Reddit Will Require You To Log In To Use Old Reddit (arstechnica.com) 48
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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. Asked why boat-botany scrapes New Reddit less frequently than Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to another commenter's explanation. "[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."
Nestramutat said that the login requirement will add a barrier against threat actors. "You're also now attaching an account ID to every malicious request, plus account creation is only available on New Reddit (with the enhanced security stack)."
As for how long Old Reddit will exist, boat-botany left the door open for its retirement. "We can't promise it will be around forever, but [Reddit CEO Steve Huffman] himself has said we'll keep supporting it while folks are still using it," boat-botany wrote. "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."
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. Asked why boat-botany scrapes New Reddit less frequently than Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to another commenter's explanation. "[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."
Nestramutat said that the login requirement will add a barrier against threat actors. "You're also now attaching an account ID to every malicious request, plus account creation is only available on New Reddit (with the enhanced security stack)."
As for how long Old Reddit will exist, boat-botany left the door open for its retirement. "We can't promise it will be around forever, but [Reddit CEO Steve Huffman] himself has said we'll keep supporting it while folks are still using it," boat-botany wrote. "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."
Anyone with common sense (Score:1)
Anyone with common sense has long deleted their Reddit account and have never looked back.
Hive mind / echo chamber hell is all Reddit is these days.
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I've never had an account. I wish Google would stop indexing it altogether. Whenever I click a reddit link in search results, it's just pages of people arguing over wrong answers.
Maybe you're the issue? + complaining about porn?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hive mind / echo chamber hell is all Reddit is these days.
I haven't had that experience at all, but I don't do political or racist rants. Reddit is a treasure trove of information for my various hobbies and I learned a lot of extremely specialized knowledge for very specialized interests....plus free porn! I just feel bad for you...a website let's you follow your interests to an intensely specialized and niche degree...AND offers unlimited free boobies and you get upset about their politics? You must be one miserable prick!
As they say "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."
Re:Maybe you're the issue? + complaining about por (Score:5, Interesting)
I must 100% agree with this. I've never subscribed to any of various politics, religion, pop culture, or other such subs that are sure to be a cesspool. But I've found great value in homeowner, personal finance, robot lawn mower, retirement (crossing my fingers), tech, hobby, and other special interest subs. The only ones that get crappy with any regularity are the local state/city ones, as political bowels inevitably dump their load there.
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Youtube and Reddit are the best examples of "just ignore and discard everything it tries to gives you by default".
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It is remarkably hard to find good discourse on the internet because as soon as you create a place for people to do that income the advertisers and the Russian bots and the pussy pics in bio spammers and everyone else to ruin everyone's fun.
Then the next thing you do is you have a karma score and you hide posts or block users who have karma that is too low. So the scammers and the Russians show up and do low effort posts o
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How do you delete an account here? What's the procedure? And please be *precise*.
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Just fill out this form. [onetrust.com]
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There are still low-volume subs that are worthwhile, and good communities that use it. I've got an account, and interact with mostly friends in a few subs, most are in the low hundred users, but a few like /r/cooking and /r/photography are higher traffic.
I understand requiring accounts for the interface, anonymous use is unfortunately abused.
That said, the day they kill off old reddit or subvert my ad blockers is the day I stop going back. The endless scroll design and ad-powered updates are unbearable fo
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Reddit was nice enough to do it for me, by claiming that telling someone to "jump up their own ass and die" is somehow a threat of violence.
Don't miss it even a single little bit. Too many precious snowflakes that seem to think disagreement is assault.
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I miss independent forums (like /. of old) (Score:2)
I really hate how reddit has eaten the world. 15 - 25 years ago I had a stable of fun forums I would visit for my various technical and leisure interests and they were great. Now everything is getting slowly enveloped by the grey goo of AI slop. It's really hard to tell sometimes if you're interacting with a human there.
And making you log in so they can get your data is frustrating. I mean, if I'm not logged in I'm looking at the ads.
