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.
I spent months deleting my old reddit comments. And I’d have to type in my username on a search engine after about a month or two and find more of my old comments and delete those too.
I know the bots already scrapped my contributions. I wanted to say fuck off to to Reddit and take back my contributions.
I requested my data via https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request, and used every ID on that list to delete the comment via a small Javascript script I used in the browser (so I didn’t need to log on via their API, as I already was logged in).
It took a while because I had a 1 second delay between each delete. Before deleting I had actually replaced the last 1000 comments with some AI slow to poison their DB a little, before I decided to just slowly burn it all.
I’ve now been reddit free for a year, after having browsed the gods-forsaken site since 2008.