Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

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. In a follow-up comment, boat-botany defined abusive behavior as that which violates Reddit’s rule prohibiting activity that interferes with the platform’s “normal use” or that “create[s] programs or applications” that break Reddit’s ( controversial ) API rules. “By logging in, we get a lot more signal that allows us to detect whether an account is breaking the rules, and then we can block that traffic or enforce those accounts,” boat-botany said. As of this writing, Ars was still able to use old.reddit.com without logging in. …