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An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

old.reddit.com

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Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#311

Post by olyjohn »

WWLink wrote: post #268
linuxftw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pinterest needs to be blacklisted from search engines. I'm never signing up for an account there, period.

lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate" The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.

Reminds me of eBay, and how I try to find parts and accessories specific for my old car. I used to be able to just type in the make, model, and year, and BAM, I had tons of results. But eBay has allowed peddlers of low-quality, generic junk to spam their listings. Now I have to search "1981 Honda Accord -fits -turbo -generictrash -etc" and filter out every single part that comes up 1000 times that isn't actually even designed for my car. They just call it a "generic" part and list that it fits every car. I used to search eBay regularly, and now I hardly go on there anymore because I can't find anything.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#312

Post by Starkus »

mrlala wrote: post #281
trianglem wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

r/the_donald has many many posts advocating for violence against certain groups in clear violation of policy. These posts would stay up for days or weeks. In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist.

>In my opinion quarantining them was basically a slap on the wrist. I mean, I agree they should have been banned from day one basically.. but to say it's a slap on the wrist is odd because absolutely no one has to read any of their trash unless you specifically go there. Most random reddit users probably don't even know of td, let alone would actually go there voluntarily. That being said.. I think it's unconscionabl…

That is totally false to assert. So basically you're saying to 'ban them from day one' because...you don't like their politics?

and no, they are not a 'breeding ground for violence and hate thought/speech'

Reminds me of 'wrongthink' and you're advocating for its censor?

Censorship is evil, censoring that sub was evil to supress information

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#313

Post by egypturnash »

CydeWeys wrote: post #239
coldpie wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look to Patreon God, this one baffles me. I feel like you could write that website and app with 5-10 skilled employees and a handful more for support and administrative overhead, skim your 10% of a good chunk of all Internet microtransactions, and retire early. Then they go and nuke all their goodwill trying to milk every cent they can out of the process[1]. What the fuck? Just make a product people want to use and…

You're underestimating the abuse, moderation, support, and fraud burden that results from doing so much sheer volume. So that's a lot of support people right there, and those support people will need a fair number of engineers writing the tools they use to do their job.

YEP. Every site that allows user-generated content has to deal with people who want to make stuff near, or past, the boundaries of what is legal and/or moral. If you move money around then you have to start worrying about people scamming each other, using you as a tax dodge or a laundry, and you have a whole bunch of fun new regulations to comply with regarding that sort of stuff as well.

The typical Silicon Valley Disruptor approach is to just wave away all responsibility except the absolute minimum the law compels you to do.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#314

Post by blunte »

It's not a new pattern. And like MySpace, Yahoo, Digg, and so many others, Reddit will eventually fall out of favor and be replaced by a new better, less corporate system.

And that system will also follow the same path (unless it is started by an already-very-rich group of techies who value status more than money).

Just think: if you were fabulously wealthy, then burning a few million a year to have a completely free, non-commercial social site would be perfectly reasonable. Of course, eventually you would die and someone would then begin the usual path with your legacy...

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#315

Post by neonate »

CM30 wrote: post #8

Hmm, I just checked myself, and I was able to read comment threads perfectly fine without being logged in, on both a desktop computer and a smartphone. Obviously old.reddit.com doesn't have these issues, but I'm pretty sure the session on smartphone used the new site, and that let me keep reading without any interruptions too. Either way, if Reddit does this, that's it. Not returning to the site. The internet doesn't…

I just checked too. Am able to read comments without an account on both reddit.com and old.reddit.com, desktop and mobile.

Maybe they were testing something? or did this as a trial balloon? or canceled it because of backlash?

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#316

Post by olyjohn »

MentallyRetired wrote: post #121
jermaustin1 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying staff? Hosting costs? Recouping money for the time they spent on it?

Right? It's almost as if they have expenses to pay for. They provide value and they're entitled to earn a profit off of it. As a small business owner myself, I'm surprised by the amount of people who expect everything to be free.

The problem isn't making profit. The problem is when they see profit, and get greedy and want more and more and more and then become delusional about the "value" provided. Then all these people come out of the woodwork who are only looking to make money and don't care about the rest of it, and it starts going down hill. We're not expecting it to be free, just somewhat reasonable. And you know what? When it becomes unreasonable we quit going and it dies. So maybe they should listen to us a little bit.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#317

Post by homonculus1 »

riversflow wrote: post #291
wescarpenter wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. Video recommendations covering the screen while I pause to try and read something. Is it really that niche of a use case that the user is pausing the video to better view something in said video?! How many more places do we need to shove recommendation systems down the users throat.

It makes sense if you consider the possibility that through the anonymity of analytics YT is optimizing it’s website to keep children glued to tablets/smartphones. When a user pauses, show them something else to watch, they might be bored and about to start playing roblox. Also, if they switch videos it gives you more views to give to your creators, and you can lead the next vid with an ad. Need to get more ads to th…

It's not mere possibility, it's reality. The service's incentives do not align with the users', they are pursuing engagement as opposed to utility. It is actually counterproductive to YouTube's bottom line for the content to be deep and meaningful, they make more money when it's fleeting and superficial. This is the natural outcome of the attention economy.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#318

Post by s1artibartfast »

q3k wrote: post #236
arkades wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are an awful lot of Patreon users waiting for an alternative. If it’s so easy...

Unfortunately this suffers from the 'Effective Target Audience: Assholes' effect. It's basically impossible to start a YT or Patreon or Twitter alternative without either accidentally or actively pandering to people who have been kicked out of the main competitor, which mostly happen to be neonazis and/or fascists. As such, most alternatives will immediately have their main pages full of hate speech and nazi propagan…

I wonder if the same company could silo content to address this effect. Essentially have the same staff support multiple sites with identical backends. One which is child friendly, one racists, one for porn, ect. If creators get flagged too much, they just get bumped to a different silo, but you still take their money.

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#319

Post by bdcravens »

cal5k wrote: post #292
asdfman123 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still baffled about the UI "improvement." It's comically bad. It's so busy and I can't find anything I want. I have never, ever seen a site anywhere near as big as Reddit with such a bad redesign. It seems they could have hired one UX guy and one graphic guy... I could probably pay some people on Fiverr $100 total to create a better design for the entirety of Reddit. The old design was boring and out of date, but…

You can still opt out of the redesign, which I do. I find the new desktop design to be intolerable.

My presumption is the choice of name ("old.reddit.com") says something about the permanence of the original design (I'd feel better about "classic" or similar)

Re: An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?

#320

Post by choward »

TheHypnotist wrote: post #63
nimajneb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the (old) desktop site on my phone. I also don't want extra apps that should just be websites.

The app is clean. I can't even look at the actual website now.

There is absolutely no reason the website shouldn't also be clean. The only reason not to have a good website sure is to lure people to use the app. It's a shady tactic that many companies use because people like you will just download the app, no questions asked.
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