Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.
Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who appends “reddit” to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to “Old Reddit.”
There’s no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you’re logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren’t logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app’s incognito mode.
Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user’s identity — “Honestly, we don’t want to know” — just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver “more relevant ads.”
“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”
Reddit is making this announcement alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today. Search traffic was “down meaningfully” in Q3, Huffman says in the company’s shareholder letter, with logged-out traffic and web traffic being the most heavily impacted. “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” Huffman says.
However, Huffman notes that app and logged-in daily active unique users make up “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”
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Lemmy is way better. Just wish it was easy to search it for information like reddit
Tbh Lemmy’s integrated search is pretty great with all the filters and ability to search locally and across instances. It’s already way ahead of reddit’s search.
Maybe one of these work well? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search+engine+fediverse
It’s been a series of greed-motivated decisions that have made Reddit a worse experience for users over the last few years:
- API changes that killed off third-party apps
- Allowing AI training on its content
- Hidden/curated profile nonsense (yes, I know it’s easily bypassed)
- Limiting access to old.reddit
- Removal of r/all
- Age verification
- Killing RSS feeds
Now requiring log-in to view all content and talks of paywalling some subreddits (put on hold, but I wouldn’t put it past them to bring it up again).
Despite Reddit being on the decline for a while now, I would browse without being logged in or through Redlib because there is still interesting and helpful information and niche communities to be found there. I recently noticed some subreddits were not appearing among search results on Redlib and not being able to access posts that appear on its Redlib’s front page either. I hope there will be a workaround.
@zen like any other fascist social media
Everyone? But I haven’t touched reddit in years; you’ll have to make me visit with my cold dead hands, much less log me in
Correction: Reddit will force bots to log in. Everyone else already left.
This is what keeps me off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and most of Youtube. Glad to finally be forced off reddit.
centralizing online communication on a few large platforms was a good idea, riiiiiiight??? /s
I just hope this makes more people discover the “threadiverse”.
Even if there isn’t a huge wave immediately, by continuing to engage here even if the communities we have here are small, we prove that it is possible to do what we are doing without centralized bigtech corporations, and longterm/medium that is an existential attack on their legitimacy (as it should be).
We just have to keep this place going to win, we don’t have to grow virally or convince everyone to move here instead of migrating to Yet Another Corporate Social Media Silo… we have to establish thorough proof over a significant stretch of time that the narratives out of Silicon Valley about what social media is and how the only way to make it “sustainable” is profit and surveillance capitalism are delusional and offbase narratives. We prove that a little bit every moment we spend here…
Corporate Social Media must prove the rule that Bigtech Corps are needed to run social media, we have a much easier job, we must only prove the exception while demonstrating we are only one possible alternative of many.
Fediverse as a whole, but yes.
Removed by mod
waves
Haven’t used Reddit in years and don’t miss it. Lemmy works great.
Unfortunately Reddit has become an enormous repository of the world’s knowledge about a vast number of subjects. That’s why it’s always at the top of search results.
Welp, not much longer it seems.
Being inaccessible to users who aren’t logged in doesn’t make it disappear.
On the long run, it makes it irrelevant. Nobody even thinks about Digg.
What about Digg? Digg died mostly due to people flocking to Reddit.
Digg died mostly due starting to suck so badly people walked. For Reddit, there isn’t even a platform to escape to. But people are now less online in general and smeared over low-brow plarforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Anecdotally it would seem that people are more online in general, albeit episodically with smartphones rather than via desktops and for hours (apart from work). But engaged only passively on scrolling social media. I would agree that intelligent commentary is much less online than it once was. It seems that intelligent people have mostly seceded from society to do their own thing in peace, to whatever extent is possible, over the past 2 decades.
They didn’t leave because it was login-gated. That’s the point.
Certainly it has nothing to do with AI using reddit to train and thus becomes the first place an AI checks for results
And nothing to do with Reddit making money by charging Google for API access to train its AI models.
Now take it a step back further and ask yourself why AI uses Reddit to train.
It’s literally a misinformation factory on every subject on earth. Do you consider AliExpress the foremost retail experience as well? I mean they have counterfeit versions of the world’s commerce at your disposal so technical it’s the biggest collection of “merchandise”.
Reddit has a sense of community that is simply not on Lemmy due to its small size
A bunch of bots do not constitute a “community”
depends on what subs you visit. /r/worldnews for example is a botted to the brim. Still, nobody bothers to send chatbots to shill on some Estonian guppyfish appreciation forum with 30 users.
