https://www.androidpolice.com/reddit-testing-desktop-redesign-before-ipo/
Reddit is changing its desktop UI repeatedly ahead of its IPO in March
Can I just say something super weird? I was recently looking for a solution to an issue I had and I needed to look at an image that I could see clearly so I had to zoom in, but because if I'm in the Reddit website, zooming in actually zooms into the Reddit UI, I did what I used to always do and opened the image in a new tab. No longer does that open the image only. It now opens the image AND some Reddit UI around it so guess what happened when I tried to zoom in? That's right, I zoomed into the UI so I still couldn't see the image!!!! What the hell, Reddit, it's almost as if you don't want people to use your website anymore??
It's so you cannot share the image by itself. A static page with .jpg and nothing else won't have all that sweet tracking and ads that everyone should enjoy.
Yeah, I believe that was a change they made not long after shafting 3rd party apps. I had a couple older iOS devices with their own older versions of third party apps, and that change effectively made any post with a Reddit uploaded image unviewable. Incredibly infuriating and I can't understand the logic behind it either.
I will say that further to that, a few years ago Imgur made a change that does the same damn thing if it detects you're on mobile. Unless you tick "Show Desktop Site" in your browser, it's impossible to actually standalone view a direct image.
Presumably to disable that hot linking from other websites/apps. Especially if they use scrapers.
But yeah, bad ux.
Obfuscating the image file like that is usually completely transparent to scrapers actually, as the image URL is almost always in the HTML. You can find the direct image link yourself if you poke around in the element inspector for a bit.
It's just to make it harder to copy and increase to amount of people that link the full site URL (with the tracking and analytics ofc) instead of the image directly.
I'm not on desktop so can't inspect to see the img src.
But it's possible for a url in img src to have a different response (ie, html) when it's a direct navigation (ie new tab).
Duh, the IPO is a cash grab for the job level investor to get out. Within a year of it you'll see Spez and all the leaders bail. Then they'll either get bought out of me leaders will destroy what's left .
It's going the way of Digg very soon.
Yeah, there were obviously many other reasons to leave but this was the final straw for me, even though I left Reddit when the paid apps got axed. Old.reddit was the only thing keeping the site usable.
They only care about monetization. If they can achieve that easier with a new UI you know they're going to do that. Old.reddit.com and the current www.reddit.com are both expendable if they can make more money without them. This is the new, publicly-traded corporation Reddit. Tradition be damned, they will make their money in whatever manner pays best.
If people thought algorithms were bad before, they’re about to get a titans times worse for Reddit.
I have a self-hosted troddit instance I use to check up on smaller communities, or to replace Reddit.com queries from search engine results with abs when it loads the front page vs the Reddit.com front page is vastly different.
There’s no surprise why they got rid of the api, because they’re playing with engagement and need more direct access.
It's so painful to use now. Some pages are only usable in new-reddit, and many are only usable in old-reddit.