Reddit will start requiring people to log in to Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will go into effect “over the next month,” according to a Reddit employee with the username boat-botany. announced on the social media platform today. The person stated that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “strengthen the way automated systems access Reddit.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
The old Reddit logout experience is a major source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It is also an important interface for many long-standing mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while also preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will begin requiring everyone to log in.
In a later comment, boat-botany defined abusive behavior as that which violates The Reddit Rule prohibit activities that interfere with the “normal use” of the platform or that “create programs or applications” that violate Reddit’s rules (controversial) API rules.
“When logging in, we get a lot more signal that allows us to detect if an account is breaking the rules, and then we can block that traffic or enforce those accounts,” boat-botany said.
At the time of writing, Ars was still able to use old.reddit.com without logging in.
The news is likely to upset some long-time Reddit users who have relied on old.reddit.com for a familiar look and feel 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 the new Reddit isn’t deleted as often as the old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to a comment by another user.
“(T)he shape of malicious traffic is always changing,” wrote user Nestramutat. “It’s going to be a constant game of cat and mouse (.) As one method is banned, a new one is developed. It’s easy to see abusive traffic in retrospect, but it’s harder to block it preemptively. Given that they claim Old Reddit doesn’t have the modern security stack, this will likely prove to be even more of a challenge.”
