Started with old reddit being blocked if you don’t sign in. I stopped using Reddit with an account years ago when they banned me for no good reason after I’d spent months building a subreddit that was attracting users (was a state specific sub that wasn’t NSFW or selling anything.)
I had gotten around the old reddit ban by using a VPN. At first not every state had this ban on old reddit. Last week that changed. Now every place seems to not allow old reddit unless signed in.
Fine, I’ll use new reddit. My god it sucks. It’s designed to show you ads every other post. Videos autoplay which lags out some of us users machines/connections. I gave up trying to use it. Tried the app, even with protections turned on it was constantly spying on me so I uninstalled it. Plus the app sucked just as bad as new reddit does.
Since Google search results almost always include a reddit post I still occasionally click on one. I noticed now that anytime I click on one and nav to new reddit then try to click back the page lags for upto 30 seconds. Clicking back more doesn’t speed it up. It freezes up. I have to close the tab and start the search over again.
Reddit is death spiraling. That was what pushed me to signup on Lemmy. I suspect we’ll see more converts in the coming months.
Agreed. Cutting off the API’s was the start. But many of us got by with old reddit and it worked ok for lurkers. After they banned me I gave up on contributing but still lurked. They’ve effectively ended that with the death of old. And they made new reddit so glitchy and “sticky” that I don’t even want to click the google search results links anymore.
Bravo Reddit. Throw away that last remaining benefit you offered.