Logged-out Old Reddit access is “significant source of abusive scraping."

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.

  • unglueclass23@programming.devEnglish
    14·
    4 hours ago

    My browser clears all cookies from Reddit when I close it down. And every time I go to the new Reddit site, it auto logs me in with my Google account. In some other sites there’s the annoying “log in with google account” popup at the top; it doesn’t do anything if you don’t click to log in. But Reddit doesn’t ask. Just says: “Logging you in” and you can click cancel if you’re fast enough.

    They even auto create you an account if they do this for the first time.

    Awhile ago they were also experimenting forcing mobile users to use the app

    And now they’re also rolling out age verification in the EU (just got an email yesterday). One of the ways to verify your age is with Persona which Discord also tried to use and got a lot of backslash.