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.
Use a front like Redlib, there are also browser extensions to redirect your click
Nah I’m not doing that much work for reddit. It’s going to start slowly dying off like facebook anyways. I’d noticed over the last year or so how much content from Indian subreddits were making the frontpage. Especially on weekends and the mornings of weekdays. I don’t really need that, nor do I need the ads, bots, shills and other junk that has accumulated. Time for reddit to digg itself its own grave.
I agree but my point was that Reddit is still a valuable website to search infos when you need it, and a frontend is the best way to do it in every aspect.
Also pretty much effortless, just go here and search stuff: https://reddit.nerdvpn.de/
I’ve started doing this, one tip I have is there’s an option in the settings Layout->Compact that makes it a bit more like old.reddit to browse