, it could easily be done. They have control over their own instance.
Can you elaborate? Arent blocks public via the admin logs in lemmy? In addition that info can be pulled from the api from any instance/fediverse protocol.
I can reproduce of need be since i have my own lemmy and piefed instance and have over 20 years of software development experience.
They* called it shadow banning on reddit, but I think of it more as shadow curating. I explain it a little more in other comments itt. Reddit does the curating as well.
IMO, you could do this live pretty easily. When I first started posting, the trolls would complain that I wasn’t consistently online, lol.
<lesser extent>
I dont understand. Can you point to where in the code it has this? The algorithm/stack is open to anyone.
You can read the code? I can’t. It wouldn’t even have to be a permanent code. It cold work for say an hour, take the post out of the running for the front page, and then disappear. The effects would be the same.
I know this is happening, I have no idea how.
Yep i can. Ive helped out on both lemmy, piefed, mastodon, gotosocial, peertube and others. Little things mind but yeah its my day job.
Theres a queue that is part of different instances. What can happen is posts/comments get backed up and the queue takes them all in. When an outage or slowdown happens it can bog down certain servers. Threadiverse (piefes/lemmy/mbin/etc…) up/down votes, comments, posts, etc… it gets slower as more instances connect to others. Its unfortunate but its part of the fediverse protocol. Piefed has some advances there, but it can still get bogged down sometimes.
Im not saying thats definitively what it is, but ive been on the other side of this phenomenon a couple of times when my lemmy and then later piefed instance had a new instance sync with it. Lemmy.world has had this issue for a while since its one of the biggest.
The way to test is to sent the instance in quesion a POST request with a comment OR use a known good instance (like piefed) and check the logs. It usually comes back with either a 200 immediately (which is good) or theres a HUGE delay.
Most of these instances are very much volunteer efforts.
So, instead of saying this isn’t happening, why not look into how it could be done? They’re doing it, I have no idea how. Take a look at new and you’ll see that things are being controlled for the all, hot page.
I post almost every work day, I can see the patterns really well from my end. I don’t care about upvotes as well, so I don’t really have any emotion attached to it other than it pisses me off that I’m probably not seeing other things they don’t want me to see. That’s really what I hated about reddit too and why I came here.
They could have someone controlling it real time, yeah? That would explain the inconsistency of when I post out of the norm. I’ve been lightly testing them for years now, which is why I believe I can safely say these things.
Old reddit still has screens and moderation tools that haven’t been rebuilt. It’s kept on life support for mods right now.
old.reddit.com on mobile is a bit rough but otherwise yeah
Use the Slide fork!
from what I heard and saw from some mods (who can see the statistics on the old.reddit usage), it’s less than 10%, sadly.
the vast majority is using the shitty new design
Or the app exclusively, and probably aren’t aware of the web interface at all.
Reddit went full Facebook by making it more accessible to the general public, with the predictable Eternal September results.
I have the same thought. I still use Reddit, 100% on Old Reddit and I think objectively you could say I contribute a lot in terms of comments and participation. If old Reddit goes away, I’m done.
Wonder how they feel about people like me, who use a third party Reddit app on Android? They get no ad revenue from me, and I don’t contribute either.
how are you still doing that, I thought they all shut down like three years ago with the whole API debacle
Reddit blocked third party apps but they didn’t block personal-use API access. With the help of some apk-editing tools that I won’t mention here, you could import your own API key into a third party apps and continue using it fully (including posting and commenting). I’m using Reddit Sync still.
My API key still works, but my understanding is Reddit recently blocked the generation of new keys. So at some point my key will probably die too. At that point, that’s the end of Reddit for me.
wait recently blocked? did they end up reverting the change they did back when the API thing was done? that was one of the things they did then was restrict API key generation
Hydra works really well on iOS. It’s not read only, full usage.
And it behaves and looks really similar to the Lemmy client I use (Voyager). Unsure if they share some of the codebase or if they both just try to imitate Apollo.
On android you can using redreader for free. I’m still using it for anonim read only reddit
The main change was them charging for the API so you can simply make a developer API key for free and patch it into apps. I’m using Boost and it still works well.
I think there are still “read-only” clients. I haven’t looked in awhile, but I know there were some available via F-Droid (alternative app store) long after the API was cut off. I assume they use standard web scraping for grabbing content.
Also, I’m not sure if it still works, but I think you can still use open source clients that rely on the API, you just have to compile/build them yourself using your account’s own personal API key.
I haven’t looked into either of these in a while and definitely not an expert on the topic, but I’m sure if you’re interested there’s enough info out there to find a solution that works for you.
AFAIK there are a few, “read only” apps. iOS has RDX, not sure about Android.
I’ve answered to a sibling comment, but I’ll duplicate here. Hydra is not read-only and works really well on iOS.
I use stealth on android. It’s limited. Gifs show as links. No where near as good as sync used to be. But still better than the website if I end up there via a google search.