this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024

76 points (98.7% liked)

askchapo

22763 readers

19 users here now

Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How does anyone even use Reddit? Why is the site so broken? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I hardly use the site and I just tried making an account to ask a question on a hobby subReddit.

The site is plagued by errors, every five seconds "We had a server error"

Any time I tried to post "You post was automatically removed" no explanation. And this isn't a "you posted something against the rules" kind of thing because the posts I was trying to make were the same as the one other people were making on the sub. Half the time even when I tried to comment on a post the "server encounted an error".

Not to mention the site blocks you if you try to use a VPN.

Is it because I'm using mobile Firefox? Who cares? If Lemmy can function fine on a mobile browser, Reddit, one of the most famous and popular social media platforms on the internet can.

So I deleted my account. Why bother having a Reddit account if you can't even use it? I know complaining about Reddit is cringe and overdone, but damn I had no idea how far the site had fallen.

I swear these popular sites are trying to destroy themselves. There is no logical reason they should be this broken. It's almost like these corporations are purposely trying to break the internet.

all 35 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago

One of the things I love about Hexbear is that it works fantastically under Firefox on Android. It loads fast and it loads with a great layout. It's obvious that whoever is maintaining the layout code is testing against mobile Firefox, and if anyone reading this is involved in that testing, I really appreciate your work.

I deleted my last Reddit account a few weeks ago. I kept it around that long because there's a surprisingly useful and active and non-chuddish subreddit for my home city. But I decided to just bite the bullet and stop going there.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago

It's slightly less unusable with old.reddit.com which gives you a previous, less enshittified, UI. It is definitely even worse on mobile because it tries really hard to push you onto their shitty app

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (2 children)

The site's been increasingly enshittified, and I think it will become completely unusable if they get around to removing the .old prefix option.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago

That will probably drive a bigger exodus than blocking the apps.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What? No way, I love the app. I think my favorite thing about is how if you click on a video it just loads forever, only playing if you back out of the video and then click on it a second time. Highly functional phone app, *reddit.com.*

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Still love the site steering-device

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It is kinda funny how they are destroying the internet by trying to make money off of it but unlike the real world analog of, say, clear cutting a forest and having wood to sell they still really haven't figured out how to make money off the destruction. They're making heaps in the destroying, sure, but there's nothing left over after they do it to drag to market. It's all just outside money getting dragged into the process. There's no gold in them there hills but they're making money selling the mining equipment.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Colonial extraction but against our own business model

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I think some subs have a karma minimum, or account age minimum, so your post may have been removed by an automod.

Edit: yes it's buggy as shit though so wouldn't rule other stuff out either/the automod actions aren't configured to give an error message of the 'reason' for post/comment removal

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I help mod a subreddit that has a karma minimum, but it's not uncommon that posts are just randomly auto removed for no good reason other than reddit having a brain fart. It's annoying as fuck.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Haven't used reddit in years now. In the rare event I want to view a reddit page, I run the old.reddit.com page through an archive service since it blocks my VPN.

Has anyone seen the Mastodon server bird.makeup? It basically proxies Twitter accounts and rehosts them as Mastodon accounts. Is there anything like that for reddit and Lemmy?

edit: project source code. Also supports instagram at: kilogram.makeup. Apparently, reddit support is being worked on.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Has anyone seen the Mastodon server bird.makeup? It basically proxies Twitter accounts and rehosts them as Mastodon accounts.

thanks niko-happy
i hate it rage-cry

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

In practice, it's not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it's legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I'll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.

I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don't see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it's not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can't even comment in would be obnoxious as hell. It might make sense if the communities could be bridged, but Reddit will never develop the APIs to make that possible. As long as Reddit is read-only, it makes more sense just to link to a libreddit instance.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

In practice, it's not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it's legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I'll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.

yeah bridges are pretty neat

I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don't see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it's not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can't even comment in would be obnoxious as hell,

god bless that ever happens lol. never

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

This wouldn't be annoying if well implemented IMO.

If bridge servers could configure:

source whitelist / blacklist (subreddits, users, etc.)
post content types to mirror (links, images, text posts, comments, etc.)
vote behavior (ignore votes from reddit, lemmy, or both)
fetch behavior (federated servers, cache advertisement, polling frequency, comment thread max depth, etc.)

we could either federate with a bridge configured to our liking or run our own instance.

