A real shame. Even if you put all the political arguments aside it sucks when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.
Both Imgur and Reddit have put a lot of roadblocks up lately as well. I think some of it is driven by trying to reduce bot traffic.
It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
If I go on a specific subreddit or post I can freely look, but reddit homepage now pops a modal you can't dismiss.
This is on mobile browsers, of course both sites are pushing their apps.
I am sure it doesn't align with their incentives so they don't care, I will never have an account and never install the app, but why block me from viewing the site if I am still seeing the ads? Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
> It's quite inconsistent though which is really frustrating. I can look at the imgur homepage feed, but if I go into a specific post and accidentally click anywhere it throws a modal up that can't be dismissed.
That's not inconsistent, that's a deliberate dark pattern that every social media site uses. Let them see the first page, then when they want to engage: force creating an account.
When you just put a "log in to see this page" up front, people will bounce. When you have them engaged a little bit, chances are they are already invested enough to create an account.
It's not only social media anymore, many mainstream websites have started doing it.
For example on IMDB, you used to be able to read the comments, now they locked them behind a signup box.. it's only a matter of time until they lock the whole site down.
I wish we had the old internet, with simple html forms, texts and pictures.
The peek was really Web 2.0 design, it introduced just enough styles and interactivity to get rid of TABLES but no more than that.
The imdb move was truly stupid of Amazon, imo. I use to go there all the time for movie info but now its wikipedia and other alternatives and don't even bother with imdb.
That's not quite what I meant sorry, I meant Reddit handles it differently to Imgur (one blocks the homepage and one blocks deeper links but not thr homepage. I agree with what you're saying though
I remember using old.reddit to bypass login requirements and quite often it would let me read with VPN on (otherwise it kicks you out if you are not logged in with VPN on). Only recently did they introduce the same authentication blocks to the old.reddit, so I am assuming everyone was taking advantage of it
You have to log in to use old and new reddit now. The only way I can view reddit is through the mobile app without logging in.
They already AI shadowbanned me and nuke all of my accounts for participating in historical discussions that mentioned violent upheaval of power, thats why I can't login. I appreciate them helping me ween off using the site completely.
Thank you reddit, never thought I'd quit you. And I'm missing nothing but the exact same conversations over and over again.
This exactly, reddit and X can be good places to stay informed about what is going on in the world, but the constant negativity, astro-turfing and misinformation is quite unhealthy. I'm a fair bit more relaxed since 'reading reddit' isn't my morning ritual anymore.
I dropped Reddit after the Apollo/API fiasco and came here, and it's been a good change. I still skim Facebook occasionally for niche group stuff, by and large I just don't consider Reddit save for searches that take me there but the constant flood of interstitials has me avoiding it more and more even then
FYI web extension "Old Reddit Redirect" was just updated. Restores anonymous access and old reddit. I looked under the hood and it's just setting a "redesign_optout" cookie, so I'd say our days are numbered regardless.
> Does the free ad model just not pay anymore, or is the selling user data model just that much more lucrative that they would rather no user at all if they aren't logged in?
Traffic from google is probably in the process of collapsing, so these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely.
And yes, the free ad model is probably in the process of dying, the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
This will presumably make many on this site happy, since for many years an ad supported open web was consistently railed against.
> these sites are trying to capture all the users they can as registered users before it's gone completely
With the shuttering of nitter if this is what twitter wants then the least they could do is let you create an account. You need apple or google for that. It seems like they shut the front door some time ago and now drew the curtains so people couldn't peer in.
They managed to make it enticing enough for me just to see one person's posts to enter my email but said "fuck off and get the app". I'll have to make do with the 5 posts they show without login
> the information that was once given away for free in return for looking at ads is now more valuable sold to llm's who will have the eyeballs going forward.
Imgur is 80% posts of text for people trying to post political messages vs what it used to be, interesting or funny pictures
I guess that's their traffic so that's their market but ugh. Imagine if flickr or some other photo site was run over by people posting photos of text messags.
I discovered recently that a big part of this is that sites weight photos of text higher than text.
I learned that the LinkedIn meta of photos of posts is because their algorithm de-ranks anything with a link, so for farming you should post a picture of text then follow up with a link to a blog post a day later as a comment reply to the post to double-dip the activity.
And, eurgh, so many bad incentives to just make everything worse.
If you earnestly just post a link to a blog, it weights you don't because they don't want people leaving their feed.
And actual text people spend less time hovering than photos of text, so again, down the ranking your post goes.
I don't spend much time on other social media but if Imgur is all just photos of text that won't be an accident, but it'll be what sites optimise for.
What imgur used to be was just an image host for reddit. Then they tried to make it into a separate community thing and reddit added their own image/video hosting.
I remember when Imgur tried to become a self-contained community.
