Reddit to Require Logins for Old.Reddit.com Access

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.

The news is likely to upset some longtime Reddit users who have relied on old.reddit.com for a familiar look that they find easier to navigate and digest and who also want to view Reddit without logging in for convenience and/or privacy.

When a user asked boat-botany why New Reddit isn’t scraped as often as Old Reddit, the Reddit employee pointed to a comment by another user.

“[T]he shape of malicious traffic is always changing,” the user, Nestramutat, wrote. “It’s going to be a constant cat and mouse game[.] As you ban one method, a new one gets developed. It’s easy to see abusive traffic in hindsight, but it’s harder to pre-emptively block it. Given that they’re claiming Old Reddit doesn’t have the modern security stack, this is likely proving to be an even greater challenge.”

Nestramutat also said that the login requirement won’t eliminate malicious traffic but will add a barrier against threat actors.

“You’re also now attaching an account ID to every malicious request, plus account creation is only available on New Reddit (with the enhanced security stack),” they added.

The Old Reddit login requirement follows recent Reddit testing that blocked logged-out visits to Reddit’s mobile website to push people to its mobile app. Making Old Reddit users log in could impact Reddit scraping but also will address Reddit’s interest in connecting as much traffic as possible to specific users—a strategy that is common among companies like Reddit that rely on advertising for revenue.

Old.reddit.com might not exist “forever”

Perhaps more alarming for old-school Redditors is that boat-botany’s post left the door open for Reddit retiring old.reddit.com. In a follow-up comment, boat-botany wrote that Old Reddit is not shutting down “right now,” adding:

We can’t promise it will be around forever, but [Reddit CEO Steve Huffman] himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has, so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable.

In May 2025, Huffman addressed the longevity of Old Reddit in a post: “We’ll figure out how to work around it and keep it online as long as people are using it.”

The new login requirement will likely decrease use of old.reddit.com, though we don’t know how much. While many old.reddit.com users may visit the site while logged in, the forcefulness of the login requirement could deter longtime users.

“All part of the force-feeding of non-self-curated content to users. It’s really sad to see. [If] Old Reddit is phased out, I will no longer be able to make viewing my [subscribed-to subreddits] the default option for … using Reddit. It’s quite sad,” Reddit user ClarkFable posted in response to today’s announcement.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.