posted in Technology

Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com

As of a few minutes ago old.reddit.com now seems to requre logging in to access it.

Shame as it was still the best place to browse for info about some niche interests.

Edit: Seems like they might be testing the change as it is hit or miss at the moment.

Edit: Adding this to My flilters in uBlock Origin seems to fix the issue for the time being:

||reddit.com^$header=referer:

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
the logo of Reddit on a smartphone screenArs TechnicaReddit signals ominous upcoming "changes” for old.reddit.comReddit says the beloved site is used for some "bad behavior."

Replying to @⁨UniversalBasicJustice@quokk.au⁩

Steve is a jealous bitch and has made it harder to find archives of that content which he does not nor has ever owned. He’s like Smaug but with brain damage and an incredibly tiny penis.

Here’s one, you’ll have to hunt to find the big ones at this point.

academictorrents.com/…/85a5bd50e4c365f8df70240ffd…

Academic Torrentsreddit_dataReddit Comments from 2005-12 to 2017-03 Downloaded from . You can find a current list of SHA-sums there to verify this torrent s downloads. Intended use is for scientific / non-commercial purposes. Example code to work with the data: , Info Hash: 85a5bd50e4c365f8df70240ffd4ecc7dec59912b

Replying to @⁨floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com⁩

These are Pushshift torrents from 2005 to 2025: https://sciop.net/datasets/reddit. There are two data sets, one by month and the other by subreddit. Each is about 3.5 TB compressed and based on the compression ratio I’ve seen, about 30 TB uncompressed. This is without any sort of media, just text.

Reddit sent AcademicTorrents a request to take them down so AI models couldn’t use them as a way to avoid paying Reddit hundreds of millions of dollars for training data.

sciop.netReddit Comments/Submissions - Dataset - SciOpPreserving Public Information

Replying to @⁨fizzle@quokk.au⁩

Yeeeesss…, but typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

Since Gemini is fed by the reason directly or might be fun exercise to ask it about yourself and while in some questions it will answer correctly or just loves to invent new things.

This works especially well if the person owning the account did not worry as much about privacy. So you hear many true things and also a lot of bullshit.

Replying to an earlier post

typically it is easier to determine how reliable the person is from the test of the context.

sure. that’s an advantage of reading off reddit.

an advantage of asking an LLM is that it can consider multiple reddit posts and stack overflow and whatever else.

you’re right that there’s an eternal problem of determining whether information is accurate or just confidently incorrect, but I don’t think that applies exclusively to chat bots.