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Reddit Will Force Everyone to Log In (theverge.com) 93

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-an-era dept.
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."

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Reddit Will Force Everyone to Log In

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  • The Enshittification Continues (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:06AM (#66401464)
    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. New users will see an initial bump as a handful of people make accounts, then disappear as search results become less and less applicable to current problems because they aren't indexed. Reddit is currently an amazing repository of knowledge. Now it's dying, all to appease yet another money making scheme by trashy people with garbage MBA's all about 'adding shareholder value'.
    • My main reddit account was created during the Digg exodus, and I've seen many changes since then. Each one seems to make the user experience worse in exchange for the bosses getting more and more money and/or control of your information.

      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)

      by Jerrry ( 43027 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:48AM (#66401538)

      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.

      • My guess is the later. The reality is that a LOT of social media platforms have been moving towards gated community models for a while. I don't have any accounts on sites like X or Bluesky, and it's annoying how little content I can see before they cut me off. I still see a lot of wannabe social media sites pop up with "invitation only" marketing strategies that never seem to go fully open to the public even after years after they debut.

        My biggest concern right now is that YouTube seems to be dabbling wi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by canavan ( 14778 )
      They have already started enforcing logging in on old.reddit.com. That has already reduced my use of reddit significantly. If you search specific answers via e.g. google, the results are polluted with crappy auto-translations that aren't immediately obvious from the search result pages, so I'm rather hesitant to click any reddit results.

    • Re:The Enshittification Continues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:08PM (#66401812) Homepage

      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.

    • Reddit is a dumpster fire.

    • 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

      • This due to spez' incompetence.
        "Reddit sucks but they hve the answer i need" has been the response to suggestions people abandon reddit for like 5 years.
        This wouldn't even be a problem if reddit were still a fun and interesting place to have a discussion.

  • 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)

      by Puls4r ( 724907 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:08AM (#66401472)
      No - it's not just about the participants. It's about all the people who get drawn there because they can *read* the information. Reddit will die a slow quiet death. But the MBA's who monetized it will be happy because they'll get their wad of cash then move on.

      • 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

        • It is no win for everyone. Well except ai scrapers. If you run a website and look at the logs, it is 99% scraping and 1% human now. As you say, most just look at the google ai answer and don't bother visiting the source from the ai scrape. Google gets a little cash and not the site they got the info from. So if reddit walls off, they stop the scrape. But they stop the humans too. If they don't wall off, the humans don't come anymore because they just read the answer from the scraper.

          • 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

          • 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.

          • 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.

            • If you want to have. good place to talk, you need to pay for it.

              "Oh i'd never pay to post!" and yet you do post, you've been posting for 20 fucking years and you won't pay between $5 lifetime and $100/year to avoid wasting that time on LLMs and paid advertisers who pose as users.

              If the answer is no then please maybe consider using some of your infinite time and patience to shitpost over at usenet. If we're going to have an unmoderated shithole it might as well be too hard to use if you're stupid.

              Free for

              • Logging in has nothing to do with showing ads, which is where the actual money is generated. People that visit to just read are still getting ad impressions, same as the logged in users. By blocking the folks that just wanted to read, they are losing out on those ad dollars.

                With that said, maybe it's worth it to keep the AI out. Of course, when I can just tell AI to get a new email account, then a new reddit account, then continue scrapping until banned, rinse and repeat.

                If I can think that far ahead, then

  • So, wouldn't fake accounts... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:21AM (#66401496) Journal

    ...still allow unauthorized screen scraping?

    • Accounts are easier to throttle and ban compared to individual IP addresses which may belong to actual people.

      • 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

        • 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.

        • 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

    • ...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)

    by Akardam ( 186995 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:22AM (#66401498)

    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...

    • My own usage cratered after the old reddit change. The new site is just not great for reading threads on. And it blocks 18+ content. I noticed I wasn't the only one who had reduced usage, when I did check in, the activity on the subs I used to check was significantly lower.

    • 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

      • There's something wrong with you and you have an agenda to push if you're in 2026 talking about the front page of reddit

        Get out of here you walking talking billboard, go stuff some coupons in an envelope or some shit.

    • 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.

    • 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)

      by abulafia ( 7826 )
      When they locked out anonymous access to old.reddit.com, I moved on.

      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)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:23AM (#66401502) Homepage
    "I'll tell you the experience. It's pissing me off!"

    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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It may not stop tracking, but it lets you do the search for something without losing your place.

    • Doing a Google search for stuff brings up Reddit posts along with Stackoverflow and similar. Not being able to see those posts just means less engagement with the site. It won't encourage people to sign up, it'll just turn stop them clicking on Reddit links going forward

    • Even Facebook isn't that harsh, and it's the perfect example too.

      It depends. My experience with multiple social media sites is that they can change day-to-day. One day they let you in (with restricted visibility), and another day they block you entirely. I don't have accounts on ANY social media site, and when people send me links to X, Bluesky, or whatever, it seems a mixed bag whether the links work or not.

