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So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

cole-k.com

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Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#22
It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.

The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.

The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.

Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#23

Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems. In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...

My mother tried to buy something on Amazon yesterday. It wouldn't let her check-out until she'd entered a code sent via WhatsApp. Which she doesn't have and doesn't want. She'll be buying her tat on eBay in future.

I dream that Amazon will lose lots of sales and backtrack, but I don't suppose they will.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#24

Meta has spent $2B on verification lobbying. Very successfully it seems. In 1-2 years, you won't be able to browse the internet without scanning a body part and providing a ID for your ass. https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh...

While your post is joking in tone, depending on how much we push back now is the exact level of delta between actual future and 'drink verification' copypasta[1].

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/1dfea32/drink_ve...

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#25
YouTube have also become very aggressive in forcing you to have a Google account and to watch videos to allegedly "help protect our community".

I avoid YouTube like the plague, but sadly there are lots of people out there who don't know anything other than YouTube exists and so they post their videos there (e.g. conference presentation recordings etc.).

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#27
I don't mind logging in, but when they remove old.reddit altogether, I'm just going to stop using Reddit. The new interface is the slimiest culmination of all the worst dark patterns and manipulative algorithms. I gave up on Facebook and I'll give up on Reddit. I have so many games and books and magazines to consume which I just don't because of this awful habit of picking up my phone to doom scroll. In fact, bring it on. Turn it off. I dare you. I need an excuse to log off Reddit forever. It's a toxic cesspit of the very worst people on the internet. Worse than 4chan. Worse than Kiwi Farms. When I look back on my time on Reddit I have almost only disdain. It is a supreme waste of my life.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#28
I noticed they logged me out when I happened on a link recently. I don't think this change will make me log back in. The value of the site has already crashed, now the only question is which site will manage to capture the mainstream link/image discussion next.

> This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans.

This hasn't been true for a while now. A lot of what you find on reddit these days feels incredibly fake. It's like there should be a variant of Goodhart's law: Once a forum becomes known for genuine human writing it stops being a forum for genuine human writing.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#29
post #10

I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.

Agreed; we have a Linode VPS for some small WordPress websites and it was grinding to a halt after an AI crawler started iterating through every possible date in "The Events Calendar"’s URL structure, sequentially scraping calendar pages all the way back to like 1970. I'm sure that's partially my fault for not putting it behind Cloudflare or anything though.
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