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:
“Has the largest” meaning a 3 comment average per thread. That’s what the OC is talking about. The communities in Lemmy World are really small in a way that makes it hard to hold together a sub. A new movie comes out and maybe one or two people talk about it on Lemmy while Reddit has hundreds.
Then you might say, be the change you want to see, but Lemmy has a pretty small install base. Even if you participate, there isn’t anyone to follow, because the users here are usually white collar tech folk. Hence the interest groups being tech and politics.
It’s quality comments though. I just went to old.red to see if it worked for me. It did, but the comments were very shallow. I’m guessing bots? It’s hard to say. After being here for years, it was a shock.
It’s two things. Bots, yes, but also the communities have gotten really lazy. Shit was fire during peak culture war because people were actively trying to learn. Now it’s like everyone gave up.
I loved reddit for the first year or so, we had some quiet communities for reddit that were everyone just messing around. It was fun and then it really wasn’t.
God, post-digg era was peak. When subs like r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu were still active. It was just folks talking about their lives and relating to eachother. Then we all grew up, life got serious, and the culture wars started.