Reddit Will Force Everyone to Log In (theverge.com) 74
Reddit plans to require users to log in to browse the platform, ending its longstanding practice of allowing anonymous visitors to access posts and discussions. According to CEO Steve Huffman, a key reason behind the decision is to curb unauthorized scraping and automated traffic.
"This is a big change for Reddit, where we've allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades," Huffman says. "And I don't know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it's a big change for me. But I've come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business." The Verge reports: There's no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you're logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren't logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in "select markets outside the US" in the "coming months," according to CEO Steve Huffman. "We'll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there." Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app's incognito mode.
Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit's user experience and its ads business and is "more protective of Reddit data." The "vast majority" of unauthorized Reddit access happens "through our logged-out experiences," though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user's identity -- "Honestly, we don't want to know" -- just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver "more relevant ads."
"This is a big change for Reddit, where we've allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades," Huffman says. "And I don't know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it's a big change for me. But I've come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business." The Verge reports: There's no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you're logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren't logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in "select markets outside the US" in the "coming months," according to CEO Steve Huffman. "We'll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there." Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app's incognito mode.
Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit's user experience and its ads business and is "more protective of Reddit data." The "vast majority" of unauthorized Reddit access happens "through our logged-out experiences," though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user's identity -- "Honestly, we don't want to know" -- just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver "more relevant ads."
The Enshittification Continues (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now I'm left wondering how the "One Two" punch of Google having direct and ongoing access to reddit will work on search results they serve to users in a walled garden. Will Goog start censoring it's own search results so that users asking basic questions can't see the 1 or
Re:The Enshittification Continues (Score:5, Interesting)
Reddit stock is down 35% today. Perhaps this is the market's reaction to recent Reddit actions. Or it could be a knock-on effect to the general downturn in tech stocks.
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Re:The Enshittification Continues (Score:4, Insightful)
I started using reddit *specifically* because I could read answers to web searches. Later I created a login so I could ask specific questions. Blocking users out from even reading content, essentially making it a walled garden that you have to log into to even read is the beginning of the end.
Since Reddit sold API access to Google, and Google has integrated its AI into search, the Reddit answers to web searches will be presented in the AI answer. Most people will be unable to get past the AI answer to see the rest of the Reddit discussion thread: just take the AI answer and move on, do no further research. A win for Google, and a loss for Reddit.
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Correct.
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They're facing a major problem, and it's partially of their own creation: there already is a wall between their content and the user searching for it. It's called Gemini. Would they be facing it if they boycotted AI early on rather than selling their user's content to Google et al? Probably not as bad. But they'd still be having problems.
Reddit's stock is down today after u/spez basically said "We're fucked" to the shareholders, pointing out there's been a dramatic reduction in web traffic, and that Gemini
Just like the link to the story in this post! (Score:1)
Let's face it - so much of the Internet is going that route.
Anyone who wants to participate/post already has to right - so not like that is changing what is getting posted.
Mostly about monetizing things that want to go scrapey scrape i assume.
Re:Just like the link to the story in this post! (Score:4, Informative)
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It seems more likely that what they're looking at is 'nobody' who reads Reddit posts without logging in will ever need to visit Reddit.com because they can just get all the answers they want from a Gemini query.
I can see their conundrum while noticing that it will suck for humans more than AI and that AI - as currently [not] enforced by law - is the primary culprit in this round of enshittification.
The current economic situation is that all profit from the current web will accrue to the Mag7 while their dat
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Google gets a little cash and not the site they got the info from.
Even Google gets less cash, because users who get their answer immediately from AI won't read multiple pages of irrelevant results and ads disguised as answers. This is actually one of the reasons for Google's current stock meltdown.
Personally I find that the AI digest is good enough for my less serious searches - which are probably the majority. For important things, I don't stop at the AI response - I dig deeper and read multiple sources (and even there, AI sometimes recommends relevant links that aren't
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AI Scenario
User to AI: Is this mushroom safe to eat
AI to User: Yes it is!
RIP User
AI to nobody: Oops, sorry. This was not safe to eat. Here is a list of how to identify poisonous mushrooms.
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The only way to post is to log-in. That should of been enough. I suppose from Reddit's point of view, this might result in a few more registrations while also getting rid of unwanted AI traffic and getting rid of the leeches that just "read" and never contribute.
Personally, I'll just not go there anymore. It's not the end of the world for me, though it is a shame. It's definitely not going to make Reddit MORE interesting.
So, wouldn't fake accounts... (Score:5, Insightful)
...still allow unauthorized screen scraping?
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Accounts are easier to throttle and ban compared to individual IP addresses which may belong to actual people.
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I mean, kind of. Its like saying postal spam costs more than email spam ... which absolutely is true ... but that still hasn't stopped my mailbox from filing with garbage mailings.
Similarly, as a scraper I just need to get enough valid accounts to scrape what I want. All Reddit can do is try and raise the cost of me doing that, but for any reasonable amount of scraped data that cost simply isn't going to be prohibitive.
In other words, Reddit might drive the cost of scraping up from two cents to four with
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P.S. Now of course the AI companies want to scrape on a completely different scale ... but they also can do things most scrapers can't.