Reddit is addictive so it's taking a while but I'm trying to let it go. It
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(cough, cough...bullshit) (Score:1)
I disagreed with someone and was banned from the whole site.
Kewl story AC...but I call bullshit. You can disagree with people all you want. They can't ban you from the site unless you did a LOT MORE than "disagree" with someone....threatening to find someone and kill them is not disagreeing!
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I posted the phone number to a police station and got permabanned from all of Reddit for doxxing, so no - you really don't have to do a whole lot to become persona non grata on EVERY SINGLE HOBBY FORUM on the internet.
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Well then you don't know how Reddit moderator snowflakes work.
Someone reports you for "inciting violence" and they ban you. And when you "appeal" they don't bother to look at what you actually wrote, they just deny it and leave the ban in place.
I was literally banned for "inciting violence" because I told someone to jump up their own ass and die. This is clearly not a threat of physical harm, as I'm suggesting they do it themselves, and it's physically impossible.
Yet I'm still banned. So explain that to
Would you tolerate me saying that in your home? (Score:2)
Well then you don't know how Reddit moderator snowflakes work.
Someone reports you for "inciting violence" and they ban you. And when you "appeal" they don't bother to look at what you actually wrote, they just deny it and leave the ban in place.
I was literally banned for "inciting violence" because I told someone to jump up their own ass and die. This is clearly not a threat of physical harm, as I'm suggesting they do it themselves, and it's physically impossible.
Yet I'm still banned. So explain that to me if you're so "on the inside" enough to accuse someone of something.
OK...ask for your money back! Moderators are unpaid and if someone told me that, I would think they are a huge asshole. You're not guaranteed a full trial and due process. However, you did more than "disagree" with someone...you told them to go die. I wouldn't call that "inciting violence"...but frankly, the subreddit is a lot better off without you if you behave that way. No one will miss you if you behave like that.
So think of it from their perspective...they're unpaid and doing it for love. The
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I posted on there trying to figure out why my Synology NAS was only letting me use 16 TB even when using much larger drives and 64-bit hardware, got an irrelevant lecture about gigabytes vs gibibytes and some negative karma, then found my account permanently suspended without explanation or recourse soon after, and that was the only thing that was even remotely controversial that I ever posted there.
The answer (in case it matters) to my question was
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They use browser fingerprinting.
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I also miss traditional forums. It seems like now they've rolled up all the worst attributes of every form of communication and came up with Discord. And Slack. I wish my company would institute a $1 charge for every new post so people would use "Reply in thread" the way God intended.
They just want to get rid of it (Score:5, Insightful)
old.reddit has less space for enshittification, so they are trying to push users to the new site. They would have long deleted it, but they know that the users who still use old.reddit are the ones contributing the content the other ones merely consume. The new site is for ads and users that are fed an algorithmic feed and the old still exists so the people contributing actual knowledge don't quit.
Lemmy has become just as bad (Score:2)
I must be malicious (Score:2)
Got it.
This is good to slow bot/scraper abuse, IMHO (Score:3)
Now...we're all adults...you post shit online and you run that risk...but at least reddit is making steps to make it difficult to steal. I was really upset when I found there were sites serving my deleted posts in an easy to search format. Again...I guess I should have thought about that...but they are stealing from me and from reddit in my view.
It's like if a musician gives a performance in a park for free. You have the right to watch. You have the right to record on your phone. You don't have the right to make money off their performance....that's both illegal and very unethical.
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It's like if a musician gives a performance in a park for free. You have the right to watch. You have the right to record on your phone. You don't have the right to make money off their performance....that's both illegal and very unethical.
And it's different when Reddit does it, how?
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Reddit doesn't do it. Reddit is the owner of a private club, and they make money off the people who go there agreeing with explicit terms that entitle Reddit to monetise.
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One is a bug, one is a feature (Score:2)
It's like if a musician gives a performance in a park for free. You have the right to watch. You have the right to record on your phone. You don't have the right to make money off their performance....that's both illegal and very unethical.