Reddit users would post an image in Imgur and the "community" would reply complaining about the lack of context, judging appearances or just being mean in general. The nicest ones would ask users (that would never read anything) to make the images private.
Bots are the noisy excuse they can scream and point to. You look at the mobile reddit app or the new reddit interface and you think these javascript “devs” are capable of forming any valid opinion on these things?
This is the company that refers to its users as “daily active shitheads.” That’s a real quote.
They’re just screaming and pointing to anything they can so they can lock it down and gain more favorable data to sell and more legitimate accounts to show advertisers. That’s what it always is.
I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.
> I’m never wrong and I’m tired of fake imposters devs telling me I am wrong at every corner of every single topic when I turn out to be right 100% of the time.
If you truly believe this, then you should probably seek therapy.
Actually you can discard those annoying popups on reddit using some HTML element blocker (e.g. “hide distracting element” on safari or the picker tool from uBlock origin)
I had some success with these for logged-out browsing ever since old.reddit was locked down completely
Imgur has been totally unusable in the UK for a couple of years - it's an irritant, because it's used for so many image embeds and I'm reluctant to fire up the VPN just so I can see someone's meme that they posted on a forum thread. Nobody has ever used Imgur as a destination site, it's a utility, and any attempts to make it a destination or an app you'd deliberately open are futile.
Reddit isn't so badly impacted, but there are still age-walls around some of the content where it's been deemed "adult" (which encompasses more than just graphic adult imagery).
There's a chrome plugin called 'MirrorImage'[1] that basically rewrites all imgur links/embeds to use a proxy service, it seems to work pretty well to get around it.
I dare say something similar also exists for Firefox
I recently deleted all of my Reddit accounts. The website had been unusable on mobile for a good while, with the constant and ever-more-aggressive nagging about switching to the app. Old Reddit was the one thing that made the site still usable. And now that requires a login.
So fuck that. Bye Reddit. I'll miss some of the communities.
Same, the few communities that are worthwhile I still lurk through photon-reddit. It's a pity how the site went down, I only hope their stock value goes down in the same way.
It's been real annoying to no longer be able to visit reddit posts for search results as it has been the de-facto public forum where recommendations and solutions to issues get posted for a while now. Never going to login there again though and I think I will follow your example and have them delete my account.
There's a pretty radical difference between the statements "I don't have cable" and "I don't even own a TV".
I know lots of people who spend an immensely unhealthy amount of time in front of TVs (even me from time to time, not judging), and few of them have a cable subscription.
Nice to see everyone taking a break from their day jobs at Google of continually breaking yt-dlp so it's impossible to use, to comment how this is an injustice.
To the aggrieved I say: 403 Forbidden.
In their defense, you're not getting the full YouTube experience without ads of an AI doctor selling you suppositories.
It failed because it didn’t make any technical sense. The RIAA was trying to argue that YouTube’s proof-of-work JavaScript challenges were some kind of DRM and by running JavaScript YouTube-dl was circumventing DRM
Judging by the amount of work that's being done on youtube that does nothing but make things harder for third party tools, without bringing any benefit to anything or anyone else, that might not be far from the truth. :)
To me Google's actions wrt yt-dlp seem to be more of the "look here mr. music industry, we're doing something" rather than a serious attempt at blocking it.
Google is in strong enough position against the music industry that they could just tell them off, because where else is the music industry going to go?
This is the sensible response. I'm always bemused by the reactions that go: "this is a garbage site but I am forced to use it every day". Be grateful that your social media addiction is now automatically mitigated! Go outside!
Enshitification doesn’t end. It collapses under its own weight as people get tired and instead stop using things or switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
> switch to some newer radically different paradigm.
What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
Asking because things don’t always magically get better, for example phones are still mostly using locked down Android that bends to corporate whims and the alternative phone options are quite limited (how many Linux phones have failed to get mass market adoption?).
Ofc not all is grim, like Framework is doing some good work on repairable hardware in general and also in regards to software there are quite a few FOSS projects that respect the user etc., like Mastodon also exists and is actually decent to use.
I just think it’s important to acknowledge that the network effects of some of these established players are quite major.
> What if there won’t be a critical mass of fediverse users for it to matter enough and centralised social media platforms are all that we’ll ever get?
I know this might not be a popular view but I'd be fairly content with a fediverse that never scales to the size of platforms like reddit, a lot of the reasons I use the fediverse is because it resembles older forums or even reddit before it was enormous.
With every year passed the bar for a successful Linux phone got higher. Potential users expect more & more apps for internet-related services to run while the companies tear down their APIs making more 3rd-party apps impossible.
Facebook Messenger didn't have an XMPP API because Zuck was a nice guy back then.
The fact that you use fediverse and framework as some catchall for future innovation tells me you are really missing my point.
