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.
Darn. Old Reddit is the last way to access NSFW subreddits without logging into Reddit.
There’s a website called Reddtastic that works great!
Yes, this is exactly my use case for Old Reddit. For obvious reasons, I use private browsing mode when viewing NSFW stuff. Private browsing mode does not retain my logged-in Reddit session, so that’s where Old Reddit comes in.
Huh, I… didn’t even think of that. I suppose people could download all the old content before this kicks in, at least, but yeah, that’ll be the loss of new stuff moving forward, unless people can sway them over to nsfwlemmy.
Yeah, this will be quite a loss… genuinely a shame. It sucks that we can’t scrape and rebuild a copy of the whole site…