Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
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.
In a follow-up comment, boat-botany defined abusive behavior as that which violates Reddit’s rule prohibiting activity that interferes with the platform’s “normal use” or that “create[s] programs or applications” that break Reddit’s (controversial) API rules.
“By logging in, we get a lot more signal that allows us to detect whether an account is breaking the rules, and then we can block that traffic or enforce those accounts,” boat-botany said.
As of this writing, Ars was still able to use old.reddit.com without logging in.
The news is likely to upset some longtime Reddit users who have relied on old.reddit.com for a familiar look that they find easier to navigate and digest and who also want to view Reddit without logging in for convenience and/or privacy.
When a user asked boat-botany why New Reddit isn’t scraped as often as Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to a comment by another user.
“[T]he shape of malicious traffic is always changing,” the user, Nestramutat, wrote. “It’s going to be a constant cat and mouse game[.] As you ban one method, a new one gets developed. It’s easy to see abusive traffic in hindsight, but it’s harder to pre-emptively block it. Given that they’re claiming Old Reddit doesn’t have the modern security stack, this is likely proving to be an even greater challenge.”
