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So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

cole-k.com

391–400 of 681 posts

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#391

I closed all my Reddit accounts after they instantly shadow-banned my 8+y main account after I shared a single gdrive link to reply to a user with actual data. I've been appreciated as contributor in various places for being helpful, thorough and precise, but Reddit doesn't care to have good content. It's simply not a good discussion platform (and the UI sucks).

Mods are the death of reddit like I've been saying for at least 10 years. Shadow ban after shadow ban, the dopamine rush a bad mod gets from shadow banning someone must be amazing. It's way too easy for them.

Advanced version:

My account (very old, very established, much karma, no problems) got shadowbanned one morning for no discernible reason, the appeal was "granted"... but it's still shadowbanned even as the appeals page claims an appeal is unnecessary because the account is in good-standing.

> the dopamine rush a bad mod gets from shadow banning

IIRC admins (employees) can do a true shadowban, but moderators are limited to just excluding you from the subreddit.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#392
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t seem to understand. It isn’t about me. Or even people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not even be obvious to people, but they’ll slowly turn away at this or the next thing or the next one after that. I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate. MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to…

The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe: > MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it. This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship. > MySpace seemed like the shit until you…

> This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

I think original[1] Facebook UX was probably fine and clear enough for anyone but I would say that most people didn't jump ship: their first social media use started with facebook. And that was because FB grew bigger and faster, not because people were migrating from Myspace. Myspace has only been mostly limited to teenagers and a small fraction of music artists. Growth just slowed earlier because it never attracted many adults. It grew when people didn't have a smartphone and were not terminally online yet. It was a niche.

The main difference was the paradigm/mental imagery. Myspace was about opening the door to your teenager bedroom with all the posters on the wall and stickers on the workbooks. Facebook was about publishing and reading personal diaries.

[1]no idea how is the current one as I have been without account for 5 years now

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#393

I feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too idealistic back then, but it’s clear that the modern internet needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole eyeball scanning thing though?

Never thought of this until now but what if you had some kind of pay system that worked more like an escrow-ish service ?

So initially you have to pay some small sum. Eventually sometime not too long after (Hours? Days?) your money is returned to you. Make it pricey enough to deter large bot spam (some will of course still pay for single bots) and cheap enough to be affordable for most.

Like putting a quarter in a shopping cart !

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#394
post #65

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.

Do old accounts still work?

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#395

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…

> The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies Incorrect; 94% of Reddit's 2025 revenue came from advertising, it's right here on page 81 https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001713445/42e4fe7... This is why Reddit is supposedly ending its licensing agreement with Google: when the latter shows AI snippets in its search results, Reddit misses out on advertising revenue, and Reddit has judged the Google juic…

Thanks, I stand corrected! That makes all the recent changes even more puzling.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#396

New reddit has a literally worse user experience. No comments display more than maybe 1 reply and if you click to view more, it takes you to a dedicated page for just that reply. If you click the back button it completely forgets where you were in the original comment thread. Basically impossible to peruse comment sections like on askreddit posts, etc.

It's really weird, I mean Reddit's strength was the threaded commenting system (esp. compared to Digg when they were competing) and then they started making almost every commenting-hostile move possible.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#397

I refuse to log in to Reddit, deleted my account ages ago. And now on mobile it places an unclosable pop-over asking me to log in to continue reading. So now I only read things on desktop. Would like to stop using Reddit all together but sometimes it is genuinely useful to read some human answers, although since LLM’s train on the data I can get a lot of the same info that way at least.

>I refuse to log in to Reddit,

You are so brave, an true hero.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#398
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said anything about not getting the current memes and jokes. I was alluding to the current mix of the content on reddit. It has gotten more political and less entertaining if you look at the default feed whether you create an account or browse anonymously. And in any political or open ended discussion, unless it is scientific, the discussions are shallow. I will however concede that non-scientific/technical d…

The world has gotten more political. Everything is going to shit and we have not even really started the climate change.

[flagged]

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#399

I think at this point I'm ready to give up on Reddit, most of my questions are already answered by LLM. And the discussions quality on Reddit are abysmal, its filled with bots.

How do you think the bots are trained? Reddit has really good data since its comments and tags and specific subreddits basically have ranked questions and answers by points driven by the title and the comments are ranked by points which have quality answers.

"Reddit has really good data"

Depends on what you mean by good. If you want to make a bot that seems like a person, then yes. If you want accurate information, not so good.

Re: So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

#400

I feel like Richard Hendricks in the show Silicon Valley was on the right track with his new internet project. It seemed too idealistic back then, but it’s clear that the modern internet needs to be burned to the ground (or kept barely alive to keep the PMs, MBAs, growth hackers and slop farmers busy). How do you bootstrap a new humans-only network without doing the whole eyeball scanning thing though?

Never thought of this until now but what if you had some kind of pay system that worked more like an escrow-ish service ? So initially you have to pay some small sum. Eventually sometime not too long after (Hours? Days?) your money is returned to you. Make it pricey enough to deter large bot spam (some will of course still pay for single bots) and cheap enough to be affordable for most. Like putting a quarter in a sh…

I want to see a vending-machines in City Hall or Post Offices etc., where you can give $1-5 to a charity of your choice and receive an anonymous "Probably Human or at least has Metaphorical Skin In The Game" token. The token can be spent/burned with any online service to create/upgrade an account.

I'm skipping over many details about privacy and security and anti-resale, but basically it means that the service can extend trust in moderation, since you (A) have something to lose and (B) making lots of accounts has lots of physical friction.

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