HN Explorer

old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login

40 points by chucksmash ↗ HN
You maniacs! You blew it up!

Redirect URL:

https://old.reddit.com/login/?reason=lor2&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fuser%2F<YOUR_SN_HERE>%2F

Page text:

Log in to use old Reddit

To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.

By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy.

45 comments

[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 28.5 ms ] thread
throwaway81523
It still works for me. Maybe they are still rolling out the change.
shmde
The www.reddit.com shows me a banner after 10 seconds to login/signup. So annoying. I refresh multiple times to make that banner go away. It sometimes does sometimes doesn't. Such user hostile stuff.
dostoynikov
It does not require me to login. I am from Japan tho. Maybe this requirement is kind of European freedom stuff lol.
ColdStream
Australia here. I have been playing around with this on various machines.

It seems to be using some cookie system that is bypassing this for the moment. Older machines I have still can use it without issue. But a fresh browser on the same connection will be prompted for the login.

Regardless, it is clear what direction this is going in. Age verification is also being tested in some places.

mexicojalisco
It’s been requiring login to old Reddit from Mexico for 1-2 months. In out
mandarinclips
It's difficult for me to post on Reddit now; it's very restrictive, mainly because my karma score is too low. There will be even more restrictions going forward; AI automation is becoming too powerful.
chanux
Sounds a bit like the story of Stackoverflow.
a_e_k
Earlier today I started getting a "Get the app to keep using Reddit" popup when browsing while logged out on my phone. (I prefer to use Firefox Android exclusively in private mode to reduce the temptation to doom scroll and to have the added friction of manually logging in when commenting on any site.)

Unlike the prior nag screens, this one was modal, blocked any scrolling, and had no way to close it. It seemed to pop up about 15 seconds after I first start scrolling any page - either a list of threads on a subreddit, or a thread page itself.

Man I miss the old iOS-looking Reddit mobile (m.reddit.com, IIRC).

My Reddit account is now just a few months short of US drinking age. I've been using the site since before subreddits were a thing (back when the only topic-specific alternative to the general front page was programming.reddit.com). I've posted a lot, modded some, and stuck with them through a lot of stupid decisions over the years. But I'm beginning to think it's finally time to move on; I'm just not sure where to.

shawn_w
Are there any decent alternatives to reddit? When they finish killing off old reddit I'm gone, and will need a new time waster.
dlcarrier
It's still working for me, even in an incognito window.
viccis
I've seen many people point out that, despite AI being heralded as increasing engineering productivity by 10x or more, we don't seem to have gotten a decade worth of new disruptive sites and apps like we got multiple times a year in the early 2010s. Not that surprising to me, as product fit was always the bottleneck, rarely engineering.

But I can say that where AI and its externalities truly excel and have rapidly accelerated is in taking away or at least hobbling the value of many sites. This is another victim, I think. Reddit needs to figure out how to make money, and their main valuable asset now is a trove of somewhat organized (compared to, say, Discord) text conversations. They have so far been too incompetent to turn being one of the only way to get good results from google searches into revenue, so they're scuttling that with this and the normal site paywall in hopes of LLM corpus cash.

dzhiurgis
Oh the irony - the anti-ai movement will destroy companies that are best providers of ai training data.
suppy123456
Have people. Unable to see comments while not logged in. They hid the comments behind a login prompt.
kotaKat
Is it really “keeping Reddit safe” or is Popular in United States still all the Indian teenagers subreddits because they’re still riding residential proxies into the site?
wbnns
I'm visiting from EU in a private tab and not getting any login prompts or redirects, fwiw.
imnotr0b0t
I noticed that too... There are still ways around it, but I don't think it'll last long. I don't know, I'm thinking of giving up on Reddit altogether
krazingans12346
reddit is already blocking other methods to remove the login popup, they arnt rolling it out all at once for fear of public backlash. they are trying to sneak it in slowly.
TrueKoi
It's been taking place over the last month. A workaround was incognito on browsers, till they blocked that. Then it was switching location through VPN, till they blocked that. Then it was going through TOR which they also ended up blocking and prompting the login/signup screen as with the previous workarounds.

This is all so that in a few months time they can say that demand for old.reddit.com has dropped so they'll no longer be supporting it and force everyone to use that horrible tiktok style layout, controlling every pixel of a users device and deciding what they see.

What a downhill ride this has been.

GaryNumanVevo
I feel like I see so much AI generated text on reddit. I don't think the average redditor even notices that they're arguing with bots that are trying to astroturf
red-iron-pine
said it here before but will say it again: that was the only thing keeping me using the site on the regular.

i've got a regular account i use if/when i need to log in and ask a question or interact, but that's the exception not the rule.

done w/ the site in general.

1vuio0pswjnm7
I can trigger the login redirect with /s/ in the URL

Otherwise I can still access Reddit without an account, e.g., /r/... and /r/.../comments/...

It seems the company still has not fully implemented this change

The notice suggests it should already be completed by now, but it isn't