Good luck to Reddit in trying to win a "CAPTCHA" battle between their engineer's ability to separate humans from bots ... and frontier AI's ability to pretend to be human.
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I mean, kind of. Its like saying postal spam costs more than email spam ... which absolutely is true ... but that still hasn't stopped my mailbox from filing with garbage mailings.
Except the cost alone is the reason you have an order of magnitude less garbage in your mail than in your email inbox. That's the whole point. If you're looking for a perfect system, it doesn't exist.
Similarly, as a scraper I just need to get enough valid accounts to scrape what I want.
No you need a system to continuously generate valid accounts, something which is significantly more difficult than just visiting a site. Not impossible, but make no mistake, speed and complexity is a determining factor. No one including the reddit CEO is under the delusion that this will stop scraping, but it w
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...still allow unauthorized screen scraping?
(Reddit MBA) "I've calculated the value of selling screen scraping data from fake accounts at 2.7 trillion reddcoin, which of course can be used exclusively in the Reddit store to buy and sell our premire NFT stocks, valued at almost-just like the real thing.."
Don't much care, moved on (Score:5, Insightful)
When they locked out anonymous access to old.reddit.com, I moved on.
Yes, I will miss the technical, humor, and local-events discussions. The rest, I won't.
A slight smile crosses my face at the ad views this will cost them - as one might presume with the current old.reddit.com redirect to a login page (which does not show ads), the only way one would be shown ads on the platform going forward is if one is logged in (and doesn't have an ad blocker). So all those ads being served to anonymous viewers goes bye-bye. I very slightly wonder if the bean-counters took this into account.
This move will create a vacuum. Some other thing, for better or worse, will come around to replace it. The internet, as has been long said, will interprit this as damage and route around it. I still have just enough faith in humanity left to believe this...
Re: Don't much care, moved on (Score:2)
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Yes, I absolutely despise the new UI. I started using reddit specifically because of that compact interface that never autoplays anything, gives you all identically sized thumbnails of videos or pictures etc. When they started trying to force people to that new UI I all but stopped using it. I did find a plugin that takes the new UI and creates its own equivalent of old.reddit.com called sheddit that I am still using when I HAVE to go there. But I also have other complaints about the way that reddit is mana
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I wasted enough of my time over the years because of accounts I created so I could comment (here, Ars Technica, etc.) - I very deliberately refused to create a Reddit account because it is such a massive timesuck rabbithole. Make an account, you suddenly feel the need to comment, then you curate the feed to make sure it's even more addictive to you, so you comment even more. Screw that. The first time they force login is the last time I hit the site, I guess.
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It's a shame. I've written answers to questions on Reddit because I knew other people could find them in the future.
It has taken one wrong turn towards enshittification after another. The first was removing the API. Then the algorithmic feed - which I avoided by using old.reddit.com. Now it has moved fully to the closed-garden approach.
Thankfully, this doesn't bother the bots at all.
Same (Score:2)
I use Kagi, and that's when I demoted Reddit results so they don't junk things up.
Dude seems to have a very high opinion of the value of his website. We'll see if he's right, but the last 30 years are littered with also-rans who came to the same conclusion.
To paraphrase Ghostbusters (Score:5, Interesting)
I log in to read, but I regularly open threads by right-clicking and open in a different tab. Since I mostly use private browsing (Safari or Firefox) to stop advert tracking, this means that one tab is logged in but most of the ones I open to read later are not logged in. So now that pattern is dead? Then there's the "site:reddit.com" searches I do on topics that I just need an answer for rather than ever wanting to participate in. Again, same pattern - I use private browsing and I usually right click and open multiple tabs on several likely looking search results before then starting to read each tab to see if anything useful turned up. That pattern gone as well?
The summary touches on this next bit too - I'm wondering what will happen when I send a link to someone else, some of whom don't have and will likely never have Reddit accounts. Are they now simply unable to see it? Even Facebook isn't that harsh, and it's the perfect example too. I do not have nor will I ever have a Facebook account, but I'm sent the odd link now and again which I do open and look at without needing an account. A world where Facebook is more open than Reddit is just...odd.
I get their dilemma, but this seems a bit too far to me.
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Since I mostly use private browsing (Safari or Firefox) to stop advert tracking
Just delete cookies on exit and be done with it. Opening each tab in a separate private window isn't doing anything to stop tracking.
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It may not stop tracking, but it lets you do the search for something without losing your place.
Re: To paraphrase Ghostbusters (Score:2)
Fuck u/spez... (Score:1)
...and the horse he rode in on.
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Oh, she was only following orders..
Dead site (Score:3)
They are supposedly going to make it so you can curate your feed better though. I gave up on Reddit because I could not get it to stop giving me rage bait posts. YouTube has the ability to just block them but Reddit doesn't let you do that. I know why it's better for engagement and that's all they care about.
That's the fundamental problem in the internet even more so than AI sloppification. It is heavily optimized to make you angry and keep you angry because that's what keeps you glued to the screen the longest.
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On r/lawncare, it's people's shoes and dogs shitting on the lawn. On r/laundry, it's people either deliberately telling you what piece of clothing is dirty and asking how to clean it, or showing the labels.
