I wish GitHub made it clear when the repo was created. The commit history comes from git and frequently predates the GitHub creation when imported from somewhere else.
The api shows created_at as 2008-06-18 but this seems like relevant info that should display in the ui.
I don't know what Reddit you're seeing but I assure you there are still plenty of thriving NSFW subreddits. I might even say tons. I've seen a few get deleted here and there but it was always for pretty specific, targeted reasons.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I prefer new Reddit when I’m on my phone (which nowadays is my primary causal scrolling device). I think part of the reason people stick to old Reddit is because they haven’t ripped off the nostalgia band-aid yet
How do you deal with "Please open in app to see all comments" and other similar bs? If you don't want to install app and/or login only old.reddit works on mobile web.
It's absolutely wild that all these years later new reddit is still so bad that a sizable portion of the overall traffic fights the defaults to use old reddit. Users never fight defaults... unless you screw up as badly as new reddit did.
No it mostly works, but does revert and need to be rechecked seemingly randomly. Used to be more frequently actually, now is only every few months for me.
Personally I re-wrote it once and my cookie has has my back for a few years right now, but YMMV depending on how often you change browsers, delete cookies etc.
If you're doing that often or if you're part of the "HN Crowd" it should be trivial to write a quick bookmarklet to do the re-write for you.
The best thing for Reddit's business would be to hide communities as much as possible and turn their app into a version of TikTok that throws nothing but ads disguised as viral videos in front of users. They probably want to do this badly.
Actually, what if someone came up with an app that had no user created content whatsoever and was just an infinite-scroll of corporate ads? I bet it would make millions.
If you login as a user you see comments in a different style than the guest view of comments. The guest view of comments on new new reddit is even more awful.
It has little to do with the look and feel. Loading a "new" reddit page feels like going on a 2010s news page without an adblocker. The page takes 15 seconds or more to load. Elements are shifting around during that time. If I'm not logged in, I get a screengrabbing beg ad to install their apps.
Reddit code is trash. The old version is just much simpler and therefore less annoying. If it weren't for the fact that the smaller subreddits have lots of value, no one would put up with it.
I used Reddit before the new UI and... also prefer the new one. It's much better for browsing funny memes. But I don't use Reddit for "serious" stuff. There are subreddits for topics I'm interested in, but I would spend most of my day correcting people if I was subscribed there, because they are so bad. Funny cats are ok though.
I still distinctly remember the survey they had post new reddit launch. After answering it as accurately as I could given the rather limited options available and submitting it I was given a response of 'sorry you're so change averse, suck it up'. Obviously paraphrasing, but the idea that someone could only dislike the new UX because they were change averse has stuck with me as being particularly brain dead.
Same here. When Digg came out with their v4 redesign I switched to Reddit and never looked back. Though now I prefer HN more and use Reddit less these days, so it won’t be too much of a loss to me.
Old reddit + darkreader +ublock origin extension on Firefox is my preference.
I’d like to know others’ opinions on darkreader: is it a great security threat. I perused the information it discloses it gets access to but have not seen many online criticisms.
Could be a fun project to put all the steps outlined in the install guide [1] into a single script which turns a fresh Debian 12 install into a running Reddit instance.
At the risk of beating a dead horse: one could also say "no" to another silo'd instance and instead opt to try running something like Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Them going closed source is one of the many, many changes I have seen on that site. It used to be somewhat cool back in the day but Reddit feels like it is trying as hard as it can be to be FaceBook these days. I had to leave because it feels nothing like it used to be.
I've been using old Reddit for a few years, pretty much since I found out it was a thing. Judging by their current iteration's UX, the code is probably horrific enough that open sourcing it would hurt their reputation. As you may know Reddit is owned by Conde Nast or some sibling company, and they love outsourcing their stuff to bodyshops.
For an actively-maintained project, see the code that runs rDrama-dot-net (sup /h/slackernews lol) and watchpeopledie-dot-tv https://fsdfsd.net/rDrama/rDrama
It’s unbelievable how user-hostile old Reddit has become on mobile. Overriding the back button to remove the referring page from history. Modals popping up after x amount of browsing, etc.
I still think that tree-style comments and voting are far, far superior to old-style forums. Especially for hobby information or someone looking for info years after the fact.
I have spent way too much time following 3 separate conversations in a forum thread looking for the specific information I want.
With reddit (and HackerNews) it's so much easier to track individual sub-threads and see what's going on, and the voting system (while it can and does lead to echo chambers) is also great for promoting better content, IMO.
