Logged-out Old Reddit access is “significant source of abusive scraping."

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.

    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I believe it still relies on Reddit’s APi however, the token used is regularly refreshed to circumvent their rate limiting.

      OAuth token spoofing: To circumvent rate limits imposed by Reddit, OAuth token spoofing is used to mimick the most common iOS and Android clients. While spoofing both iOS and Android clients was explored, only the Android client was chosen due to content restrictions when using an anonymous iOS client.

      Token refreshing: The authentication token is refreshed every 24 hours, emulating the behavior of the official Android app.

      HTTP header mimicking: Efforts are made to send along as many of the official app’s headers as possible to reduce the likelihood of Reddit’s crackdown on Redlib’s requests.