I don't have an account, but even I can recognize this astroturfing. It's being deliberately done to get views.
The lawn care forum gets 600k views and 6.5k posts (Score:2)
A lot of those are probably bots but advertisers treat them like they aren't. Data is data.
I guess what I'm saying is rage bait and outrage porn drives a lot more engagement than lawn Care.
Also those kind of subreddits like the lawn Care One require massive amounts of maintenance and moderation t
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The whole internet is basically rage-bait trigger-porn (be it the xxx kind or not) but yah. 'Normal' human engagement is long gone, replaced with edgy garbage "does this micro bikini make me look fat" with boobs bigger than her head practically falling out.
But the curated feed is a joke. It just gets you to tell reddit (or any site) more about your interests _for free_ all so they can serve better ads and engagement content spam.
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I block ads myself, but if I'm shown ads, I'd prefer they be targeted as opposed to just flinging sit at the wall to see what sticks. At least relevant ads MIGHT introduce me to a new product that I MIGHT buy. Random ads that I get shown that I have zero interest in have basically no chance of me checking out their product.
How's that working for /. ? (Score:2)
Are we seeing wild growth in our user base due to the new policies?
Re:How's that working for /. ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mastodon? (Score:2)
Though I have not really figured how to find stuff on there.
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And gave up.
I think it does not have critical mass.
The problem with enshittification is not just that companies thrust shittier stuff on us, it is that too many people keep consuming the shittier stuff
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You mean Lemmy?
I've tried it. It's OK but it needs more development.
Good. (Score:2)
As long as Google, etc, stops indexing the site - something I've always wanted. That should be the rule. If it's paywalled or behind a login, it's not indexed.
What are they going to do? Put a gun to my head? (Score:2)
I will not log in. They can't force me.
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cool (Score:3)
it will now be completely impossible to research any purchase, awesome
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Actually going to reddit has never been useful, enjoyable, or healthy. Adding "reddit" to searches has just been the only way to get anything close to legit product information for several years.
It will force something awright! (Score:1)
AI backlash? (Score:2)
I have a feeling this is less about unauthenticated users than it is about preventing AI scraping. Nothing they can do about Google/Gemini - but everyone else is getting cut off.
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I'm quite sure I could tell AI to go get a new email address, then go make a reddit account, and then scrape away until banned. Rinse and repeat. So how is this helping Reddit again? If anything, they'll lose money because now "readers" that don't log in will NEVER see ads, because they won't be on the site at all. That seems like a loss to me.
Oh well. I'm sure something else will come along.
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RDDT down 30% (Score:2)
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Can't tell how much was a bad earnings report and how much this policy. Now instead of displaying non-targeted adds to anonymous users, the display no adds. I canceled my account out of general annoyance.
Huffman claims the login ... is better for ... (Score:2)
Reddit to sell your data and usage patterns to advertisers and making more money and keeping our advertisers happy as pigs in sh*t while turning you even more into the product you really are.
Have I got that basically right?
Bye bye Reddit, I guess. (Score:2)
One day I copped on to how it was affecting me, and I deleted my
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I've noticed this in news and Slashdot even. I specifically give myself breaks from both because a lot of negativity and downright toxicity exist and it's made worse by the Internet.
I do enjoy coming here and it's probably still the best place to try and have a discussion will fairly intelligent people. Try the same on Yahoo! and you'll quickly see the average post is an order of magnitude worse then here. Not to mention Yahoo! censors post so that you have to really work at using euthanisms and purposely m
Yet you are all logged in to Slashdot (Score:2)
NOW can we just bring back Usenet? (Score:2)
What IS reddit, really, at the end of the day but a re-intrepretation of Usenet but owned by only one company? And over the years, it has degenerated into every bit as much a cesspit of trolling as the alt heiarchy was, with a fetid cooler of ragebait sitting in the muck as an appetizer. And "But it's MODERATED" has failed as badly as it did on twitter.
My only visits to the site in the last couple of years have been from search results when I had questions about something technical and the first couple of
Goodbye then (Score:2)
I was occasionally looking at things there, but that has become a non-option now.
betting AI companies are driving this (Score:1)
I can't entirely blame them for wanting to protect their content.
So government knows what you're looking at (Score:2)
And reddit can monetize your interests.
Enshittification, like Twitter (Score:2)
Reminds me of when Twitter started requiring Javascript to view a page. That was the last week I read anything hosted on Twitter. It must be at least 5 years ago now, and it's been great. Whatever's in that post, if it's really important, will be available somewhere else, and with better context.
Now, Reddit does on occasion actually have something useful to me, so I'm more tempted to make an account there, but we'll see how it goes.
Experts Exchange vs Stack Overflow (Score:2)
IIRC, Experts Exchange started requiring logins soon after their site got big. Stack Overflow never did. So people just avoided Experts Exchange and Stack Overflow became huge.
Reddit already started doing this in the US with some subs on mobile. I'd encountered a requirement to use the app to view some larger subs. I started reading those subs less - I switched to desktop mode on the phone which is a lower quality experience. If they force logins... well, I don't need to see the content that much. I guess t