Teddit: browse Reddit in a privacy preserving way
Reddit has become a central discussion hub in the past couple of years. The site has received a number of financing rounds in the past decade, the last in February 2019 when it received $300 million based on a €3 billion valuation.
Reddit has intensified advertising and tracking in recent time; some options can be turned off in the Reddit settings, others are based on scripts running on the site. While it is possible to use content blockers to prevent many of these from being effective or loaded at all, some have started to use third-party Reddit clients instead that promise better privacy.
One of the latest ones is Teddit. Teddit is a web frontend, unlike many others that are available only on mobile devices. You can load the site using any web browser to access Reddit's content.
The core difference between Teddit and Reddit is that the former does not track users and that it has no advertising. In fact, you can load Teddit with JavaScript disabled and it will work just as fine.
Teddit loads much faster; you download about 270 Kilobytes to your system to display the site's homepage whereas you will often download more than 20 Megabytes to display Reddit's homepage. The number of requests that Teddit makes to display the site is 30 while Reddit makes about 190 requests.
According to the developer, all requests go through the backend so that clients connected to Teddit never communicate with Reddit directly. Users interested in the code can check it out on Codeberg.
You may access text and media content on Teddit including user comments. A search is provided to find threads or subreddits of interest, and you can check out the posts of individual users.
All account related activity is not available on Teddit. You cannot sign-in to your account, and that means that you won't get a feed of all subscribed subreddit groups or the ability to leave comments, reply to them, or start threads on the site.
Bookmarks are your friend if you need to access certain groups regularly on the site
Closing Words
Teddit is ideal for accessing information on Reddit. Since it is limited to read activity, it is great for accessing Reddit content without being tracked by the site. You can easily replace the URL of any Reddit page by replacing the "r" in Reddit with the "t" in teddit, and the "com" with "net" to load the content on Teddit.
The Reddit URL https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ becomes https://www.teddit.net/r/firefox on Teddit.
Teddit is not for you if you want to interact with other users on Reddit, but if you require only read access, it may be ideal.
Tip: the option to combine multiple subreddits in the URL to display these all at once is available on Teddit. Check out the guide for details.
There is the danger that the project will go away at one point. If it becomes too popular, it could be shut down because of increasing costs to run it.
For now, it offers an excellent option to access Reddit content in a privacy preserving way. It is also excellent for users who live in countries that have blocked Reddit.
Now You: do you use Reddit? What is your take on the site's development?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.