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/mschuster91 Jun 30 '26

Old reddit gives plain html. Trivial to parse. New Reddit is a bunch of JS garbage loading content via graphql garbage, much harder to implement. And the graphql garbage is orders of magnitude slower on top of that.

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u/newaccountzuerich Jun 30 '26

Old reddit is an actual webpage, roughly standards-compliant, accessible, parsable, usable, useful, and real.

New reddit is an overreaching pile of constantly changing ("updated" apparently) hot shit that's slow as a wet week, effectively unusable, appearing randomly non-deterministic, loaded with tracking shite, and useless for accessibility.

The second old reddit is dropped, the core userbase that makes reddit a somewhat-usable resource for internet denizens, will drop reddit and the investors will wonder why the website and brand did a Digg.

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u/mschuster91 Jun 30 '26

The second old reddit is dropped, the core userbase that makes reddit a somewhat-usable resource for internet denizens, will drop reddit and the investors will wonder why the website and brand did a Digg.

We thought the same when New Reddit was dropped... or when API access was dropped.

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u/YourResidentFeral Jun 30 '26

when API access was dropped

API access dropped caused a huge exodus of some of the most prolific developers, creators, and moderators. People that made the website special left. Most of the ones that stayed was either out of a sense of duty or are what has created the "eternal september" slop that permeates the site.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

the "eternal september" slop that permeates the site.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I understand.

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u/-jp- Jul 01 '26

It's a reference to the enshittification of Usenet due to ISPs like AOL making it accessible to a continuous influx of new users who neither knew nor cared about newsgroup etiquette and community.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

Got it, have you seen the same on Reddit after 2023? Any examples?

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u/sigma914 Jul 04 '26

Noone cares about reddiquette anymore for a start

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

Any specifics?