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.
Here is the thing, I don’t think they are driving towards a cliff. In olden times, reddit was one of several options for doomscrolling, with Slashdot, Digg, et Al. When Digg shot themselves in the foot, Reddit was ready to take up the slack, so eternal September happened, and Digg essentially withered away.
At that time the combined user base of these sites was probably an order of magnitude less of present day reddit.
I believe that reddit has achieved critical mass, and they can pretty much do any shit they want. They may lose users, but they’ll be a drop in the bucket.
The inertia is too large.
Myspace, Digg and Slashbot thought that too. Look at FB basically a bot farm like reddit. Something new will come along, maybe its Lemmy, it was Voat for a second. Discord, IG, TikTac have all be chipping away at them.
They all will fall down if they over reach.
Not being combative, its just how this goes imo.