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So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

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Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#51

Post by NitpickLawyer »

corbet wrote: 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.

I don't understand why sites like reddit need to do any work on (unauthd) GET. They are not instant messaging platforms, they are forums. You can live with a ~1-2-5 minute delay on forums. So POSTs (from logged in users) append to a queue, and a worker does work at regular intervals, creates the HTML and that gets sent to a cache + distributed to a CDN if needed. There's no need to do work on unauthd GETs for a forum.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#52

Post by superkuh »

mh2266 wrote: post #42
superkuh wrote: post #3

This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their p…

iirc they removed “fat people hate”, a variety of subreddits named after racial slurs (including literally /r/ s) and a subreddit for “well it’s not technically porn” of children new Reddit remains awful both design and implementation wise but the content they cleaned up wasn’t a big loss, and there’s still plenty of “non-desirable” content (so many porn subreddits, to start) on there

That actually happened much later. I am talking about examples like r/gundeals being removed, lots of accounts asking about it then getting banned, etc. Please don't try to imply that "undesirables" means just actually offensive or illegal behavior, though there was that on reddit too. Much like what the environment of a public bar would be: informal and varied.

It is not controversial to say that the corporate environment style social rules implemented in ~2015 went far beyond gnerally offensive content to the point where it was obviously catering to whims of the advertisers demanding they not be beside content their target demographics would just not like (ie, for political reasons or whatever).

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#53

Post by jdw64 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #35
jdw64 wrote: post #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 com…

Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned a…

I think it's not so much a problem with social media itself, but rather a phenomenon that occurs when consumption points converge. Anger is great for grabbing attention, and for newcomers trying to get noticed at a converged consumption point, generating anger or outrage is just the easiest way.

At first I thought it might be a problem with social media, but it seems more like a problem that arises when groups converge in one place. So these days, I just write my thoughts on my own homepage. That way I can write my own thoughts without getting angry at other people's posts.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#54

Post by walrus01 »

felooboolooomba wrote: post #13

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...

(13 years ago)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#55

Post by khurs »

LaurensBER wrote: post #17

For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO. It's pretty clear that their focus is no longer on providing the best communities (see the many examples of power hungry mods, see below) or the best UX (see the deprecation of the API or the recent changes to old.reddit.com described in the post). The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies, everything else is clearly a secondary concern. It's a…

Same with many/all news paper website comments, there is a preferred narrative that is controlled.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#56

Post by inigyou »

superkuh wrote: post #3

This is the second death of reddit, the penultimate one. But it stems directly from the first death in ~2015 when they accepted the massive venture capital investment and then had to try to monetize the facebook refugees which meant clearing out all the business appropriate "undesirables" including firing many beloved long time corporate employee, and switching to model where people and corporations posted to their p…

I thought the 2023 API lockdown was a very significant point. That's the first time they tried to block the site from being mirrored.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#59

Post by inigyou »

jdw64 wrote: post #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 com…

Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#60

Post by khurs »

traceroute66 wrote: post #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.).

If you use DuckDuckGo and use the video search, you can watch many YouTube vids embedded

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rickastley&ia=videos&iax=videos

Fun fact: some countries have no YouTube ads, so if you use Tor/VPN to change to an ad free country, then can watch ad free without an adblocker.

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