Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com/

by righthand • 22 days ago

123 42 22 days ago

They can tell abusive scrapers from regular users, they choose not to distinguish. I might give in and create an account eventually but damn. Had deleted my reddit about a decade ago.

andy99• 22 days ago

By “abusive” they probably mean “doesn’t let us track them”. I’m surprised they’ve kept old.reddit.com going this long, it’s actually an un-enshittified version of the product, which is basically unheard of.

gorfian_robot• 22 days ago

when they kill it, I will prol leave reddit. the new version SUCKS

mvdtnz3• 22 days ago

They can tell abusive scrapers from regular users, they choose not to distinguish.

Really? How? Be specific.

monk_grilla• 21 days ago

How do you meaningfully use Reddit without an account? Do you really navigate to specific subreddits and read them one by one, rather than assembling a home feed of subs you have joined?

You never want to participate in discussion, or vote on comments and posts?

I don't really understand how you all were regularly browsing and using the site without an account.

harshalizee• 21 days ago

By Reddit's own admission, that's literally 98% of users. Most of the incoming traffic never engage with the post in any way. This is true of most social sites. That's where the term 'lurker' comes from.

throw0101a• 20 days ago

How do you meaningfully use Reddit without an account? Do you really navigate to specific subreddits and read them one by one, rather than assembling a home feed of subs you have joined?

Old is useful for posting to other places, like right here on HN, because the UI is not complete and utter garbage.

Old is also useful for quickly going to a particular sub-reddit if you just want to peruse around to quickly see what the current topics are (/r/worldnews, /r/country-i-live-in, /r/city-i-live-in).

beart• 16 days ago

Third party apps used to work fine without an account. They kept track of your settings and filters locally. My usage declined rapidly when reddit killed them.

smalltorch• 22 days ago

Bummer, thats like a funeral for one of the greatest public forums.

There is probably a point where all these platforms just get to big and can't hang.

cyanydeez• 22 days ago

going full bot mode then.

thin_carapace• 22 days ago

if you don't give every iota of your physical makeup to our benevolent leaders, this is labelled as abusive behaviour. for example, talking over communication channels that aren't completely monitorable is clearly terrorist activity. using your brain is directly harmful to corporations, therefore unauthorized intelligence is harmful.

I'm starting to see a pattern here and it starts with reverse demonization, like a begging succubus. you wouldn't want to get hurt now would you. that's not in your best interests. now while you're in a fearful state, please give your responsibility to me. it'll be easier this way, I promise I have your best interests at heart.

Grombobulous• 22 days ago

Bye Reddit! It was nice while it lasted, I guess. Small funeral for all the genuinely useful communities and knowledge on there.

I had already deleted my account, and using the site has gotten far more hostile especially without willingness to use the app.

On mobile you now have to use incognito in order to not get cut off and told to download the app.

I guess I can’t complain too much. Old Reddit lost money for, what, a decade? Longer?. Public company Reddit runs a pretty good business.

sillywalk• 22 days ago

I ~~can't~~ won't use the new ( decade+ old? )reddit.

From the Reddit Post announcing this, :

"In case you are wondering . . .

Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit? A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever, but u/spez himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable."[0]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...

rekabis• 21 days ago

it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable.

This is how you justify it to anyone who doesn’t know web dev.

For those who do, it’s an idiotic statement. The only difference between new Reddit and old Reddit is the visual styling and how content is presented. Both have all the same security.

altairprime4• 21 days ago

They don’t mean websec, they mean textsec. The old site doesn’t have the level of text scraper defenses that the new site does, without which Reddit can’t monetize the written output of their userbase for AI training. Putting old behind a login wall solves that.

Having previously recommended on HN that blogs put up a simple basicauth that takes any password to stop AI theft dead in its tracks, I definitely agree with their reasoning; if nothing else, it’ll result in an honest accounting of users left using it.

baranul• 20 days ago

Unfortunately, that does partially make sense about old.reddit security and is a slick way to push log ins.

But the thing about old.reddit, was you did not need JavaScript to use and browse, which is more secure. Looks more like reddit brass wants to find ways to squeeze old.reddit for more ad pushing and to suck up more user data.

anenefan3• 22 days ago

That's unfortunate. Rather than using rate limiting or access control over a singular user which would have significant different usage to say scrappers ... I'm not making an account ... I guess I won't be visiting old.reddit threads ... the new makeover reddit moved to, never played well with my browser but died almost entirely some time ago one when I added one of the many PII scrapping trackers to my deny list -- maybe they'll give up on their usage of including a PII tracker ...

mvdtnz3• 22 days ago

Rather than using rate limiting or access control over a singular user

Rate limiting by user is much easier said than done for anonymous (not logged in) users. How do you define a user? The same person (or bot) can hop from IP to IP using a number of methodologies on a scale of sohpistication. They can take or leave any cookie you send their way. They can avoid browser fingerprinting and spoof their user agent.