      At any rate, it seems the whole WWW is now moving towards a gated community model, and it really sucks.

  • ...and the horse he rode in on.

  • Dead site (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:27AM (#66401510)
    Maybe dead internet. But they can't survive this. Reddit is already kinda useless. You need rage bait and outrage porn to engage people on the internet enough to keep advertisers happy and get enough engagement so that you can mine data and train AI with posts.

    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.
    • You need rage bait and outrage porn to engage people on the internet

      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.
      • Per week. A relatively minor political forum called white people Twitter does 650 k views and 42k posts per week. The bigger rage bait forums do millions of views and tens of thousands of posts per week.

        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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by torkus ( 1133985 )

      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.

      • 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.

  • Are we seeing wild growth in our user base due to the new policies?

    • Re:How's that working for /. ? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ctishman ( 545856 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @12:02PM (#66401562)
      Honestly, I came back to Slashdot after at least five years because of how annoying the rest of the internet had gotten. I can't say I'm part of some great movement, but I've been enjoying figuring out how to use my mod points, losing entire posts because I forgot to copy them before I rejected a post preview, all that oldschool stuff. Feels like I have to pay attention again, and the people ragebaiting are human, which is in its own way nice.

      • Ah, yes... the good ol' days of mod points disappearing only when you want to use them, for no damn reason.

  • 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.

  • I will not log in. They can't force me.

  • cool (Score:3)

    by bistromath007 ( 1253428 ) on Friday October 30, 2026 @12:08PM (#66401588)

    it will now be completely impossible to research any purchase, awesome

  • Slight title edit. "Reddit Will Force Everyone to Stop Using Dumb Site That Already Killed All Good Ways to Use the Site and Now Encourages All Users to Stop Using the Site Completely". We'll see how long that lasts, about as long as their last attempt with the dumb banner overlays begging you to log in or else.

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • I have a feeling that this will do little to stop AI scrapers. Whats to stop AI scrapers from just making accounts and continuing to scrape?
  • Reddit Inc. stock is down today. A lot.

    • 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.

  • 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?

  • I had mental health issues several years ago. One of the things that exacerbated it was Reddit. It's too easy to join a "conversation" that turns into a shouting match. And it's hard to back down on topics or opinions you believe in or are passionate about. It fed into the depression I already had (and hadn't acknowledged) and made everything much worse. People are cunts, and they are supposed on the Internet, and worse still on Reddit.

    One day I copped on to how it was affecting me, and I deleted my

    • 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

  • And you will crack and log in to reddit. Even Wikipedia and 4chan have login requirements now if you want to edit certain articles or post from certain ip addresses.

    • Yeah lots of people said this when i left reddit and facebook years ago and never went back.
      My only regret is that i ever used them to begin with,
      I'd say in overall regret, i regret reddit more than 4chan or facebook and i'd never touch either of those sites with a 10ft pole

  • 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

  • I was occasionally looking at things there, but that has become a non-option now.

  • I can't entirely blame them for wanting to protect their content.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      That's a strange spelling for "sell". They announced some time ago, that they will make deals with AI companies to license the content that they hope is harder to scrape since you need a login for old.reddit (and now soon for new as well). I think Google bought that access and possibly OpenAI as well. It was never about protecting your content.

  • And reddit can monetize your interests.

  • 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.

    • If you make a new account with an anti-reddit name and post about how spez used to mod a creepshots on kids subreddit they'll shadow ban you.

      Which is a fucking great account. You can't actually respond to anyone and yet from your perspective, the entire site works flawlessly. Finish up by putting the site in a browser sandbox with a QoL extension

      Anyhow that the best experience you can get aside from searching for actual separate forums you wanna be a part of. There's probably one somewhere for your hobby

  • 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

  • Neither (Score:3)

    by allo ( 1728082 ) on Saturday October 31, 2026 @02:56PM (#66403466)

    > the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.
    It is neither. It looks like the right decision for their investors and they only learn when it's too late.

  • I enjoyed the communities I was part of on reddit, but they shadowbanned me for 'technical irregularities' the day I switched from Cox Cable to AT&T Fiber. I've filed maybe 100 appeals over the past 13 months and have never received a response. I moved on to Forum app by Facebook/Meta if you can believe it, to try and find ham radio, retrocomputing and mzda miata groups I can post on since reddit will no longer have me. Check out r/Shadowban on reddit - tons of humans are caught up in reddit's shitty bo

  • Haven’t used Reddit since they started forcing a curated feed at me. The irony is that Reddit sold ‘their’ content to AI companies and that is being used against them. Forcing login is just the latest in a long list of dumb things this company has done. I don’t care because I have already gone, but for people that are still there this sucks.

  • Once again, I am absolutely gobsmacked at just how clueless upper management at corporations have become.

    How do these guys even manage to put their pants on the in morning. Do they have help for that?

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