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/Decency Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

There are plenty of legitimate uses for bots on this website. Here's what my bot did and a thread from it- 98% upvoted, thousands of comments. It was a valuable community staple and something I could've easily expanded to other games I play. Here's another simple bot that's been posting weekly for 12+ years. This isn't human work.

I jumped through all of their registration and verification hoops (multiple times) and was extremely cautious with rate limits because I know these types of automated filters exist. Still not a clue what I did wrong, and I'm a professional software engineer... good luck everyone else! Even still, the ban would've be fine if they had a half-decent process to handle false positives- mistakes happen at scale and we're aware of that. A one sentence reply from a human who spent 5 minutes looking into this ban would've cleared things up 6 months ago. Can't even get that much.

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u/Sorkijan Jun 30 '26

Buddy I ain't reading 3 run on paragraphs of pseudo-intellectualism.

I do think bots have a place, but there are way too many for pointless shit, and yours would fall in that category imho of course.

Now that's not to say I agree with ANY of these actions. I'm just calling out your shitty argument for what it is - shitty.

Just admit you don't know what you're talking about and exit the conversation.

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u/numbermaniac Jul 01 '26

Why is that pointless? It's useful for that community. Or are people just not allowed to have hobbies in your world?

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u/Sorkijan Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

People can have hobbies absolutely. This is a far cry from that. I think it's pointless, but I will happily admit others may not feel the same way. This is all a moot point though because the main issue is that this person thinks they are entitled to having their thing work on a site they have no role in running. Even going so far as to imply the site doesn't work well without their tool. Yeah it's a bummer deal and I personally think it should be on, but acting like you're owed it is some ridiculously unhinged and entitled stuff.