Reddit will start requiring people to log in to Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will take effect “in the next month,” a Reddit employee announced on the social media platform today, according to the username bot-botany. The person claimed the change is part of an ongoing effort to “harden how automated systems access Reddit.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
The old Reddit log-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-term mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between maintaining your access to old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, starting next month we will begin requiring everyone to log in.
In a follow-up comment, bot-botany defined abusive behavior as one that violates Reddit’s rules that prohibit activity that interferes with the “normal use” or “creation” of the platform.[s] “programs or applications” that break Reddit’s (controversial) API rules.
“By logging in, we get a lot of signals that allow us to detect whether an account is breaking the rules, and then we can block that traffic or enforce those accounts,” Bot-Botany said.
At the time of this writing, Ars was still able to access Old.reddit.com without logging in.
This news is likely to disappoint some longtime Reddit users who rely on Old.reddit.com for a familiar look that they find easier to navigate and digest and who want to view Reddit without even logging in for convenience and/or privacy.
When a user asked bot-botany why New Reddit is not scraped as often as Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to another user’s comment.
“[T]The size of malicious traffic is always changing,” user Nestramutat wrote. “It will be a constant game of cat-and-mouse.”[.] As soon as you ban one method, a new method develops. It’s easy to see abusive traffic in hindsight, but harder to prevent it in advance. Given that they’re claiming that the older Reddit doesn’t have a modern security stack, this is probably going to prove to be an even bigger challenge.
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