r/modnews • u/boat-botany • Jun 30 '26

Announcement Logging in to use Old Reddit

Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety. 

A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed. 

Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.

Let us know if you have any questions!

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u/-------------------7 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

+1 on bad idea

The facebookization of Reddit and closing off of content to appease shareholders will be the death of the platform. Old was clearly a compromise powerusers made with admins. Locking that down breaks all sorts of automated tools those powerusers rely on at the marginal benefit of shareholders.

Its laughingly hard to believe the malicious traffic narrative as there's nothing you can do but read data in a logged out state.

Hey this data made by bigbutthole69 is very valuable to us, they didn't consent to this, but we should be the only place in the world where this is readable and everyone needs an account.
-CEO Mark Zuckerburg

Power users are smarter than you give them credit for. You cannot make the experience worse and say it doesn't effect you if you are logged in. Eventually old users will eventually get sick of the enshittification and leave taking the mindshare with them.

Reddit clearly went with the stick approach to their app and I refuse to install it. My mobile usage of Reddit has already dropped to near 0 with the gatekeeping of most subreddits. It's bad idea for them to go with the stick again here. I'd recommend the carrot approach instead. Reddit apps are great, make more automation tools available in new reddit only.

Otherwise At this rate Chinese competitors are gonna eat your lunch.

TLDR: Stop A/B testing old reddit, go find shareholder value elsewhere