It isn’t all bots
A few years ago it had a vibrant community with tons of smart people. It is more of a echo chamber now with some memes tossed in.
Not with that attitude
I never felt that Reddit has a sense of community, even on mid-sized subs like r/karate or the sub for my local town. On the other hand, there are several people here on Piefed/Lemmy whose names I recognize exactly because we have smaller communities.
The main advantage Reddit had is that for any topic, you were likely to have a world expert in that topic weighing in. You might have to scroll down a ways to get past the slew of stupid one-liners and joke-of-the-weeks, but it’d be there. But I suspect that fewer of those experts are weighing in these days, now that their only purpose is to feed the AI models.
Maybe not any more, but it used to. Back in the day I used to spend a lot of time on places like /r/3dprinting and /r/raspberry_pi answering people’s questions. It felt fulfilling and I certainly was not the only one spending my evenings doing it. But that was years ago.
I miss the memes and the niche knowledge
Yeah, the niche knowledge is what I’m talking about, I agree.
But as for the memes… you know, a couple months ago I looked at the reddit goth memes sub to try and swipe some memes for !gothindustrial@lemmy.world, and… I only found like 4-5 decent ones. And most of those were swiped from Insta or Facebook, by their own admission. If I want to find good new goth memes I gotta look at Insta or I think Tiktok. (for old ones, I’d look at Facebook, maybe imgur or pinterest.) I don’t think reddit has a lot of good original stuff any more. Maybe it’s different for different types of memes, tho.
Reddit has good memes simply because of the user base. If 1% of the user base posting a good meme once a year is still 4 million memes a year or about 10,000 memes a day. (Quick napkin math)
I never felt it.
Unfortunately many people did. Lemmy is really lame most of the time.
Um, no. /r/collapse died a long time ago as a community.
Weird thing to think is a strength of reddit. I don’t agree
That’s what I miss as well. There were three sub’s that I joined that I really liked and met some great people through. Here, it is much much harder to do, because those similar sub’s on here are really small, and maybe get 1 post a week if lucky.
All the more reason to not go to reddit.
Rest in Piss Reddit
Can’t force me to login, when I haven’t visited since the creation of my Lemmy account. (3yrs)
Eyyy, fellow APIcalypse refugee
Same for me. I refused right then and will continue to do so, forever. My continued authentic human expressions will never again contribute to their brazen intellectual theft.
I’m mostly curious what will happen if they lock out search engine queries from even seeing the page containing the answer - that was no doubt given by a helpful human user; benevolently and without compensation I might add.
Will they keep the human created and subsequently stolen important information hostage unless the reconnaissance targets (you and I) are forced to log in?
I’m mostly curious what will happen if they lock out search engine queries from even seeing the page containing the answer
Very possible they expect outsiders to use the site through LLMs or otherwise pay for the privilege of access to community-generated content.
You already made the site unusable by killing RSS feeds. Making it even worse won’t make me come back.
You already made the site unusable by killing
RSS feedsthe API.FTFY
anychance this helps the 'verse?
I’ve posted a few links to Lemmy on the Reddit discussion. Don’t want to obviously overwhelm the moderators here, but hopefully we get a few new users.
The thing is, the people who were browsing Reddit without an account are just going to browse Lemmy without an account as well. :P
Nothing wrong with that
Agreed, but it’s presumptive to think they’ll make accounts here when they didn’t make accounts there.
What to do about the influx of new users? Nothing. Reddit’s latest foot-shooting won’t drive new account creation the way the original exodus did.
At the start, yes. But I would imagine some fraction will convert over if they like the content.
I suspect that’s how a lot of people got started on Reddit.
Yeah, I had stopped commenting and voting in reddit because it has felt less and less impactful with time and with the huge echoes chambers and also bots.
There are still a lot of echo chamber here but they seems less impermeable?
Anyway since I’m on Lemmy I’m motivated to participate. And I don’t think I’m an exception on that.
For sure to some degree, but I watch a weekly fccincinnati game thread (soccer) not logged in there because I deleted my account 3 years ago.
Noticed last night I couldn’t look at that thread in old reddit without logging in, I could still visit by going to regular reddit which wasn’t gonna happen.
I do have a throwaway from long back that maybe has one comment posted. so I used that last night but it will likely end with me visiting even less than I do now.
i used extension to reskin it as old, but it has kinks it needs to work out. just dont want to see the ugly doomscrolling feed that is the new one.
