---

Why

Old Reddit was dense, fast, and got out of your way — a page of ranked links you could scan and pick from; what replaced it is built for scrolling, a slot machine's psychology applied to a link aggregator with a data harvesting apparatus built on top. Every pause, expansion, return visit and comment is harvested into a profile; the profile is what advertisers buy; and your feed is ranked against that profile to keep the session going — one more scroll, one more belief reinforcement, one more outrage, one more product placement. It's a cynical lesson learned from Facebook and TikTok — a session that ends is a session that stops producing.

The sentiment manipulation and almost all the data harvesting needs you logged in. Identity is what ties every scroll and hesitation to one durable profile that follows you across devices and years; logged out, the data scatters and the profile thins. Which may be why logged-out reading keeps getting harder: a login wall that raises itself half a minute into reading, with no close button and no way to dismiss it; old.reddit.com vanishing behind account requirements for days at a stretch, with no announcement; the anonymous JSON API gated off entirely. Whatever the intent, the effect is the same: reading without an account keeps getting narrower.

Sheddit is the opt-out. It takes the page Reddit already sent your browser and re-renders it locally into old reddit's layout — no account, no credentials, and zero API calls of its own. What you read is the list Reddit serves to a stranger: ranked by votes, not by your profile, because there is no profile. The login wall is removed outright rather than negotiated with. Nothing is recommended to you, nothing is harvested from you, and the session ends when you decide it does.

What's left is a ranked list of links that stops when you do. Everything below is about keeping it working on a site that has no reason to help.

Three ways to get old Reddit back, and why this one

Redirecting is the simplest thing that works, while it still works. old.reddit.com is being phased out in stages, and the current stage is random, full-site login walls — no pattern, no announcement, logged-out access just stops for a stretch and comes back later. This project's own measurements already caught the milder version of the same thing: a long unreachable spell that lifted with no notice. A redirect extension inherits whatever old.reddit.com decides on a given day, and the direction of travel is an account requirement for any access at all — the pressure described above, applied to the one refuge a redirect depends on.

Rebuilding from Reddit's JSON API gets you real old-Reddit markup, but it rides your logged-in session — the Classic Layout project documents needing an authenticated session because Reddit gates the anonymous .json endpoint, which means logged-out readers get a 403 and nothing renders.

Sheddit takes the third route. Everything it needs is already in the page Reddit just sent you: <shreddit-post> elements carry the title, score, author, permalink and comment count as plain HTML attributes. Sheddit reads those and draws its own markup, which leaves nothing to revoke, expire, or log into.

The catch is that Reddit can quietly rename those attributes whenever it likes and owes nobody notice when it does. That's why this project is meant to be free, open-source, and collaborative. When they change something, so will we.

How it's tested

It runs on every Reddit page you open, and for now you install it by hand rather than from a store. Here is the testing behind it.

Six suites, each catching what the cheaper one below it cannot:

Mutation testing. A passing test proves nothing until you have watched it fail. npm run test:mutate reintroduces every bug this project has shipped, one at a time, and fails if the suite stays green. It has caught assertions that protected nothing at all.

A written record of every bug. docs/engineering-log.md gives every one a numbered entry describing what the wrong behaviour looked like rather than just what changed — because that is what makes a bug recognisable when someone is about to reintroduce it.

Two of those entries are why geometry and extension exist as separate suites rather than more assertions bolted onto run:

• jsdom does no layout. The suite passed 39/39 while the page rendered visibly wrong. That is what geometry catches.
• Content scripts don't share Reddit's JavaScript realm. Infinite scroll was broken in every installed copy of the extension while the dev harness paginated happily — because pasting into DevTools runs in a different world. That is what extension catches.

A third entry applies the same care to a design decision. Reddit blurs adult thumbnails for logged-out readers, and Sheddit renders its own <img> straight from the URL rather than Reddit's — which is why those thumbnails fall back to old Reddit's placeholder tile (see Scope) instead of the raw image.

