Old.reddit.com is now login only
17 pointsby denvrede5 hours ago7 comments
  • spacedcowboy3 hours ago
    I’m about halfway done writing a replacement to Reddit, with no adverts, no tracking, no data harvesting, no selling of your data, no algorithm-driven presentation, no tracking pixels, basically none of the things that annoyed me about reddit.

    I don’t expect it to make me millions, or even thousands :), but it’ll be an experiment to see if a completely non invasive platform can work. Costs should be small, so I can keep it going myself for at least a few years and then maybe Patreon or similar to fund it if it grows to need that

    In some ways I’ve taken the opportunity to make things a bit better, the post editor has preview, moderations can be appealed, all moderations are public, the groups have hierarchy, edits can be viewed etc.

    Anyway, a month or so and I’ll announce it, currently in test at blewit.uk, because they did.

    • fragmede2 hours ago
      I mean this genuinely, good luck! It's a tantalizing project to work on, I've bought a couple of domains for it but haven't followed through due to other projects taking precent. Maybe the costs will be small enough for the site to support itself. Technology has advanced since Reddit's inception in 2005, so server costs feel like it's possible to run on a shoestring budget, but if you go viral, server costs are anything but.
      • spacedcowboyan hour ago
        Thanks :)

        There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops you have to jump through to stay legal (which are mainly aimed at <generic big company>, not <joe schmoe>).

        I've also taken a few decisions to keep things "lean and mean", so the hardware it requires is surpisingly modest, at least for getting going. Pushing as much as possible to the free tier of Cloudflare helps, and just one box behind the HA layer can manage ~1.3M req/sec if they hit the redis layer (which I ... encourage by design :). Even going all the way down through the DB and back, it hits 50k/sec - which is rendering, not i/o. That's ... quite a bit of headroom :)

  • Zanfa5 hours ago
    I will never understand the obsession to build terrible SPAs to replace existing UIs, that are, without exception, worse than the original.

    But I guess Reddit had a good run and all things must come to an end.

    • sandeepkd5 hours ago
      My experience is that it has mostly to do with the team structures within organization. SPAs allow you to create front end only team which can theoretically iterate faster with changes and demos.

      Btw concept of SPA is probably more than a decade old by now, GraphQl has taken over in lots of places along the same lines.

  • mittensc5 hours ago
    needed an excuse to compulsively stop visiting, this is perfect

    funny that i wasn't getting anything useful out of it for some time

    new version doesn't even work properly on firefox with ublock, comments almost never show up, video doesn't work...

    • denvrede5 hours ago
      Same for me. I reduced my visits after the crackdown on third party clients and I guess now it’s time to say goodbye forever.

      To be fair, I guess Reddit won’t miss me either because I was only lurking the whole time.

      • mittensc4 hours ago
        I tended to use it with an account when posting on hobby subreddits and without an account otherwise.

        They are going to lose casual posters as well.

    • frereubu3 hours ago
      I was hoping for this too. I spend far too much unfocused time on there. It'll be interesting to see if I crack and start logging in though. There are definitely posts I've found useful on Reddit, which would probably be the gateway into it. (Although I suppose I could always use the www version if I end up on there via a search result).
  • CM302 hours ago
    Well, that's my usage of the site on mobile over with now. The 'new' interface is even less usable in a mobile browser.

    Whenever old Reddit stops being available for members as well, that's my time to return to old school forums instead.

  • mchinen25 minutes ago
    Today I noticed they also wall off the normal (non-old) site after the session goes on for a little while.

    Hopefully it's just another A/B they drop after a week like in the past, but otherwise I may have to move on to another semi-anonymous doomscroller.

  • mopsi2 hours ago
    Does this mean that Google will soon stop showing reddit posts in search results? I've occasionally found helpful tips there for rare issues that are not covered anywhere else.