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.

  • Vivavuvov@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    This is presumably because they’ve been boosting their anonymous agitator account with their profiles set to private, and there are tools out there that reveal said hidden comments like arctic-shift which I assume utilise old.reddit. They are trying so desperately to curate a rightwing majority narrative that simply isn’t true.

  • robocall@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I regret every time I revisit Reddit. Them shutting down old.reddit will certainly keep me from ever going back. It’ll be a blessing in disguise for me.

    I was addicted to reddit for over 10 years when they shutdown the RIF app. At first I felt like an addict detoxing and it hurt. but now I can look back at those times and say good riddance to Reddit.

    I still enjoy this format of social media, and therefore use Lemmy a lot. It’s clear there’s no algorithm or bots upvoteing trying to make me angry or keep me on the site. There’s less bots here trying to steer the conversation or promote their product. I’m happy with Lemmy. Fuck reddit to death.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Honestly, Lemmy has been good for me in some ways because it isn’t as popular and doesn’t have the deep niche communities reddit has that I was super active in.

      I get more accomplished now because I essentially “finish” my Lemmy browsing and move on, whereas reddit always had something else for me to dive into.

      • reptar@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yup.

        ‘Boredom’ is important. The various endless scroll platforms are not good, for a great number of us at least.

  • auzy1@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    We really need a firefox addon to block reddit from google results automatically

    • optimisticturtle@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Might as well not even use google 70% of the time though if you exclude reddit. I found before switching to DDG or Startpage that I would have to add reddit or site:reddit.com to my queries.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Seriously, what an odd take. The vast majority of questions simply cannot be answered these days if you exclude reddit from your search results. It used to not be this way. Something’s gotta give.

  • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Evidently not enough people left Reddit due to their last enshittification measure, so the enshittification will continue.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      If I’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that people in general will put up with an astonishing level of enshittification

      • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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        6 hours ago

        People on average will literally put up with anything. You can charge them $10/month for their email and you see 90% or so of all people just shrug and then pay it.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Enshittification. They have their users locked in, and now it’s about trying to make money for their advertisers.

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    old.reddit is the only way I use it. this goes away, I delete my account.

    The support forums like r/stopdrinking and r/CPTSD have been lifesavers for me, but reddit just keeps finding new ways to be terrible. RIP Aaron Swartz

    • robocall@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      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.

      • NostraDavid@programming.dev
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        9 hours ago

        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.

    • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Yup.

      I only use old Reddit at work on a computer now. I create a new account every day as it takes that long for them to shadowban me. I get a handful of comments in, get a number of upvotes/downvotes and influence opinions, then I create a new account when I get into work the next day.

      Don’t have time for a shitty platform on weekends as I have better things to do and I don’t care to use it on mobile, even though RedReader still works and looks like old Reddit.