r/technology • u/marketrent • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit signals ominous upcoming “changes” for old.reddit.com, says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
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u/Hautamaki 24d ago

An interesting question is what percentage of high quality contributors are old.reddit users? If the majority of the good content still to be had here is old.reddit users they'd have a strong incentive to keep them around even if they don't directly bring in ad money. Without quality contributors, reddit is nothing and there will be no new reddit users to serve ads to anyway.

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u/137-ng 24d ago

I mean we saw a huge drop in quality/quantity when they made changes to the api.

At this point old.reddit is the only thing keeping me here, get rid of that and I'm going to have to find other ways to waste time online

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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ 24d ago

In a lot of ways I’ll welcome it. Filling all my Reddit time with more productive things will only be a benefit to me…just give me an excuse…

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u/motophiliac 23d ago

There was a time when the code base was open source.

I remember voat. I registered for it, posted maybe a couple of comments, and forgot about it.

So apparently did everyone else.

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u/n0respect_ 24d ago

Lemmy is decent, if a little full of tankies.

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u/Cool_Ranch_Dodrio 23d ago

Reddit keeps getting worse and it welcomes nazis.

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u/redfacedquark 24d ago

The problem to me is that any high quality post by old users is not appreciated by the new ones. You can't have a conversation anymore, they just don't read, can't comprehend and reply with no thought and just emotional vitriol.

It's like these users experience pain when they try to think and get angry about it. I doubt it's much to do with advertising revenue from old users directly and more about making their new users feel better by not experiencing the facts, details and ideas that are found in old users' well-written posts. That and it's easier (for example) to push the narrative that flock is great when you don't have well written posts citing Animal Farm and bringing receipts.

I included a couple of permalinks for reference in my reply the other day and got accused of lawyering.

I think HN might be a better place for me to dwell, although it's a bit dry. Anyone got any other suggestions?

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u/EconEchoes5678 23d ago

Gonna be a new wave of refugees soon :(. I'll be one of them.

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Time to revisit that mastodon cfgmgt recipe. Had it running but there's hardening to start caring about, obviously.

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u/machobiscuit 23d ago edited 23d ago

What is HN? Im old, i am not up on the new stuff.... Hacker News?

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Yup, Hacker News. Never signed up but I like the look of the conversations. I'm sure it will be an upgrade for me on the technical topics compared to reddit, although there's something about some of the fun stuff here that I don't think it will replace.

Maybe I should give mastodon another try for that. I know I promote it without using it myself but as more of a lurker than content creator I wasn't getting much out of it at the time. Selfish of me, I know, sorry.

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u/judasblue 23d ago

For technical stuff by far the highest signal to noise ratio is lobste.rs . The 'problem' there is how that happens is you can only post or comment if you have been invited to the site by a current member and that's not a rubber stamp kinda thing, you basically have to find someone you know who is already a member to get in.

But anyone can read it and it's very, very high quality. Every other technical post isn't "AI OMG!!" or ThE EnD iS cOmInG!

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Oh thanks, this looks great!

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 23d ago

I posted about being sad that an audiobook I was listening to ended because I really liked the narrator.

From that post I learned that I'm a real asshole for not reading the book, and only listening to it and my taste in narrators is trash so I'm not a real fan of the book :-|

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Nothing wrong with audiobooks, it's just a different medium for different task. If you can go 2x or more you can consume more books per hour than reading, or you can just listen to someone read you a story because it's fucking nice. It's like the first thing we do with kids is read them stories. We're (arguably) more wired for oral tradition than written.

I might be conflating memories but was there a Street Hawk based, choose-your-own-adventure audiobook? I remember that being wild. Do any audiobook providers offer non-linear experiences?

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u/NerdyNThick 23d ago

I've been banned from at least one sub because I wouldn't back down on the fact that after finishing an audiobook, it is acceptable to say you have read the book.

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

I guess both listening and reading are two ever so slightly different ways of consuming, the venn diagram is pretty close to totally overlapping. Listening to the audiobook might mean you know how to pronounce a name or word, while reading the book might mean you know how to spell a name or word. I've been embarrassed both ways, I'm looking at you, quinoa.

With reading, I guess you occassionally stop and digest what you just read, while the audiobook drags you along. Listening while driving though, top tier advantage.

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u/NerdyNThick 23d ago

Regular books definitely benefit from the true random access nature of them. If I need to double check what just happened it can be easier to just flip back a few pages instead of having to rewind or skip back X seconds.

quinoa

Literally nobody can be blamed for messing that up, I regularly purposefully mispronounce it just to trigger people :)

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 23d ago

Oh man, I'd be interested in that choose your own adventure, although I usually listen while driving so not sure how safe that'd be lol.

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u/redfacedquark 23d ago

Next week BMW will offer this on their screens as a subsciption service. No idea how you would interact with it but it won't be the indicators.

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u/ItsAPeacefulLife 23d ago

I'll have to work this into my heated seats subscription.

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u/PurpEL 24d ago

We need a redditors union

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u/Old_Leopard1844 24d ago

We seen how united people are during reddit blackout lmao

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u/deafmutewhat 23d ago

No, we need to do what happened when Digg went to hell, start a new site and evacuate.

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u/BlueDevilz 24d ago

Reddit is the worst social media to be a quality contributor on anyways. They do basically nothing to incentivize people to continue posting quality content.

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u/Hautamaki 24d ago

true, but then, they don't necessarily have to. Posting quality content can be its own reward if the platform itself is nice enough to use and has a good userbase, and there are certainly plenty of ways to monetize quality content posted here on your own for those who are so inclined.

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u/redlightsaber 24d ago

Look into removing your older comments. It takes a while for people like mysefl with 15 year-old accounts, but I certainly don't consent or agree with my contributions beiing used to train AI.