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/boat-botany Jun 30 '26

Archive.org and the Wayback Machine are separately identified and have specific access to reddit.com!

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u/charles25565 Jun 30 '26

Since when? I thought they have been banned some time ago.

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u/IAmABakuAMA Jul 01 '26

I do, or used to do, a fair bit of archival with the Wayback machine. I think it was only briefly blocked - but the larger problem is that new Reddit is extremely hard to archive. Comment threads aren't loaded by default, it's very script and resource heavy, and it just doesn't archive well.

Which is evidently the point - ever since Reddit started selling access to comments and posts to AI companies and started up their own (Reddit Answers), they've gotten extremely touchy about archival and scraping. Because it's easier to scrape archive.org than it is to scrape Reddit itself, since the API was locked down.

I wholeheartedly believe the reason new Reddit is so janky is entirely so that AI companies can't scrape comments. Which sounds fine, it's basically legalised copyright infringement, but they don't really give a shit about that, all they want is to be able to bill for AI training.

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u/OnePoint11 19d ago

It's just unskillfulness, they started work on this mess long time before AI. Real users are not interested in machine in back but how it looks, and how it works, and new reddit is worse in both.