Article URL: https://www.cole-k.com/2026/07/21/reddit/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747 Points: 105 # Comments: 101

If you don’t know Reddit, it basically is the host of many popular forums. And like any company which encourages you to “come for the cats [and] stay for the empathy,” Reddit seems to be in the business of extracting as much value as it can from said forums without completely destroying them. After all, simply fostering community is not a noble enough goal for the New Tech, and fortunately for Reddit, genuinely human-generated data is now gold in the LLM Age. You are welcome to read about the last time they decided to pluck the metaphorical liver from their communities. While I no longer wish to engage with Reddit, I still visit it occasionally, especially in the LLM Age. This is because appending site: reddit.com to a search query is basically a surefire way to find results written by genuine humans. Which, just to be extremely clear, I still find desirable. I guess this makes me old, but I use the original frontend for Reddit, old.reddit.com. I’m going to try really hard not to preach about why it’s a better frontend, but that’s all it is! A design for Reddit. Look, I know I’m a fringe user. I use Firefox. I noscript! I am no stranger to being forced off a product that worked just fine because someone decides to no longer support the two people who still use it. It happened to my phone of 8 years, which works fine by the way, but is on too outdated of an OS. May it rest in peace in its tiny glory. It happened to my tablet of 10 years, which works even better than my phone and holds a charge like champ, for the same reason. It happened to the API for Stack Exchange used by my copy of their outdated app long removed from the app store. This one hurt me the most.1