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…)
So they are basically going to turn Reddit into discord and hide content from users coming from search?
Or are they going to turn it into quora and only let you see a single post from search?
I don’t see either of these options being good for reddits long term user acquisition, but maybe their strategy is to just milk their current data dry and then bounce
Yeah I have so many questions about how they expect to get new users from search. If I search for something and it sends me to a login page (or a paywall, ad or anything like that) it’s over. I’m leaving and never going back. You gotta have something I actively want (I’d check out as a guest on every online purchase if I could still track packages). I don’t want an account for everything.
I hope you enjoy seeing this arrogant fucker. This dude and his wink will appear every time a not-logged-in person tries to visit reddit soon enough.
I don’t visit reddit. To the point where I use ublock origin to remove it completely from search results. Specifically because of what they did to third party apps. I left and I’m not going back.
Discord is actually pivoting to allowing google searches to public servers. So they are flipflopping.