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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open reddit clients there is no alternative.
You can still use old.reddit, you just need to be logged in. That said, if old.reddit ever went away altogether I would stop using it too.
Behavioral tagging of bot traffic is actually easier when you're not serving plain HTML pages, because the number of signals thrown off by bad bots that don't exactly replicate browsing habits goes through the roof. The larger anti-bot implementations do a lot of this type of thing nowadays.
Bot authors no doubt have their own incentives for using old.reddit (lower bandwidth, conceptually simpler to crawl, etc) but it would not surprise me to learn that Reddit wants exactly one door for bots to have to shuffle through. They also don't work on old.reddit much at all these days, so any effort they have to put in to handling bot traffic is kept to one route.
Pretty dumb era of the internet we've wound up in.
While yes, you can not simply scrap new reddit as easily as a pure html scraper is cheaper to run. And while the new reddit its js "slow down" scraping as it need to run over a headless browser. Do you slow scraping down a lot?
No. Because you can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies. Given the fact that you can scrap millions of pages per day, on a single cheap 1 CPU node...
The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js / client vs headless browser. Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic to not give off the smell of automatization (and avoiding tls fingerprinting).
I wrote this type of stuff before we had AI to help write it, in a few days time. Now with a LLM at your fingertips in a few hours, you will have a complete working version with cloaking build in.
And the larger size difference does not matter, you can block irrelevant files via faked cache responds, to give the server the impression that your a repeat client, and no need to flood your browser instance with images, fonts etc. Some think that this is a defense, aka throttling you with increased bandwidth usage lol
So in my personal opinion, its not about dealing with scrapers, but trying to push people to new reddit, so they can finally phase out old reddit.
PS: So much fun reading new reddit on your phone browser, to have it pop-up a "use our app" banner, that prevents you from interacting with the website anymore. And even blocks firefox its scroll ability (and thus accessing to the browser its nav bar). Tip for people: delete the sites cookies and cache regularly, to prevent this usage tracking, so the banner newer shows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still use old.reddit, you just need to be logged in. That said, if old.reddit ever went away altogether I would stop using it too.
I'm able to browse old.reddit.com without logging in right now. Maybe it's for specific subs?
Another fun New Reddit quirk: on iOS, the un-dismissable “better in the app” popover makes scroll stop working, meaning you can’t scroll up to get the iOS-native “Open in App” toolbar that actually opens the app, so your only option is to click their hand-rolled button that just opens the App Store listing, or reload the page and tap the native “Open in App” button before the popover reappears.
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...
Any plans for reddit to compensate their contributors?
What I'm getting is a temporary/false "You've been blocked by network security" page but refreshing then brings up the reddit page as per usual.
https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login