On the contrary, they're better for browsing, but much worse for participating. Reddit's key innovation was making the site attractive to viewers who weren't yet members of the community. It used to be that you joined a community when you found it and people had to be asked to lurk — "lurk moar" even became a meme — until reddit came around and people browsed /r/funny (which was actually good once) for months before getting an account.
The downside is that every discussion feels like a race. Trying to have a conversation on Reddit or HN is vastly more stressful than it ever was on old forums — even compared to places where people were screaming at each other. You have six hours to get your point across before the thread dies. There's a tendency for unproductive one-on-ones to occur that wouldn't be possible with traditional threads.
But the upside is that Reddit is (so far) the best place to find out whether I should try the new cookies at Trader Joe's or whether some off-brand of iPhone cables are reliable.
I disagree that they're necessarily worse for participating. The issues of following a popular forum thread would still make it obnoxious to participate in the conversation. And in a forum, when two people get into unproductive one-on-ones it tends to stifle the entire conversation, because it's put right inline with all other posts.
The problem with massive threads, I feel like, still exists with forums, but the opposite. It's usually folly to comment on a popular thread early on a traditional forum, as your comment will just be swept up with all the other excited comments. I think the answer to both is to use them for smaller communities, which is why I think reddit is best for hobby communities and whatnot.
>You have six hours to get your point across before the thread dies
It used to take longer for a thread to die, but comments have always solidified rather quickly.
This was fine, anyways, because each thread was an archive of the state of mind of the people involved at the time. If the conversation continues, it should continue in an entirely different thread, and if you're new to the conversation, you can backtrack over the previous threads to get up to speed with everybody else. There was a real hivemind-like (in a non-derogatory sense) stream of consciousness that everybody could participate in.
This is impossible now, though, because of moderators preventing multiple threads subjectively "related" to one another being on the first 5-8 pages at once.
Worst of all is the "megathreads", which aggregate literally over a hundred links to external sites into a single post, where people can't even vote on them individually. The entire benefit of the format of Reddit is user-filtered content, so you don't have to read literally the entire internet to find your way to something useful.
With all the hype around AI, I feel like there is so much low-hanging fruit in the realm of "human algorithms" that everyone has failed to explore over the last 15ish years of stagnation (and decay) in social media. People need useful processes and structures, not magic question-answer machines, or recommendations based on "who they really are inside."
Just imagine, for instance, if HN allowed you to vote specifically on backlinks to previous threads for each individual post. As of now, there's no easy way to know how far a discussion on a particular topic has advanced in the past, and judge whether you're about to say something redundant. If users could easily post a related thread and get some signal back about whether it was helpful, it would occur to them more often to re-post relevant discussions. Thread-backlinks competing with fresh comments and other links is just too much noise.
If you look at the discussion around the "Clean Code, Horrible Performance" article, there is a followup which addresses some of the claims the commenters made about the original. Then, in the comments for that article (across all platforms), you find people claiming that nobody would ever actually say those things.
Eventually people are going to realize the UX provided by AI isn't actually that great, and rediscover that DAGs are really useful.
“Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done in one weekend. (Disclosure: We used my web.py library.) The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain.”
Someone would have to correct me if I'm wrong here as my history is hazy, but wasn't Reddit originally built in Lisp and then ported to Python due to other factors (i.e hard to find talent/hard to maintain/speed of iteration/etc)?
Django back then had notable nuances at scale and if you were migrating over a codebase in another language I'm not sure it would've been a viable thing to entertain.
Didn't they stop updating that repo at some point? I'm not sure it was at the same time that they replaced the main site with a SPA - so it's probably not entirely accurate to say "Old Reddit" (which to me means old.reddit.com) is open-source.
Why in 2023 it takes like 4 seconds for every site to load on a mobile phone? Does anyone on reddit even use reddit on phone? They dont know that their page takes forever to load? Or do they just want to get rid of users that try to read stuff and make it some sort of a picture-based site? Seriously did anyone there ever even try to optimize loading ? I go to /r/askreddit - open a random thread - and it takes few seconds to load. Compare it on mobile to old i.reddit that loaded instantly even with thoustands of comments.
I tried like 10 different reddit apps. None of them has the look and feel of the light-weight i.reddit did. I dont even mention that those apps often dont have tabs + history cannot be shared with browser.. Seriously why there is no app that behaves the way i.reddit behaved?
I also dont understand how the really-really old reddit "frame" (top 10 upvoted comments on left side of the screen) died. This was just so damn good.
Internet supposedly moved forward due to "security", but why there cant be some sort of a browser plugin that can display the original site on 90% of the screen and top 10 reddit comments (i.reddit style with nesting) on the left?
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