And it's different when Reddit does it, how?
If you're talking about reddit monetizing content...it's posted by a redditor....if it's illegal or against copyright, moderators will take it down. You can also request content be removed if you're a copyright holder. Inappropriate monetization is a bug, not a feature and reddit makes attempts to correct it.
The 3rd party reddit aggregator search engines? They don't care one bit what they post or if it should be removed.
A redditor posts child porn? death threats? suicide notes? It's deleted as so
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You are mixing at least two topics:
- Bots farming karma (probably to spam later) are now driven by LLM instead of badly paid people
- Crawlers may or may not collect data using the freely accessible web interface. For some reason reddit seems to believe their new site is making it harder than the old one
That's nothing that new either. If you're using unusual IPs they force you to login (both old and new website) since quite some time. I tend to believe their scraping fears, as they make deals with AI compani
Their point of existence is advertising (Score:2)
You are mixing at least two topics:
- Bots farming karma (probably to spam later) are now driven by LLM instead of badly paid people - Crawlers may or may not collect data using the freely accessible web interface. For some reason reddit seems to believe their new site is making it harder than the old one
That's nothing that new either. If you're using unusual IPs they force you to login (both old and new website) since quite some time. I tend to believe their scraping fears, as they make deals with AI companies that would not work if the data could be scraped. I think they have the infrastructure that scraping does not affect their servers in a noticeable way, but they want to monopoly to monetize their users' data.
Reddit offers a service for free. In exchange, you get targeted ads. That's how the world works. LLMs ensure their content and communities than many worked so hard to build deliver content to other services without paying reddit a cent. It's a legit and reasonable step to ensure you're correctly compensated for your content. Also, I consented for reddit to host my posts as I am consenting for /. to have my comment. I didn't consent for Grok to serve it and monetize it.
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at least reddit is making steps to make it difficult to steal. I was really upset when I found there were sites serving my deleted posts in an easy to search format. Again...I guess I should have thought about that...but they are stealing from me and from reddit in my view.
wank wank, flonk flonk.
I remember a time when Slashdot was peopled mostly by humans who looked down on copyright law in general as a farce. Those were better times in a lot of ways, and this is only one of them.
It's like if a musician gives a performance in a park for free. You have the right to watch. You have the right to record on your phone. You don't have the right to make money off their performance....that's both illegal and very unethical.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Everything is coercive.
Risky Business (Score:5, Interesting)
Reddit isn't wrong about bots but odds are what they really want is your identity. That earns money.
The trouble is people in Saudi Arabia will use old. to read about liberation topics or people in the US will read about drug topics, or whatever the mala prohibita are that will land you in prison for things that are perfectly legal in other jurisdictions.
Even people with accounts who read other subs logged in.
"Just create a new anonymous account" is what people will say who don't understand how identity correlation works. Sure there are ways that 0.0000001% of the population can manage securely, but that's not how this will go down.
The UK just arrested an American attorney who was critical of UK politics and they have multiple people in prison for clicking 'Like'. If you think they won't arrest somebody for reading the wrong sub, give it a few months.
Also, don't connect through Heathrow ever again.
Smells Like Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
No anonymous reading of old.reddit. "Cuz bots."
But, they'll still allow anonymous reading of new reddit?
Thai smells like bullshit.
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Remember that saying about don't allow a new install of an old version of Windows on the internet or it will become infected within minutes? Imagine that but trying to start a website on the internet will soon be overwhelmed by an invasion of anonymous bots. Eventually search engines will be the only way to even know a website exists, and to
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But, they'll still allow anonymous reading of new reddit?
New reddit is a continuously dynamic updated infinite scroller. Those are actually very difficult to scrape in a meaningful way compared to easily indexable unique pages.
In that case.. (Score:1)
there is one fix and you won't do it (Score:4, Insightful)
The fix is to come up with a news reader with cryptographically managed identities (not verified, just consistent) and go back to USENET with it. This does everything valuable that social networking does, but without the malevolent overlord.
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