I am talking more about on the level of things like the migration of time spent watching television to time spent on Facebook on a pc to time spent swiping TikTok on an iPhone. None of these are inherently good or bad, but many of them exhausted their ability to grow and attract costumers and as a result doubled down on extracting value from an existing base - that’s what enshitification is or so I thought.
Reddit seems to have let this AI demand go to their heads.
I had multiple Reddit accounts, simply because I did not want my more "professional" account linked to the other accounts (some for more controversial opinions, some for more adult talk, etc.) Apparently that's a problem for them. So they banned most of my accounts. If I really was up to no good, I'd have used VPNs, etc. to hide my activities. But I just wanted to segregate my personas. e.g. I like discussing local SF and California politics, and often times take controversial positions. I don't want my activities as a respectable(?) member of the Linux Kernel group to be colored through my activities in these other groups. But now I can't do that.
Oh, and back in the day Reddit (when it wanted to pad its user numbers) didn't care for an email address or a phone number. Now, 15 years later, it suddenly wants to confirm the email address!
And don't even get me started on the moderation at Reddit. Typical example: "Hey! We deleted your comment. If you have any questions about it, email the mods." except ... they deleted the comment and now I don't even know what was wrong with it! :-D
New Reddit is too. They were A/B testing it for a while, but now you can't use it without the login pop-up after a short timespan. The funny thing is, it has nothing to do with how much content you view. So if you really want to read something, you can hit F5 and scroll back down every time the pop-up is shown. Still not worth it. But honestly, Reddit content has taken such a plummeting nose dive over the last few years, this just feels like a final reminder that it's time to move on.
Cynically, I think the purpose is to inflate page view counts. You refresh 10x to read the comments, they report 10x user engagement, and high five each other over successfully meeting their KPIs.
I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.
Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...
To what end? We're discussing this on a post about the equivalent for another platform being (hopefully temporarily) shutdown so this will never be a reliable long term solution.
All the time? It wasn't working for me using tor-browser, nor Brave. I was only a reader of Reddit. I'm on fediverse/Lemmy, mainly https://old.lemmy.world which feels very familiar!
I've not taken the effort to understand fediverse yet, but it feels very old-internet.
(as a logged-in user) I just stopped using it the day they banned 3rd party apps and I don't miss it a bit. I visit some communities still, but only on PC with old reddit. Once that is gone, I'm gone as well.
spez is a problem. And if it's not spez, then enlighten me. But they've taken years of built up network effects and absolutely wrecked it. It's so hostile when companies do this. They just ignore their users, straight up. That should be a firable offense. The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
> The customer is NOT 'always right', but you can meet them halfway
Reddit users are not customers. The advertisers and AI labs are the customers because they're the ones paying. The users are the cattle in the pen being sold to the advertisers and the monkeys at the typewriters whose output gets sold as AI training data.
I understand this, but the distinction is academic
The people using their product. The people who, if the product were shit from day 1 - as Reddit wasn't - would have never signed up for it. Who have been effectively and literally lied to
“Users” is a misnomer that sheepishly cloaks the relationship with a little feint of dignity. You are not the customer merely because you use the thing. Where the service is free, your attention, metadata, and by extension, susceptibility to influence are the value being sold; the advertisers are the customers.
As the saying goes: “If it’s free, you’re the product.”
Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in. And as much as I hate the UX too… Reddit user numbers have grown a ton in the last few years. It’s difficult to make the argument that these changes are a failure.
Yeah they have grown because it's the only thing Google ever shows when you want people's opinions or search for something and want to see what people say. The only forum or community they ever show is reddit and nothing else, not even Twitter nor Instagram nor anything else.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook are all closed [too, like Reddit], Google SERPs should have preferred reddit as a source people could access. I don't see it that much; probably country or personal search effects.
> Existing Reddit users aren’t affected by this regi wall UX because they’re already logged in.
I am an existing Reddit user, but don't want to be logged in everywhere and always. Sometimes I had a few free moments and wanted to kill some time, so until recently I could go to Old Reddit on my mobile phone and just see what the 'general human zeitgeist' was discussing: from something serious in /r/worldnews to some pop culture news story.
What kind of users though? OnlyFans models, porn addicts, LLMs and child groomers... maybe.
I could be ignorant because I'm not the target user for their brave new vision but no one I know uses reddit anymore. And with the locking of old.reddit and forcing sign-ups they probably lost the last few old timers who were still there for what was supposed to be an open forum to freely exchange ideas.
> Reddit is the worst for this. I hate the disgusting, low class UX design where they let you read about 10-15 seconds of a page before locking you out.
When this happens I use uBlock origin to remove that popup and the grey background behind it.
