Yeah while all the big subreddits are nigh unusable, there's a lot of small/mid-sized communities that are an absolute delight to be a part of.

This is a moral conundrum. Yes, some of the smaller sub-reddits are good, but by participating, you legitimize the conflict/fakenews/horrorshow that is the main website. It's like saying you enjoy the trains running on time in Nazi Germany whilst ignoring the rest of what the regime is.

It was Italy that got trains running on time. Get your fascist regimes straight.

Interestingly, Mussolini getting the trains to run on time is a myth as well.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

It's similar to how the Nazis claimed the Autobahn as their success, even though they were started under the Weimar Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsautobahn

Is Snopes having a hard time with money? The article (on mobile) had two huge full-width ads that you had to scroll past, and a persistent banner ad at the bottom, and they're still asking for donations:

https://files.catbox.moe/szanpo.jpeg

https://files.catbox.moe/j9qerx.jpeg

I don't mind them trying to fund themselves, but those aren't exactly vetted "ethical ads", are they?

You say that yet even catbox.moe is asking for money. Go check their front page.

But the page isn't covered in user-hostile ads that rely on intensive surveillance and sharing your personal data with dozens of shady companies.

Edit: Your comment really bothers me. At no point did I suggest that websites should not ask their users for money. I was wondering about and criticizing their apparently heavy use of user-abusive ads, while still asking users directly for money. Usually on the Web we see one or the other but not both.

I sorry to disturb you. It was not my intent. I just disagree about the seriousness of the ads displayed in your example. An ad for Whisky and/or Walgreens(a pharmacy) don't seem too bad compared to other ads I have seen.

Snopes probably gets a lot of bandwidth (and probably attacks) just due to them being very mainstream.

It is rhetorically pretty direct to talk about "Brain scientists and rocket surgeons".

Mussolini got the trains running on thyme.

Those smaller communities will realize (mostly too late) that they've built themselves on a platform that can't be trusted and one day will probably not be archivable.

It's really too bad that the StackExchange "OpenID" thing never went anywhere. Otherwise we'd get the same kind of "one login, many communities" benefits of Reddit without forcing everyone to use a centralized platform like Reddit (even if authentication is still centralized in OpenID).

It's not a moral conundrum, and reddit is nothing like a genocidal fascist government.

There are times when I argue that "apps" or sites must be thought of differently than the Internet itself, but this is not one of them. Reddit has no monopoly on hobby chat, or on tiktok garbage, or on local communities, or on news commentary. It is not the same kind of network-effect trap as, say, Facebook.

If ever someone asks me about reddit or if it's useful, I say to stay off any community greater than about 100-150k. Use it for discussing specific video games or hobbies, or on tightly moderated subs with focused discussion.

If any sub has posts from "karma farmers", accounts with super high karma like 500k or more, then it's probably a place worth being suspicious of from either a utility OR an astroturfing standpoint. Lots of agenda-pushing.

Are you sure you don't want to veer into /r/popular.

/r/Askwomen: What are 100% effective ways at turning you on?

/r/Teenagers: Every1 who wears their PJs to bed, I'll tell you your favourite band.

/r/ <<literally every subreddit>>: I HAVE A CAT, NAME IT FOR ME.

/r/NoStupidQuestions: If a woman shakes my hand is that code for sex?

/r/Askmen: What's your one perfect way to get a girlfriend?

/r/Pics: Here's 10,000 photos of people being gross on airplanes, what's something passive aggressive that I can do instead of just asking them to stop?

/r/Antiwork: I donated my heart to my boss and he fired me

/r/TooAfraidtoask: How to get girlfriend????

/r/explainlikeimfive: Do girls get horny too? how?

I use reddit all the time and look at none of these things. Despite some obnoxious or downright terrible subs, it's still a useful or entertaining site for folks of many interests.

There’s a lot of kids and teens on Reddit. I’m glad I was a teen on the Internet in the walled garden of AOL, so all the dumb and hormone-driven things I said there are probably lost on a hard drive in a landfill somewhere.

I'm glad to be part of the pre-internet generation where the limit to our cringe is a fleeting feeling of embarrassment while hazily remembering it, rather than having it played back in high definition at some inopportune moment.

I think as adults we should be able to recognize that we all went through this and look at it with a little compassion and understanding instead of holding it up for ridicule. As you say, people will feel embarrassed about it enough in the future.

/r/pics: Blatant political grandstanding mixed in with images meant to be evocative and establish mental association. Here's a smiling photo of Obama. Remember Obama? Picture of rednecks in pickup trucks with Trump flags, next to a photo of Taliban in trucks with flags.