And they literally are using access control. The first step in access control (also known as authorization) is authentication. You can't perform access control on anonymous users, you need to know who you're speaking with.

I'm not making an account ... I guess I won't be visiting old.reddit threads

That's your choice, of course, but you have to understand you are the least valuable user on Reddit's platform (other than abusers) right? A user who steadfastly refuses to ever log in or give a single concession - what makes you think they care if you never open reddit again? You are indistinguishable from a bot.

anenefan3• 22 days ago

Reddit IMHO, is well known for how crafty they are for ensuring once someone is banned, it's quite difficult to get around it. Thus I'm fairly confident they can pick the difference between requests from one IP landing on a particular thread by way of search engine or some other area and going on to explore comments from a couple of the users and other subsequent threads over a few minutes ... to that of a process to scrape a great number of threads at a great rate.

Yes I've experienced some very cunning web operators that make mirroring their site really really hard ... it then usually takes some hard determination to work out what is needed to accomplish a successful mirror attempt.

Authorisation just means reddit account details will be added to various sites that, often for free, provide account / password that work atm for those who only want to look at one little old thing without having to make their own account ... so the next thing would be then profiling ... which then takes the whole point of why bother unless the account making process is just a means to deploy scripts that are tracking or some other process ;)

but you have to understand you are the least valuable user on Reddit's platform ...

Yes along with the other few hundred news sites that all think they are so important they demand yearly subscription from me for access to their site to view at most a couple of articles a year.

As for how important to reddit I personally am - lol. It is though the absence of a number of read only users that will change things ... if at all for the moment. Lurkers though often share interesting threads which could result in other people taking an interest and subsequently engaging. Many people have navigated to old.reddit as it works, unlike the current www.reddit format, doubly so for myself as I cut trackers and various APIS that were not doing the right thing, and reddit's script to display comments displays ... none, nothing, nada, though I do see the OP question / comment.

cedws• 22 days ago

I stopped using Reddit daily when they killed Apollo. Now it looks like I’ll stop using it entirely. Good riddance, thanks for killing my doomscrolling addiction for me.

andrewinardeer• 22 days ago

People saying they'll never use Reddit again is just noise.

I'm sure you've seen the "protests" and sub closures because of {$change}. Two weeks later the same mods and users realise they can't get their power trip or dopamine hit from anything else and are back on Reddit - with the mods proudly back working as unpaid janitors for a company with a billion dollars valuation.

verzali• 22 days ago

Nah, I stopped using Reddit years ago. Others can too.

TFNA• 21 days ago

Discussion for certain hobbies and interests, among those seriously interested in them, has long since moved to WhatsApp groups. Sure, WhatsApp is not a libre platform either and has its own dopamine-hit issues, but you’re underestimating how much Reddit has alienated its user base (namely that portion of it who care about close-knit community and skillsharing) since the 2018 redesign.

hgoel• 21 days ago

I quit reddit cold turkey when they did the API stuff, purged my posts and deleted my accounts, have never been back.

ChrisArchitect• 22 days ago

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738835)

RandomGerm4n• 22 days ago

That reasoning is complete nonsense. If someone scrapes the data, that’s not a big deal, and Reddit has no more claim to the data than anyone else. The data is public and created by users, not by the platform itself. If the traffic is too much for them, they could use rate limiting or simply offer an archive of the data as a torrent once a month. That way, a company training an LLM could access a complete dataset without generating a lot of traffic.

avian• 22 days ago

In related news, Imgur seems to be a/b testing a website that just pushes you to the mobile app and doesn't allow you do anything in browser beyond viewing the one picture you clicked the link for.

jaggs• 22 days ago

I added lemmy.world to my news cycle a few years ago just in case. It's growing fast now it seems, as others make the same decision.

omgmo• 22 days ago

If they wanted to actually prevent abusive users they would make the API more affordable. Its just sites like reddit, twitter/x, etc. storing valuable social data that can't be found elsewhere. It's the exclusivity and the difficulty to obtain the data that is being protected.

downrightmike• 21 days ago

"Hey chat, pull reddit content and make me a dup"

bjourne• 21 days ago

What's the alternative? Seems like any community/discussion site always goes down the same fate.

dzonga• 20 days ago

you can't blame reddit honestly. or any of the other websites.

the labs crawling for training content + agents have increased traffic 100x.

increased costs yet monetization remains low. no wonder you see firms like Cloudflare proposing x402 micropayments for content.

steve_taylor• 20 days ago

The only time I use Reddit is when I land there via a Google search. Posts get flagged as mature at the drop of a hat, so my go-to has always been to replace www with old. Now that it's gone, I'll just skip Reddit links.

parlortricks• 17 days ago

Well this is a shame. I hit this, this morning, without knowing about the change. Guess my journey with Reddit ends here.

Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

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