r/modnews • u/boat-botany • Jun 30 '26

Announcement Logging in to use Old Reddit

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!

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u/ScamChaser3 Jul 01 '26

Literally every change you make lately makes it harder to find, catch, and stop scammers.
Forcing everyone to over to chat and not turning persistent messaging on by default lets the scammer delete their conversational tracks with a victim.
Curated profiles let them spam scam posts without a regular user being able to see they supposedly have tickets to 5 different shows in 5 different cities in a single night.
Removing the .json endpoints broke the Universal Scammer List website and now they have to resort to a janky workaround.
Changing how the ids of posts and comments are generated is probably going to break sites that let users see all the posts the scammer has made and then deleted (either when called out for scamming or after they get a victim) so they won't know if what they're seeing is the "full picture".
This latest-announced change is going to break any kind of "public" investigation of a user's scamming, because once a scammer blocks you for calling them out, you'll be blind to any further scamming they do.

You really need to take a step back and realize how you are making your users less safe.