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.
Yeah it feels yucky. But like I said, since google search results still have a decade+ of answers that are often good I’m almost forced to eventually click a reddit link. Before this week that was not usually a problem. I didn’t even convert every link to old reddit before they forced its end.
But as of this week any reddit link I click jams up my browser when I back-click. Its sticky and extra fucky. They are actively sabotaging reddit.
When you find a good reddit post with information, grab it and post it here with an asterisk that it came from a specific sub. Reddit has made fat bank off of user’s content, so now users should return the favor and bring the best of it here. I’ve got my posts archived and am soring through them and rewriting the best ones to repost here… Was on vintagemac and did a ton of how-to’s.
Try Startpage, Kagi, and even Qwant.
I pay $10/month to Kagi so I can remove Reddit result from searches without having to add the flag to the query. Reddit has been garbage for 5 years now.