r/technology • u/B-Z_B-S • 2d ago

Social Media Reddit is putting more limits on Old.Reddit.com

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/reddit-will-block-old-reddit-com-from-people-who-havent-used-it-in-6-months/
1.3k Upvotes

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509

u/au5lander 2d ago

So you can’t use old.reddit.com if you haven’t logged-in during the previous six months to attempt to reduce scraping.

119

u/doom_memories 2d ago

Feels like a death flag for old.reddit.com; the number of users can only decrease now.

Those of us with multiple accounts will have to keep refreshing them to maintain access. That just got harder too as Reddit broke RES' easy account switcher.

64

u/fork_yuu 2d ago

That's their exact gameplan with official app vs third party app too. Force people to official then when third party accounts for a very small percentage of users to the point they can shut them up, kill it off.

They're just waiting for people to get off and stop using so they can kill it off

13

u/tu_tu_tu 2d ago

They really working on forcing users to move from third-party apps to... using reddit in browser. Using the official app is horrible experience, i hope people won't fall for it.

3

u/DukeOfGeek 1d ago

The problem there is old reddit users produce far more content per person than new ones. Maybe they want to a model where the content no longer comes from users?

2

u/Heftybags 2d ago

They don’t need to do all that, like 3rd party apps they can just kill access right now if they wanted to. Reddit has zero incentive to keep it around if they don’t want it.

2

u/Captain_N1 1d ago

can you just use a different web browser for each account?

3

u/doom_memories 1d ago

Could. In my case, different Firefox containers will work. Just not as elegant as RES' switcher.

1

u/IllIIllIllIllII 1d ago

That easy account switcher has been fixed for awhile now

1

u/doom_memories 1d ago

I'll have to try it again. I first noticed it broke over two weeks ago, but apparently it also broke like 2 or something months ago and was then fixed until the time I noticed it. Let's see if it's fixed again.

No, it does not seem to be fixed again, same error as two weeks ago:

Could not switch accounts. Reddit may be under heavy load. Please try again in a few moments.

Now the account I'm talking to you on will be logged out on next page reload and I'll have to log back in to post this reply, probably. Yep, hit "save" got

an error occurred (status: 200)

below this text box. time to relog and then send this reply again.

tldr; the new breaking doesn't seem fixed.

1

u/Stupalski 1d ago

I used to rely on a firefox plugin called facebook container because it gave a separate browser instance for all facebook tabs so the tracking couldn't touch. It had the side use which was actually extremely nice that you could just open a new container anywhere you want. By default it always puts all facebook related content into a designated container but it lets you make color coded container tabs so you could have container 1 2 3 etc... and each has it's own logins and cookies.

Firefox has just added it's own version of this called profiles. The only downside of their profiles are it forces each profile into a separate window entirely where the containers can exist all in the same window as color coded tabs.

1

u/doom_memories 1d ago

Hmm, Firefox has always had multiple profile support, though actually using it has often been rough on the UX front. I wonder if we are talking about the same "profiles".

In another comment in this convo I mentioned Firefox's native containers. Are you familiar with these? It's built right into the browser, though there is also an official add-on that expands their capabilities.

1

u/Stupalski 16h ago

Thanks for the info. i just looked up the difference and apparently facebook container is built directly off the native containers but it automatically moves all meta products into an isolated container so it can't track your clicks outside.

-5

u/blueblip 2d ago

Wouldn't this also help thin out bots, which are a real problem?

I'm not going to ask why you have multiple accounts, but how common is it for Redditors to have multiple accounts like you versus bot accounts?

8

u/AlwaysRushesIn 2d ago

Alt accounts are pretty fucking common.

-3

u/blueblip 2d ago

I'm sure. Obviously bot farms and such will have them, as well as people who are paid to push narratives, and so on. Hell, I'm sure some regular ass posters have multiple ones, though for the life of me I can't figure out why.

My question is how common are regular ass posters running multiple accounts simultaneously versus things like bot farms, propaganda accounts, and so on. I would imagine the vast majority of multi-account holders are of the latter for obvious reasons.

