Reddit is quietly changing the way its homepage works

The article isn't about the new layout. It's about an apparent difference in the karma system that seems to de-prioritize content from karma farmers and content that comes from off of Reddit.

For specific subreddits it's hard to make a concrete statement about what is going on with traffic. Some subreddits I frequent had traffic decline noticeably due to them shutting down to protest the API changes, while others have lost traffic to other platforms, most notably Discord.

Quieter and more dominated by relatively green programmers.

I can't get good entropy about tech anymore from Reddit (e.g. I often look on hackernews or Twitter to find out how the sausage is actually made when it comes to bits of tech stacks and so on)

> Much of Reddit seems to be a link farm for Twitter.

And not even just re-publishing of the Tweet text, or links to the tweet, but often it's pictures of Tweets which is the worst of all worlds (searchability, accessibility, language translation, respect for custom text sizes, bandwidth). The only reason I could think of to post an image of a Tweet is if you think the Tweet is going to be taken down later, but you can just copy/paste the text in that case. "Images of Tweets" is such a stupid trend.

And still too much censorship on a sub-level. So easy to get banned for months or permanently for the smallest of transgressions.

Within maybe the last couple weeks, they also seemed to start blocking some Tor exit nodes.

I guess at least 50/50 it's an anti-abuse measure (rather than surveillance capitalism), at probably some human cost of denying reddit as a venue/channel to oppressed people.

Incidentally, if anyone is using Tor in ways that show up as significant abuse to Reddit, that's hurting Tor for those who need it for more legitimate purposes.

I can use it with a VPN but only if I have an already logged-in session.

Without a logged-in session, I can only see error messages which change randomly. Most of them seem to be either an IP range blocking page or an image with "You broke reddit" message on it.

old.reddit.com doesn't work for me when I have uBlock Origin enabled. Also, on the narwhal app that I pay for and uses the official API, comments aren't loading at all.

Agreed insofar as there is no viable replacement in sight. There may not be for awhile if, necessity is the mother of invention.

So true. Users deleted so much of their data off reddit during the last big exodous... so much value lost. And the irony is that LLMs have all that data and will continue to realize the value from it that Reddit never could, even when they held it

As others have noted, technical and more quality content, especially the one found in subreddits that are more composed in nature is becoming more scarce and rapidly declining in quality. Bots, constant reposts and low quality comments and posts in contrast are rewarded and gain more exposure than ever. "It's just another phase" is a very light way of putting it. Reddit is becoming - maybe arguably has become - a former shell of itself more akin to 9gag than what it used to be.

The reason Reddit can't really do this (and they tried) is because people notice and react. If they turn reddit into Facebook they'll lose their "clients", particularly the "productive" ones. I'm not going to use Reddit if old.reddit.com breaks or if I can't sort by new/top. I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of users like me. People using the new layouts might "interact" more, but it's a shallow interaction. They don't write long form text, they don't post anything original etc. If they want a link farm they can have it but it'll gradually empty out and turn into a cheap tabloid-esque aggregator that copies twitter's trending. Maybe Reddit can't be very profitable after all and they should scale down their expenses and keep it as it is.

HN hug of death.

It seems that Reddit has a 30% chance to be down at any given moment regardless of outside influences. No other AAA website is so badly programmed and so badly managed.

Isn't the crux of the article that they're observing less karma farming? I don't know if I agree with their data but they seem to be saying that it's getting better.