Example ideas:

mirror only the decent Marxist subs from reddit.
mirror some lib subs for posting bridge links to /c/the_dunk_tank instead of screenshots or the reddit link, which would be better for privacy & opsec and allow us to comment and rebuke BS or dunk without interacting with reddit.

I had a discussion with an irl friend about the various proxy frontend servers (nitter, libreddit, etc.) and how the cat-and-mouse game of blocking / rate limiting makes them unreliable and annoying to use. We discussed the idea of frontends federating their cached content with one another, where queries to the frontend would check other federated servers for the cached content before trying the official API, making it easier for proxies to avoid getting rate limited and preventing rate limiting and breaking API changes from blocking access to content already cached.

Direct ActivityPub integration is basically that, but with a bunch of added benefits:

interaction with the content
access the content with the same (open source) client they use for the fediverse
access more content than their proprietary counterparts, making the fediverse more appealing to normies who just want to laugh at memes
display links posted to both Lemmy and reddit as crossposts, so users could browse by local / subscribed, but also see the reddit comment section if they desire

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In reddit's case I'm cheering it on. Fuuuck that website. Youtube's enshittification bothers me more because it's even more of a monolith on the video-hosting landscape, and there's a ton of useful tutorial content on there for such a wide variety of subjects.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I wish videos weren't the way forward for short tutorials and fixes. This could have been 2 sentences and an image with a red circle. Aaargh

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, true. There are so many cases where I have an issue where I literally just need a yes or no answer, or to learn a simple keyboard shortcut in a program, but instead I end up having to watch a whole video. Part of that is search engines being so terrible now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

My most recent one was "how to do a fillet in Blender". The answer is select am edge, press ctrl-b to activate the bevel tool, scroll up.

4 minutes into a six minute video

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Take a look at SponsorBlock addon for firefox. It has a "skip to highlight" feature that often gets right to the thing you're looking for. Usually it's whatever was in the clickbait.

"Skip intro" and "skip filler" are good too, amdnof course, the eponymous Sponsor Blocking function that skips right past all that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I first learned to change a bike tire due to my love of biking but when cycling I need to access the internet and keep my traffic private so before I jump into showing you how to change a tire let’s first listen to this message from todays sponsor Surf VPN

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Any time I tried to post "You post was automatically removed" no explanation.

In general - if I post in a new sub - I don't bother to read the rules. Half the time I bet mods don't know what the rules are exactly. I've got better things to do with my time than to learn that the removal bot will site Rule 7.2 sub paragraph 3. But that comment doesn't even make any sense because 7.2 only has two paragraphs.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was really only using it with a stripped down third party app, because the site was such a turd on mobile. even the old.reddit interface was too clunky.

when they cut off API access, that was it for me. I heard about the FOSS alternative that would allow third party apps and found a chill, minimalist one and here I am. overwrote all my posts and then nuked my account.

sometimes if I'm on desktop I'll look for shit on reddit, like archived recommendations or niche hobby shit. I use the old.reddit interface for that, but I find it to be unusable for casual scrolling or interaction. that's not even getting into how fucked it is as an astroturfed content aggregator.

made me realize that I need to convert all my casual comms to foss shit eventually to avoid all the eventual enshitification.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

sometimes if I'm on desktop I'll look for shit on reddit, like archived recommendations or niche hobby shit.

Yeah that's basically all I use it for. Lol it's so bad for anything else.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

This site is also broken

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reddit is on a whole other level of broken

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

nah. try old.reddit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Bad gateway moment

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That is because we have no money

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

https://liberapay.com/hexbear people!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

You don't need it, Reddit doesn't even have beanis

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you want to doom scroll for over like 45 minutes, you still have to reddit if you don't want the content to run dry. Current lems biggest weakness is not enough users/contributors. Keeps getting better. Just slowly. Not like the migration slam from Digg to Reddit was.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

If I run out of content I can just post about something dumb lmao

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Sometimes I think Lemmy's existing UI is a hot mess and feel bad about my inability to keep up with fixing all the issues. Hearing how much of a dumpster fire Reddit has become makes me feel much better about myself.