Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.
Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account…
Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024.
Source [web-archived; 2026-10-29_20-16-09Z]
Related: https://www.theverge.com/tech/1002788/old-reddit-ai-scraping (…cut back access to ‘Old Reddit’ because of AI bots…)
I remember when Reddit was the front page of the internet, now it’s infested with bots.
It sure as hell isn’t going to be the front page of the internet if it has a login wall in front of it.
But yeah, I miss the old reddit days. What a downfall.
I thought about that the other day, I never had a Digg account but I was on that site all the time. Stumbleupon was just a browser extension, most of those links are probably dead forever, and they for sure didnt expect you to make an account. Everything gets worse when people start milking the money out of it.