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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

#61

Post by pwndByDeath »

I've not been a fan of Reddit in a while, but I do appreciate a useful asynchronous human interaction. I think reddit lost the useful humans a few bad ideas ago but I'm not well versed in that drama.

I'm curious what HN minds would consider a useful fix to this cyborg Internet problem. It seems having humans and bots coexisting is problematic.

If you had to start over knowing what could happened and what we should avoid, how would you do it?

Right now the reticulum network stack has my vote, it enables and cripples just the right things to make me think it might help.

But I don't earn my living from the commercial form of the Internet, I find I blame the commercial interest for the bulk of the problems (enabled by human fragility)

But I may just be a crusty old mind.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#62

Post by inigyou »

m0llusk wrote: post #4

This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not…

Old Reddit is objectively a better interface. I agree that "it's HTML so it's safe" is bullshit.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#63

Post by Klonoar »

account42 wrote: post #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 fo…

Reddit has almost 20 years of comments.

You could certainly argue that it's less true now that there's legitimate people commenting, but there are years old threads on there with very helpful and valuable information that you can only really find via some incantations of Google search.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#64

Post by tastyfreeze »

tassadarforaiur wrote: post #19

I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations / guides? Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for niches you're newly learning about. Discord is it's own problem. I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while. Do we have to find an old dump of reddit html,…

What niche are you looking for? I usually append "forum" to topic searches when I am looking for humans with similar interests. I have found communities for all the niche topics I have looked for so far.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#65

Post by inigyou »

tempfile wrote: post #11

I expected this to go for a long time. It's the only way to anonymously browse 18+ subreddits. I would not be surprised if reddit accounts are effectively (if not always) connectable to a legal identity.

They require email and phone verification to sign up now. And if you want to view NSFW you have to verify with Persona.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#66

Post by yesmens »

tassadarforaiur wrote: post #19

I don't care about any of reddits social features anymore, I logged out a long time ago, but where do we go now for the knowledge base of old reddit how to questions / recommendations / guides? Good forums with trustworthy guides are hard to find for niches you're newly learning about. Discord is it's own problem. I haven't explored mastodon / blue sky / etc. in a while. Do we have to find an old dump of reddit html,…

I predict that we will see people flocking to altnets such as i2p or tor.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#67

Post by LaurensBER »

hathym wrote: post #46
khurs wrote: post #2

Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely trying to keep other AI companies out https://mediaandthemachine.substack.com/p/reddits-new-ai-lic...

that's good, open weight models do not need degenerate comments to advance on AI

It would be interesting to hear if the addition of Reddit data makes LLM stronger or weaker.

Outside of some (technical)subs most of the comment seems to be of a far lower quality than what you find in books or in websites.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#68

Post by inigyou »

corbet wrote: post #47
inigyou wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Reddit would have a lot less scraper traffic if it hadn't shut down the feed API 3 years ago in an attempt to keep its data closed and only distributed to Google (which paid money for it). Self-inflicted. No sympathy.

I doubt it. The scraper botnets aren't going to bother with niceties like APIs, they just come in over HTTPS and grab anything they can.

There was a whole mini-industry around scraping specifically Reddit using the API feed because it was so open. AI companies first trained on Pushshift, which is like Common Crawl for Reddit, which is why Reddit shut down Pushshift (with legal threats IIRC) at the same time.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#69

Post by traceroute66 »

khurs wrote: post #60
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.

Yeah, I find it intermittent as to whether it works or not. I'm guessing YT are playing whack-a-mole on that one.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#70

Post by Aurornis »

nottorp wrote: post #49
Aurornis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has not spent $2 billion on ID lobbying. That bogus number came from a complete AI slop Reddit post that was later removed. That’s why the only references you can find to it are from sites like your gadgetreview.com link that repost clickbait without fact checking anything.

It doesn't matter what they spent excatly but it's in their direct interest to raise legal moats for competitors. Kind of like what Allegedly Open AI tried with the "AI will kill us all" threats.

> It doesn't matter what they spent excatly

If the number didn’t matter then the comment above wouldn’t have led with it to make their point.

The flaw in the original study was that someone started with a premise that Meta was at the heart of this and all spending could be traced back to Meta. They made Claude generate a report but they didn’t read any details, so they didn’t notice that Claude couldn’t access the actual documents. So it started guessing and hallucinating until it came up with the scary number that Meta was spending $2B on lobbying.

The entire premise that Meta is driving this with $2B of lobbying is an AI hallucination.

Reddit obviously is adding login gates to combat AI scrapers.

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