Scrolling and loading more comments remains usable (unlike Facebook)
The EU is first and foremost a business club. So the majority of EU rules are there to create a common market. If one participant is trying to be dodgy, then oftentimes a rule valid for all market participants is created, to re-establish the common market.
Sometimes it's even the producers that ask the EU to regulate it. E.g. all of those classes for vegetables originated from the producers. As a result, an egg of size "M" from Netherlands has the same size as an egg of the size "M" from France. And both can be sold in e.g. Belgium, since we now have a common market and common attributes. A customer seeing an "M" sized egg in the shelves doesn't need to ponder, he knows what he gets.
If some website needs a login so that you can view contents is completely outside of this. That is actually common, many newspapers and magazines do that. Its entirely to their discretion if they allow free public access, limited access, or paid access. One doesn't need to be Google Search, one can also be Kagi, so to say.
Not only requires you to log in, asks you your username once you do log in, which means for me I can't log in because I had a random username and there is no email from them where it is mentioned
It's possible that the lack of these alternatives will decrease engagement enough that Twitter would loosen these rules. Perhaps not that likely, but it's possible.
I'd say that's practically a given. Everyone that wants to have an account already has one, everyone else will not make an account just because they are bothered into making one.
Nitter and xcancel traffic must be negligible, they're doing this just to pretend they're doing stuff to justify their legal department wages.
You don't have to comply with a cease and desist notice, depending on your risk tolerance. They're not legally binding, like court orders. Rather, they are threats, equivalent to "gimme your lunch money or I'll beat you up"
Yes and hiQ v. LinkedIn has already given us precedent that scraping is not inherently illegal, not to mention X's own scraping to train their AI.
Makes sense that they want to consult legal experts rather than just going with their gut though but I hope those legal experts will work something out that gets them back online.
> when a site requires you to log in before you can read content on it.
Where does this come from? You can see the last few posts of an account [1], and the contents of a single posts, but minimal to no comments [2]. Videos play after dismissing the login popup.
I have no X account, but I read content there all the time without issue.
I received an Amber Alert a few days ago, which linked to a Twitter post containing the details, and the "x" in the "plz login" modal that blocked the entire screen was non-functional. I just sat there pounding on the x, and then a little hand gif popped up and pointed at the login button.
Do you have a screenshot of what you see when you click the above link? I've never had a twitter link go directly to a login screen. A twitter link within a twitter link does, though, unless you copy paste it into the address bar.
I don't understand why I'm being downvoted. Am I seeing something different than everyone else? I just tried with private browser, multiple browsers, multiple devices, and they're all the same: I click any twitter post link I can find, and I see the post, no login screen. I'm not using adblock or and javascript is turned on.
Trying to open an image in a tweet also gets the login screen and since a lot of people hide the important information in images because that's what the algorithm prefers, simply visiting the tweet URL directly is no longer a viable solution. You also sometimes get the login requirement for the initial tweet itself.
It depends on the tweet. I can browse many profiles of public figures just fine and open their tweets, but tweets from random people (especially if they include media) will bounce me back with a login wall. Remotely NSFW stuff is instant block.
I'm referring to a modal overlaying the post. It says "see this post in the app". Not a login prompt, as I previously reported (but who cares, modal is modal).
It is not difficult to understand why you are being downvoted. You are insisting that your own personal observations are the absolute truth, and rejecting everyone else's.
Not sure how you manage that - twitter, insta, and pinterest all begrudgingly let you see one, maybe two things, then lock down and prevent you from interacting without logging in.
It really gives the sense that you’re not wanted there.
I don't know how it works, but it is very inconsistent.
On mobile right now, I can't scroll past the second post of [1] without getting blocked by an undismissable popup.
If I click on the "read more" button of the first post, I can't scroll down at all before getting that same non-dismissable popup. It makes it hard to read the post itself, because even scrolling a tiny bit (e.g. to get what I'm reading closer to the center of my vision) triggers it.
I've also had other times where I couldn't play a video someone linked to me, but sometimes I can, don't know why.
Only if it's directly linked to you. Can't go scrolling on someone's profile without getting blocked by a pop-up. Also can't click a post and see replies.
Edit: also can't read a thread because each new post is considered a "reply", so blocked too.
We're probably cross purposes, but, yes, you can view posts in isolation if directly linked to that individual post.
But try to go anywhere 'related' or follow a trail of replies and you're blocked by either a login prompt or a post limit or some other guest-unfriendly pattern. And that means, for me personally, that the original 'thing' is not worth the time because I can't follow the train of thought that it creates - which is probably why it's designed that way: annoy people into signing up.
I can not and will not reward that (mostly, I'm probably hypocritical in a couple of facets of my life choices).
For me that’ll mean I just don’t read content on there any more. Which I realise X doesn’t care about, I’m not monetisable anyway. But a shame nonetheless.