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.
As opposed to the plain old scraping they do to train AI, and generate revenue by selling user comments for others to train AI.
I read a half-cocked internet theory that a certain someone might’ve purchased twitter just to gain access to an ex-gf’s personal tweets. I judged it as possible but unlikely, as that’s a lot of money to spend on such a thing.
Now, we’ve all heard stories about reddit blocking accounts for no published reason, and tracking folks down across accounts/IP addresses/etc. That code must be pretty expansive to do the things they’ve done. So one has the thought: if you’ve ever reached out to the reddit hive mind for some kind of support with a personal issue of any kind then that data about you is still floating around in their database and tied to whatever alternate accounts you have, even if it was the “good old days” when you did it.
Abusive scraping, my ass.
reddits moderation is very expensive, which is why they allow google to scrape thier data. the V3 captcha system is googles thing, reddit cant afford that but google lets them use it in exchange for AI/datamining. reddit and google is quite intertwined, like with mozilla and google.
Had no idea they used that. I edited all my comments to crap then deleted them around the time the admin monkied with the backend database, and stopped using old.reddit to browse once I found lemmy. I once went through the effort of making a temp account to comment on someone else’s comment there because they had suggested trying something specifically dangerous and didn’t seem to know about it. I doublechecked later and the comment I wrote was caught in some filter, likely the result of the account being too new. I can’t imagine what garbage that site will be in the years to come.