The Tower of Babel loses another brick
With the Nitter episode described in the last blog post, I ended up forgetting another development that was very representative of what I was saying about the internet moving around like a zombie that refuses to rot.
Besides the now-deceased Nitter and its mirrors, I also used Reddit from time to time. Unfortunately, it is one of the remnants of the still-glorious days of the World Wide Web, when countless forums multiplied to discuss an endless number of subjects in depth and with passion.
As someone without much time to devote to reading AI-generated guides on gaming websites of already dubious quality, Reddit was very useful to me as a way of condensing good information on the subject. And also, every now and then, for snooping around to see what the masses of young Portuguese people thought about some topic that interested me.
Reddit's move to its new version was a disaster. The old interface was already not particularly intuitive and required an extension to make it even remotely acceptable. The modernization only made things worse, with side menus suggesting posts from completely unrelated subreddits, content now clearly compressed because of optimization for smartphone access, "dark mode" implemented haphazardly without any thought as to whether there would be any visual harmony, etc.
Lucky for us, some Reddit engineer made it possible to keep accessing it through the "classic" interface. All you had to do was replace "www" with "old" and voilà. Reddit and its subreddits in their dysfunctional but original form.
The joy lasted a few years. Because that too came to an end recently, with an account now being required to access old Reddit for "security reasons".
Modern Reddit already had this problem, particularly when trying to access its content on a smartphone. Scroll through the comments a few times and a pop-up soon appears demanding that you install the Reddit app on your phone to continue viewing the page. "Old" Reddit allowed you to get around this problem until at least last month.
The case here is perhaps even more serious because Reddit's creators were those utopian yet practical tech libertarians. It was, and still is, almost impossible to create an internet Tower of Babel. But credit where credit is due: Reddit came closer to achieving such a thing than anything else.
This Tower of Babel project allowed not only anonymous participation, but also free access to its content. And I can even understand that there is little advantage in leaving all this content completely open in a world of constant AI scraping. Especially when Reddit is the main reference point for many highly specific subjects, as is the case with video games and technology products in general.
It is still a shame to see yet another platform impose barriers on access to itself and consequently abandon its principles. It is not as though I, cynical as I am, expected anything more from figures such as Musk or Reddit's current leadership, whose names I have no idea about and little interest in learning at the moment. And yet, whatever hope remains in foundational principles fades away whenever events like these happen.