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.
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.