You could try the redlib front end as an alternative.
I just want enough people to come here so I don’t have to give them any clicks
Sure, if it ever worked.
Not true. I am that person.
@zen@lemmy.zip I hope so. The “don’t have to login” part though, while technically possible, I suspect will be less usable here, just due to nature of federation (and, while I think its a good thing IRL, discovery isn’t helped that some of the biggest instances have blocked each other).
I think not much chance of that. Users that post there are unaffected & lemmy rarely shows up in search results…
This will make Google / DDG searches less useful than before, so even more people will use Ai instead of search.
In fact I would argue that this is a really bad business decision on Reddit’s part. I can totally see them come around & revert it in a couple of months.
Unlikely. Reddit is too big and mainstream and the lemmyverse too small, too confusing - and too far-left politically, to be frank. Most of it is a ghost town. I also doubt it would be able to withstand a sudden massive influx of users from both a technical and organizational perspective.
I am always surprised people claim 34,000 daily users is “a ghost town” we, well other than Earnest, made it through the great Reddit exodus
34k is absolutely nothing for an entire network of communities. I used to mod for a stagnating/declining gaming forum that was just in a single language (not English) and much larger than that - and even it felt quite small.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of users on any online community are near permanent lurkers and do not contribute with even brief comments - or even by voting. What matter is how many people are actually submitting links, writing posts and comments.
Look at this community: It’s the largest “general” technology community on the lemmyverse (I think), yet there are just a small handful of people posting, often days between posts and on average (going by the last three pages of submissions), tons of posts where not even a single user is commenting. Anything that isn’t controversial and does get comments is usually in the 3 to 7 comments range.
That’s a ghost town. I can practically see tumbleweed slowly rolling across the page. My perception might be a little skewed though, because the way I interact with posts is by annoyingly inserting myself into existing conversations or at least replying to unanswered comments that already exist, so I tend to avoid empty posts.
Part of this emptiness is certainly due to forums in general going the way of the dodo (thanks to Facebook, twitter, instagram and especially Discord, as awful as all of these are at replacing conventional forums) and part of it is due to reddit having absorbed much of the user base that is still interested in forums. My hypothesis is that reddit losing users due to ongoing enshittification would just result in the overwhelming majority of them ending spread out across the aforementioned services instead of ending up here. I’m terrible at predicting things though, but the big reddit exodus (or whatever actually materialized) largely skipped the lemmyverse in the past and I don’t think conditions have changed enough for anything different to happen this time, should this recent boneheaded decision by reddit’s management result in fewer people using their site.
ive seen some sensitive topics on forums more openly discussed then on reddit, where theres more potential to get astroturfed.
Mfw “too far left” is center-right.
The lemmyverse is center-right in your opinion? Or did you misread and thought I meant reddit with that? Sorry if I caused any confusion.
Obama was right of Nixon. Nixon gave us the EPA and wanted universal health, until Kaiser businessmen made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
nixon wasnt doing it out of pureness of his heart, he used as truncation to his political disasters(watergate tonkin gulf disaster, and the vietnam war). nixon was way more right wing than obama, lol.
You might want to look up how certain political positions switched from being supported by both sides of the aisle to becoming wedge issues. Obama was most certainly not right of Nixon. That’s just absurd.
To get back to my question though, I don’t feel like you answered it clearly. Does your reply mean - since Obama was and still is very popular on reddit - that the site is center-right from your point of view? From a European perspective this might be the case, but not in the way the current American political spectrum is organized. The political spectrum is not an absolute thing, but instead applies to the current reality in a certain place and the relationship of its participants to one another.
There’s also the issue that people who are politically further away from the center perceiving those that are closer to it as more extreme than they actually are, e.g. a far-right person might consider a moderate to be far left and a moderately left-wing person might consider a centrist to be center-right.
Ratchet effect, Overton Window, rotating villains, good/bad cop. I said what I said.
Nixon signed those things into law with a (unbelievable now) left wing Democrat majority in the Senate and House that would have passed it over his veto. He could either get on board and claim some semblance of credit or weakly resist.
It’s more than what Democratic majorities have been doing, since.
It’s a brave new world for sure.
Wrong. Reddit only forces Reddit users to log in. lol
I’m safe.they got mad, because people just became lurkers on reddit, because they dont want to get banned in general.
