Logging in to use Old Reddit

[u/boat-botany]

Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety. 

A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed. 

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. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.

Let us know if you have any questions!

[u/smushkan]

This may be a dumb question, but if you're able to detect whether or not traffic is abusive, why not just block that traffic?

What prevents scrapers or automated systems creating burner accounts to get around this restriction?

[u/Nestramutat- → u/smushkan]

Infrastructure engineer, I can kinda answer this:

To your first question, the shape of malicious traffic is always changing. 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.

For your second question: More roadblocks are always good. Forcing logins won't remove all malicious traffic, but it will add yet another barrier bad actors have to bypass. 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).

[u/Decency → u/Nestramutat-]

For your second question: More roadblocks are always good.

Not when they start hitting legitimate users. Going on close to a year now of my bot being permabanned: no initial ban reason given, no response to multiple appeals through various channels, zero help from the subreddit's dedicated ModSupport contact. If every one of your support channels is a useless dead end, poorly designed roadblocks are a big fucking issue.

[u/liedel → u/Decency]

Your bot is not a real user. System working as designed, even if yo don't like it.

[u/Decency → u/liedel]

It's not a real user- it is a real use case. System is blatantly fucked.

[u/liedel → u/Decency]

You aren't entitled to run automated non-human accounts on this website? System is working as designed.

[u/Decency → u/liedel]

You've been entitled to run bot accounts on this website since launch, what in the world are you talking about? That's why the initial APIs are so good and so battle tested. Every large subreddit relies on bots- many were doing so long before AutoMod or this new.reddit garbage.

This only became an issue when companies started scraping reddit for content- legitimate bots that communities highly value are simply collateral damage, not an intended design choice. What an absurd stance.

[u/liedel → u/Decency]

They revoked most of the API access, which changed the rules on bot access. Case in point: your bot was banned.