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.
There’s a subreddit where there are thousands of people. The equivalent community on Lemmy has a dozen. I participate there, but it definitely isn’t the same. I haven’t logged into Reddit in a couple of years, and I browse that old subreddit using old.reddit if that disappears the choice is logging in or using new reddit, neither of which is going to work for me, so I guess that’s it for me.