Install

Current version: 0.28.1 — beta, open to everyone

Both downloads below are this version. It is a beta in the honest sense: it works, it is tested on both browsers — Chrome the more thoroughly of the two — and Reddit can still change something tomorrow that breaks it. If that happens, tell me — bug reports are appreciated and acted on.

After installing, the extension's own failure screen prints the version it is running — the way to tell whether a reload actually took. What changed.

Chrome and Firefox run the same source. The Chrome build is the further along of the two — it is what most of the development and live testing has run against, and its store listing is already in review. Firefox support arrived in 0.24.0: it passes its own suite against a real Firefox and works in normal use, but it has far less mileage on real pages, so that is where a rough edge is likeliest to turn up. Until the listings land, the zips below are the easiest way in — nothing to build.

Chrome

⬇ Download sheddit.zip

1. Unzip it. You get a sheddit folder with manifest.json inside.
2. Move that folder somewhere permanent — Documents is fine. Chrome re-reads the extension from wherever you leave it every time it starts, so a folder still sitting in Downloads will take Sheddit with it the day you clear Downloads.
3. Open chrome://extensions
4. Turn on Developer mode, top right
5. Click Load unpacked and pick the folder with manifest.json directly inside it — not a folder containing that folder, which is the one mistake worth watching for
6. Open reddit.com

Chrome will warn about developer-mode extensions each time it starts. It says that about anything installed outside the Web Store; dismiss it and Sheddit keeps running.

To update: download the zip again, replace the folder's contents, then press ↻ on the Sheddit card in chrome://extensions. Chrome keeps running the copy it read at load time, so without the ↻ you are still on the old build — the failure screen prints the version if you need to check which one you are looking at.

From source

For contributors, or anyone who would rather read the source first:

git clone https://github.com/kookaburrabarrel/sheddit.git

Then the same steps: chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked → the cloned folder. There is no build step to run first.

Try it without installing anything. npm install && npm run preview writes dist/preview.listing.html and dist/preview.comments.html — the actual renderer's output, openable in any browser.

Requires Chrome 111+ or any Chromium browser (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera), or Firefox 140+ — see below.

Firefox

⬇ Download sheddit-firefox.zip

Same extension, same source; only the manifest differs, and it is generated from Chrome's rather than maintained separately. It is the younger of the two builds — shipped in 0.24.0, with its own test suite driving a real Firefox, but without the months of live use behind the Chrome one, so bug reports from here are especially useful. An addons.mozilla.org listing is the durable way in once it lands; until then Firefox only accepts an unsigned extension as a temporary install, which lasts until the browser closes:

1. Open about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox.
2. Load Temporary Add-on… and pick the downloaded zip (no need to unzip).

Two Firefox notes. Firefox can revoke a site permission at any time — if reddit.com ever loads without the layout, open the extension's options page: it will say so and offer a button to grant access back. And Firefox needs to be version 140 or newer — the current ESR, and the version that reads the manifest's data-collection declaration.

What it does

Themes

Five palettes, switched from buttons in Sheddit's own header. A theme changes colour, type and vertical rhythm — never the column layout, which the test suite proves by laying every theme out at 360px and 1280px and asserting that no row moves. The theme is applied before first paint, so a dark theme never opens on a white flash.

How it works

Reddit's <shreddit-post> elements carry the entire post record as HTML attributes — post-title, score, comment-count, author, permalink, subreddit-name, created-timestamp, and more. Meanwhile most of its child components sit behind shadow roots: a single post carries 21 open ones, and page CSS reaches into none of them. That is why every attempt to restyle modern Reddit with a stylesheet stalls out: whatever the reason for the encapsulation, the markup a stylesheet would need is on the other side of it.

So Sheddit leaves Reddit's DOM alone. It reads those attributes, renders its own old-reddit markup into a root of its own, and hides the native tree. A MutationObserver keeps doing it as content streams in.

<shreddit-post post-title="…" score="12247" comment-count="1270" …>
        │
        ▼   read the attributes
   ┌─────────────┐
   │  model.js   │  →  a plain object
   └─────────────┘
        │
        ▼   render Sheddit's own markup
   ┌─────────────┐
   │ listing.js  │  →  <div class="thing link">…</div>
   └─────────────┘
        │
        ▼   hide the original
   suppress.css

Every Reddit selector and attribute name lives in one file, src/config/contracts.js — so a Reddit redesign should only ever break one file. The full reasoning is in ARCHITECTURE.md.

