What if you make your user agent a crawler?
The big, important crawlers have known IPs don't they? Isn't that how news sites, quora and friends selectively apply their pay wall and still get indexed?
Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
81–90 of 342 posts
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#82I can access both including old subdomain while on VPN.
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#83Yes, same here. Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior. And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.
There still is a lot of useful information posted on Reddit. Was it scraped somewhere for preservation purposes?
https://lemmit.online and https://zerobytes.monster mirror the posts into their own instances
https://alien.top mirrors the posts and comments from some communities into a set of topic-specific instances and is my project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy. Visit https://portal.alien.top to get started.
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#84Yes, same here. Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior. And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.
>Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior.
Might as well quit using Internet.
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#85Curious why a VPN is necessary to access Reddit. NSWF content that's blocked by the ISP?
You misunderstand; I run all my traffic through VPN to stop my ISP from spying on it.
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would be happy if they do, because it will save my time more (like twitter). Why is that? If you don't have enough self-control to not use Reddit, a login wall won't stop you.
This is very wrong. One of the most studied ways of breaking bad habits is by introducing friction. Nothing stops me from getting in my car and going to McDonalds but that is a lot of friction. It's easier to just stay home and cook something I have.
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Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside, I get irritated as all heck by the old, previously useful reddit threads that now show up in search results but with the actually useful information deleted by someone in a fit of rage. This is frustrating, since the information is not necessarily easy to find somewhere else. Or at all. If you find that you must do this, could you at least re-host your answers elsewhere and link to them?
Yes, this is incredibly frustrating. I wonder if we've surpassed "peak publicly searchable discussion". It definitely seems harder to find quick answers to obscure topics than it used to be 2-3 years ago. LLMs will gladly hallucinate something, but given that this stuff is literally the training data that could help ground them in truth, I wonder where we're going to go next.
Of course we have passed it. The moment LLM training happened was when everyone started locking down access to their data or increasing costs of developer API access - twitter/x have done similar things, and quora etc.
Now the corpus of user questions/answers, posts and so on has real value as machine learning training data it’s hardly surprising this is happening - no one wants to “give away the farm” to a rival LLM product bootstrapped on data that was too easy to scrape.
For older readers who remember the buzz about web2.0 in early 2000s and everything would be a public api or feed - the recent history of the web now has almost been the opposite. Examples of this are everywhere - RSS is essentially dead, news readers died, people are trying to put podcasts behind proprietary systems (Spotify) etc etc, more and more data is hidden behind account walls, app binaries on mobile often only arrive from a mandatory store…
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#88I am used to having streaming video providers blocking VPNs to reduce account sharing with friends, and I understand that.
However, move regular sites are blocking VPNs which is bad, especially when using public WiFi networks.
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#89Doesn’t work on Mullvad. That “Whoa there, pardner” is so condescending
Re: Tell HN: Reddit now blocks VPN access via browser, 'old' subdomain included
#90Yes, same here. Let's just QUIT using Reddit. Enough is enough. If we tolerate corrupt behavior, we support corrupt behavior. And quite honestly, it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.
>it's become such a pile of trash, anyway. Also, it's become so obvious that submissions and comments are being manipulated and pushed by tons of bots and industry interests, it's just a bad joke at this point.
Very true. Over the last few months as more bots and reposters come online you have seen the subreddits bleed back into related subreddits. Most of the posts on /r/popular (landing point for navigating to old.reddit.com when not logged in) come from subs that never appeared before last summer's mod rebellion about 3rd party apps. Subs like /r/AITAH, /r/SipsTea, /r/TikTokCringe, and several others hit /r/popular regularly.
/r/news will see stories that are functionally dead with no comment activity hang around for multiple days. The sad fact that the mods for the sub require you to have an email associated with your account keeps me from adding any content there since I don't give that out.
A lot of content that rightfully belongs in one sub is cross-posted to related subs for additional karma. /r/pics is one targeted sub that catches a lot of content that normally one would only find on /r/oldschoolcool.
It's almost like reddit is returning to the pre-subreddit days where there were no boundaries on the content that one would see on the main, and only, page as it updated. Memes, rick-rolls, news, questions, etc all just fell into line and as the site grew, faded quickly into the mist.
With all this in mind I have been cutting way back on my engagement. I have walked back through my post history and edited a bunch of them, using Yossarian's censoring rules - death to all adverbs, nouns, verbs, adjectives - or just replacing the posts with meme text or song lyrics to stupid songs.
If the post involved answering a question commonly encountered on the sub, one that would be easily discovered if reddit had a high-functioning search functionality, then for the most part, I leave it in place. Most subs I interact with are DIY type subs for automobiles, home projects, etc. and there are problems common to some models of car, truck, etc that people always ask about so removing that content seems wrong.
It is sad to see a tool like reddit become such an enormous pile of suck but I think it was inevitable.