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…)
🤷♂️ who cares about Reddit anymore eh
It’s not even useful for googling stuff anymore.
Fuck reddit
Also fuck google while we’re at it
Search engines used to be the best advertisement for Reddit, so it’s now just further burying itself. Good job.
I would like to be the first to thank them for this move. It’s going to do wonderful things for the Fediverse.
Yeah maybe we get ads and investors and bots aswell! I’m glad we rely on unpaid labor to fix all this! /s
Nobody is being forced to code the platform or host an instance. Most who do it are doing it out of love or genuine interest or passion or whatever else
Yeah, and people will burn out from this, as have countless reddit mods. All the while commercial Fediverse instances might take over.
That is possible, I do not disagree
They still have real lives in the real world and their own things happening, and need sleep, relaxation, recreation, family time.
I do not disagree at all. Your comment also does not invalidate what I said in any way.
I’m not suggesting it does. Lemmy will need more help, financially and “for the love,” on the influx.
Some people actually enjoy building these things and do it for the love of the game
Let’s see for how long they’ll still like it. 🫠
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.
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.
In the app, it seems the option to login using username and password is gone. Now you have to use a confirmed e-mail address. In the browser it seems like the username + password still logs in fine.
Well there goes my ability to reference shit in class… gonna have to snapshot posts and stuff from various data subs now.
No doubt your classmates will say “Use Gemini” when asked about how they got their reference material.
No, I’ve already told my students that we do not use the bullshit machines in my classes. AndbanyntimenI’ve used something with an “ai assistant” or something, I do it in front of them and with a disclaimer. So far it was one time this semester forma thing to analyze classroom responses. It misinterpreted my class question andbtherefore misunderstood every answer that came in. It was kind of perfect.