Scope

Built for logged-out reading. That is the primary case and the one everything is tested against. What follows from that, stated plainly:

• Voting isn't supported. The arrows are drawn because old Reddit drew them, and they still delegate to Reddit's own controls — but the native upvote button is confirmed unreachable for a logged-out session. Treat them as decorative.
• Anything needing a session is left out. save and report were removed: they can never work logged out, and shipping them as links to the permalink made them look like actions. Old Reddit didn't offer them logged out either.
• Adult thumbnails show old Reddit's nsfw placeholder, with the same opt-in old Reddit had — reachable from the header's nsfw thumbnails button as well as the options page. See the note on adult thumbnails under How it's tested for the reasoning. It covers pictures: thumbnails, the [+] expando and full-size images on a comments page. Video is unaffected — a flagged post plays wherever inline video is on.
• Pages with no feed are handed straight back. Age gates, private communities and rate-limit pages are recognised and left alone, immediately. Putting an error screen over an age gate would cover the button you need to press.

In: the home feed, /r/* listings, comment pages, user profiles, header, sort tabs, sidebar. Out (for now): search, modmail, chat, the post composer, and anything auth-gated — these are classified as unhandled and left alone.

Future roadmap

Where this could go next. Neither is started, and both would extend the scope above rather than replace it — logged-out reading stays the case everything is tested against.

• Support logged-in browsing. The layout works the same either way; what is missing is everything a session unlocks — voting that actually votes, saving, subscribed feeds, the controls removed above precisely because they cannot work logged out.
• Bridging logged-in features with logged-out browsing — an automation script, or something like one, so the things that need an account can be reached without giving up an unprofiled read.

Privacy

For most extensions this section is fine print. Here it is the point: an extension built so you can read without being profiled had better not profile you itself, and had better be checkable on that claim rather than taken at its word. Everything below is verifiable from the source in this repository — and the one feature that fetches anything (the video player, below) is tested by counting its requests: one per video post opened, none anywhere else, none at all with the setting off. A change that quietly started fetching more would fail the build, not just the code review.

Sheddit makes no API calls — not to Reddit's API, not to anyone else's. There is no analytics, telemetry, or remote configuration, and nothing about you is sent anywhere.

The one file it fetches is a video manifest, and only to play video: opening a video post's comments page reads that video's manifest from Reddit's media server so Sheddit knows which files to hand the player. It is a plain request for a static file, sent without cookies, and it is the same file your browser would read to play the video on Reddit itself. The video and its sound are then loaded by the player itself — Reddit ships newer videos with the audio in a separate file, so the two are played together. Untick "Play video on the comments page" in the options and none of it happens. See PRIVACY.md.

It requests exactly two permissions:

• *://*.reddit.com/* — to run on Reddit pages, the only place it runs
• storage — to remember your theme and settings via chrome.storage.sync

Pagination calls loadContent() on Reddit's own faceplate-partial element, which fires the same anonymous same-origin request the page already makes for itself. Nothing is authenticated, and nothing is sent anywhere else. See SECURITY.md for the full threat model.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — especially live findings. The automated tests run on GitHub's machines, and those cannot see real Reddit: datacenter IPs get served a bot-mitigation shim instead of the page. One npm run verify:live from an ordinary home connection is often more useful than a patch.

If Reddit ships a redesign and Sheddit breaks, the fix is almost always in src/config/contracts.js and nowhere else. Start at CONTRIBUTING.md.

npm install
npm test           # all six suites
npm run test:fast  # css-lint + jsdom only, no browser
npm run preview    # writes openable dist/preview.*.html
npm run build      # dist/sheddit.dev.js — paste into DevTools on any Reddit page
npm run package    # rebuilds both download zips this README links

Documentation

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. You may use, study, share and modify Sheddit freely; if you distribute a modified version, it has to stay free software too.

---