No more browsing for you! Why Reddit blocked my daily visit to its mobile website - Ars Technica
Not hard to guess the motivation: Report for com.reddit.frontpage 2026.17.0 - εxodus
(Do we need a new forum tag for “enshittification?”)
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I recommend browsing Reddit through a front-end such as Libreddit. It works well when used with the LibRedirect browser extension or Redirector if you want more fine-grained control and setup.
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THis is 100% a great way, just make a webapp with “Web” and you will be wasting hours redditing and searching for an electrical outlet(because our battery life issues). You cannot post though, which for me is another plus! currently https://redlib.catsarch.com is reliable but there are others listed on the redlib git..
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Also: Privacy Redirect – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
EDIT: But this thread is more about the manipulation, not finding workarounds.
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you posted before I finished!
Agreed, but I think it is useful to also share how others in this particular community of appropriately paranoid work our magic.
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Running a user agent modifier might help as well as using the ‘request desktop site’ in firefox.
When they take away browsing with the old format ( old.reddit.com ), I’m going to stop using reddit. As it is, the number of AI bot posts is distractingly high … and reddit made it intentionally harder to detect since users can turn off their post history. [AI bots have a pattern that can easily be detected if you have an access to, say, their last 20 posts.]
What’s a good alternative to reddit in regard to informative specialized topic discussion forums?
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the quality has dropped startlingly between Iran/Quatar/Russia/tankie spam and just the quality of general discourse, I used to see fountain pen and mechanical keyboards on the all feed every day now it is all AI AITAH stories. But they and discord seem to have killed the website forum tradition pretty well. Dead Internet all the way. forums.puri.sm is a rare special exception.
It is worth mentioning that the Privacy Redirect plugin for Firefox DOES NOT catch the old.reddit.com link and links straight to reddit.
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It’s certainly heading that way. Lots of AI bots and low-information posts.
But the interesting contributors/contributions have gone somewhere. I just don’t know where.
It successfully redirects to Old Reddit for me.
There’s Lemmy (Licensed AGPL-3.0-only), though I personally find it a bit difficult to use. In fairness, I haven’t taken the time to get used to it and find communities I want to read from. It’s just generally an issue of discoverability with the Fediverse imo.
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It’s no good idea to have something like reddit in first place. Forums should not be centralized to become the next social media.
I don’t agree. reddit is, in my opinion, a “topic focused” discussion board. So much of other social media is “individual based” (e.g. twitter is about “individual post” and their followers discussing that topic; mastodon too, except that one signs up with a specific “community focus” ) or “single topic/product” boards (where I think group-think permeates most “non-round-table” discussions).
But, that said, the quality of reddit is declining rapidly.
I had forgotten about Lemmy, and I’ll have to take a look.
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And that is no centralized platform with one account for everything? 
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It is a centralized platform and I have no issue with that; specifically I disagree with your opinion that “forums should not be centralized”. Why do you hold that view?
In regard to “one account for everything”: You can, but of course, you are allowed to have several accounts. I have 3.
Presumably, see the OP: enshittification.
LOL maybe back to mailing lists?
Because that is the reason for any major issue, including those you mentioned here. But especially because they become a huge single point of failure. The “single account for everything” is not meant in the way you interpret it. It makes no difference if you can create one or three accounts. All three accounts are affected if enshittification goes on, no matter what subreddit they are.
I really wounder why you don’t know the basics of a healthy internet.
The bottom line is that Reddit went IPO a couple of years ago - and the board and CEO decisions in the lead-up to that and subsequent to that will rightly put a priority on what makes more profit for Reddit (shareholders), not what is beneficial to its users, except to the extent that it would drive away so many users that it would reduce profit.
It’s not really any different from any other social media company with a profit motive that provides a “free” service to the public, and, let’s be realistic, staff and equipment and bandwidth etc. do have to be paid for.
Deal with it. For example, don’t “keep using Reddit”.
I’ve never had an account on Reddit but, from what I’ve heard from friends who do, the moment has well and truly passed. Peak Reddit desirability is in the past. So no point jumping on board now.
Remind me, why did we abandon USENET?
I am told that there are those who have abandoned normal universal email for facebook’s alternative to email.
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I really wonder if you do or if you’re repeating the most recent and popular story, but without actual evidence.
Certainly “aggregators” are a target for “enshitification”, but that doesn’t mean they will become that way. In fact, if there was any interest by the parent company to limit AI bots, they would also be the easiest platforms on which to restrict AI bots.
I just had a look at Lemmy. I’ve only spent an hour, so my view could easily change (I’ll give it a few weeks). It meets all the popular buzzwords: decentralized, federated, community-driven, … But it’s awkward, confusing/convoluted, and … even though it has been around more than 5 years … it is stale and lacking content. I looked for specialized content … and what I could tell is that people were bringing over topics from reddit and the discussion was bare/vacant – one or two comments with content and one of those was sharing a link that they had seen posted on reddit. My opinion: The main users are pro-Lemmy nerds trying to make it interesting … but there are no interesting people to actually have interesting discussions with because they don’t want to spend their time figuring out Lemmy. i.e. It’s missing “the community”.