/r/politics: wanton hyperbole, plain and simple.

"Screenshots of Tweets" Subreddits

/r/Antiwork: Literally every problem, shortcoming, or thing you don't like is ultimately because of capitalism.

/r/LateStageCapitalism: Same as above, but we need at least two subreddits about this to really hammer the point home.

/r/WhitePeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes du jour, as well as well-trodden reposts.

/r/BlackPeopleTwitter: Leftist hot-takes but posted by 'verified' reddit users.

/r/MurderedByWords: Tomi Lahren and Strawmen being mocked via tweet

/r/MurderedByAOC: Pretty much any AOC tweet posted by u/IrlOurPresident

/r/AOC: Just in case you haven't seen u/IrlOurPresident's post on the front page yet.

The new largest share holders will likely coerce the removal of all three along with any other vestigial remnant that is enjoyable and is still maintained in the name of eventually maximizing their profits. For me the biggest loss will probably be when the board of directors demand that the RSS feeds stop working.

Just don't remove old reddit and I will be fine

Do we know who the larger shareholders are? Where do we look this up?

Tencent was/is big on funding Reddit. Around the time they soaked $150m, privacy policy has changed, some functionalities were added that do not work on old.reddit w/o JS, www.reddit started resembling other social media sites and the site became more profit-oriented and - for me - user-hostile.

I only last as long there as old.reddit.com does.

I last as long as the APIs allow Apollo to be amazing.

I've been saying this for years.

Reddit's official app is very poor and they've broken the mobile web experience by choice.

The day Sync stops working will be my final day on the platform.

Reddit Sync is amazing and so is Apollo. The official app feels too much like tiktok. But Reddit doesn't get any ad revenue from the third party apps, so I wonder if they're really going to last that long.

They get value from the users.

Anyone on an iOS device using Reddit that doesn't have this application is missing out.

I've said it before, but old.reddit.com and Apollo are the only methods I use to browse the site. If either dies or the API becomes private/non-existent then I'm out.

I don't know how anyone enjoys the new design, old.reddit.com I can browse so much more effectively.

> API

I just checked: the API does not (seem to) allow to retrieve items by date. Which means that a major fault of the site cannot be fixed through the API: reading the post history through random access, e.g. the posts of a specific date in a section.

(Although, one could probably harvest through the API an index of "fullnames" (IDs) and associate them to their dates or use them directly for random access in the queries - "list starting with the newest, fill DB of IDs and give me the last; list from that last, fill DB of IDs and give me the new last; loop until end". Not really the most practical way to use a repository.)

> downvote

The worst attack against civilization after - (I can't think of anything) - is an encouragement to vote according to "how does that make you feel".

You can search by date with Pushshift, and I built in a UI for that on reveddit [1]. Just visit a subreddit page and select a date under filters.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com

Does this mirror remove Reddit?

It is like a removeddit 2.0

if facebook can maintain mbasic, then reddit can maintain old. the onboarding funnel is towards new reddit anyway, old is mature and _appears_ stable, and most folks new to the platform will use their official app.

i can see the API becoming more restrictive in the coming years, like Facebook and Twitter’s before it.

The fabricated issues with old are starting to appear, though.

Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.

Using the editor to insert links with _ in them on slow, will escape the underscores (…/this_is/ => …/this\_is/), breaking the links for users of the fast version.

The worst part (for me) is, that I actually like the new reddit. In compact mode it’s cleaner than old while not wasting any space compared to old. But sadly their performance targets were something like "Uh, I guess pages should probably load in under 500ms" which is in no way acceptable for me.

> Slow reddit now supports markdown code blocks with 3 `’s instead of 4 spaces, which gets rendered as normal inline-text on old.

Reading through advent of code solutions has been a mess because of this. Some people just won't 4-space it.

tons of scrolling gifs blow through that performance high-watermark, especially on mobile (even on the M1 iPad)

I don’t care much about mobile, and even if I didn’t have a gif-animation-blocker extension installed, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue as they barely get used in the subreddits I read in ;)

old.reddit is destined to be nuked after the company goes public.

I honestly don't know how people use new Reddit. On my 2017 laptop with a quadcore i7, SSD, and 16GB RAM, using Ubuntu 16.04 and either Chrome or Firefox, and with a 100Mb/s fiber connection, it just loads glacially slow and causes my fans to come on at full speed. And that's just with a single tab - with Reddit I usually end up scrolling through and opening quite a few tabs.

If they kill off old Reddit, there's no way I'll be able to tolerate using the site. Surely I'm not alone in this, or perhaps 99% of the traffic is mobile users on recent phones?

that's like hoping for a time machine