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.

  • elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    11·
    8 days ago

    Out of school? Kind of. I wrote my first programs on a PDP 11 on a TTY. An actual perforated paper, daisy wheel TTY. No CRT. I was an admin of a Wang VS100 in the late 80’s. Later I was a systems Manager at a small campus, and admin’d one of the servers myself, in the gopher/usenet era. My first browser was mosaic (Or was it Lynx? can’t remember), and I coded my first website in HTML, no version number, HTML. Last time I bothered to look, my reddit account was 17 years old, and that was my second acount, I lost the password to my first, older account. So yeah, I was out of school. I do look younger than I am.

    • edible_funk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      8 days ago

      Well I certainly feel older after reading all that garbage. Feel better about yourself now? Might wanna get your memory checked then since you’ve clearly forgotten that reddit predates doomscrolling. It’s absolutely that now, but for nearly a decade it was just a user driven content aggregator forum. Doomscrolling wasn’t a thing. Infinite feeds weren’t a thing. Prior to Cambridge analytica rage engagement feed algorithms weren’t commonplace. I’m not sure why you’re insisting it was always doomscrolling, all of that kicked up from basically nothing into high gear during Trump’s first term.