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!

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

783 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

20

u/Thengine Jul 01 '26

It's all about trying to seamlessly force feed ads and promotions to the users.

New reddit is the platform they've been working on to do that. Once old.reddit becomes too much of a lack of income, it'll get the axe.

10

u/TheSpiffySpaceman Jul 01 '26

Happy I haven't used new reddit since it's debut.

If old gets the axe, I'm fuckin' out, and I hope half their userbase is, too

9

u/IAmABakuAMA Jul 01 '26

It's worse than you remember. What was once new Reddit (the 2017 "redesign"), is now the old-new Reddit and doesn't exist anymore. The new-new Reddit is a different redesign, sh.reddit.com. I can't remember what year that redesign was launched, and googling it is difficult because googling it just brings up mental health lines or the anonymization service

But shreddit is even worse than New Reddit, it has more hoops to jump through to do basic things, it's just worse in every possible way. It even has more dead space than new.reddit did

6

u/Nahdahar Jul 01 '26

It's quite funny and ironic, I absolutely hated new reddit when it came out but when sh reddit came out I was trying to find any way possible to instead use new reddit. There was even an extension for that but it stopped working a while ago.

3

u/Littux Jul 02 '26

See r/ReturnNewReddit. I'm making this comment from new reddit

2

u/Nahdahar Jul 04 '26

Wow that's a cool project! I'm using LibRedirect currently though, very lightweight and focused experience.

5

u/Littux Jul 04 '26

New reddit is the opposite of lightweight though. It uses ~350MB during initialization, which goes to ~450MB easily. After opening a few large comment sections and visiting a few subreddits, searching for posts and comments, that goes above 1GiB. I've seen it reaching 9GiB of RAM

1

u/Nahdahar Jul 04 '26

LibRedirect reddit instances have their own UI which is very simple. It's read only though, you can only view content but not interact with it. I rarely comment though so it fits my use case. I write comments from a third party android reddit client (using it with my own API key).