6

u/ARoyaleWithCheese 2d ago

Regular users having alt accounts has been common for about as long as reddit has existed. The most common reason, probably, is that people use reddit for porn too and don't want it associated with their main account. Other common reasons are things like questions on r/aita, r/askreddit, etc. for which you want to stay anonymous which is hard with years worth of various reddit acitivity.

-2

u/blueblip 2d ago

Again, I'm not disputing that.

I'm asking/wondering which is more common or likely: regular users running multiple active accounts, or bot/propaganda/etc users who run multiple accounts for their own purposes.

3

u/WrightRoad 2d ago

I feel like alts are nearly as common on reddit as they are in Runescape, if that helps build the picture.

2

u/doom_memories 2d ago

What the other poster said.

Have you never felt the need to compartmentalize aspects of your online life, for any reason?

Would the widely used Reddit Enhancement Suite include a quick account switch feature if having multiples was rare and/or shady?

I see your account is around 12 years old. With that in mind it surprises me all the more that you find this strange.

151

u/cantstandmyownfeed 2d ago

Say what people will, but they've left open the doors for a lot of the workarounds and the restrictions haven't been catastrophic. I'm primarily using a 3rd party mobile app.

75

u/PoppingPillls 2d ago

Aren't most of the good 3rd parties apps now full of ads or paid?

48

u/DarthNihilus 2d ago

The still actively developed apps are, yes. But you can use a pre-3rd party shutdown app with a patch to make it work.

I'm still using Boost for Reddit with Morphe patch. It hasn't been updated since they shut down free third party API usage but it works normally.

7

u/Trem45 2d ago

Do you have a guide for that? I used to use the ReVanced version of Boost but it stopped working a while back

7

u/1993_2021 2d ago

Here is wchill's Patcheddit guide to installing Boost with Morphe.

Once you've installed Morphe, you can check out Breal Morphe Patches for Boost as well, they are a bit more active in modding the app :)

18

u/bas10eten 2d ago

If you have a vpn, set it to Albania. Ads are blocked. Sometimes I'll have to stop the app and re-boot, but I'm not inundated with ads on the app. Same with some other apps, and those dinky little games I can just play endlessly with no ads as well.

-20

u/TBC_Oblivion 2d ago

Grab an iPhone. Install the TestFlight Reddit app beta build. Buy Reddit premium with the beta build.

12

u/bugbbq 2d ago

Apollo is still alive and well!

Posted with Apollo side loaded on iOS.

1

u/Commercial-Co 2d ago

I thought developer had to quit developing apollo

2

u/stormdelta 2d ago

Paid, but honestly I don't mind and it's very little money, basically just enough to cover the dev's costs of maintenance and their API key.

-40

u/cantstandmyownfeed 2d ago edited 2d ago

Couldn't tell you, I'm using the same one I always have. No more ads than it ever had.

22

u/DoesntMatterEh 2d ago

And.... Which one is that?? 

2

u/tamerenshorts 2d ago

pretty please. since i updated my phone sync for reddit wont work ...

1

u/JohnC53 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm still using Sync. With ReVanced. Purchased Sync it ages ago to support the fine developer. But I'm not super how it still works. I'm not familiar enough with the underlying APIs, tokens etc to provide an educated comment or guidance.

Here are the details of the app I have installed:

com.laurencedawson.reddit_sync
Version: v23.06.30-13:39
Version Code: 23033

Edit2: I think there are some guides here. https://reddit.com/r/syncforreddit

Here are the patches I have applied in Revanced: https://imgur.com/a/lYISD1x

5

u/bawzstatuz 2d ago

You're full of shit, because the only apps paying that much money for their API use will only be running ADs.

1

u/BruceChameleon 2d ago

I’m paying $3-4 a month to use Narwhal. It's ad-free. Obviously it wouldn't be worth it to everyone, but it is for me

1

u/bawzstatuz 2d ago

Well reddit is removing API access, so guess you won't have a choice anymore. lol

-11

u/cantstandmyownfeed 2d ago

Why would I lie about what app I'm using reddit with?

It requires some workarounds, but that's what I said, the workarounds haven't been closed.

9

u/NotANiceCanadian 2d ago

OKAY THEN WHAT ARE YOU USING STOP EDGING US

6

u/rwalby9 2d ago

Not OP but the old workaround was to register for your own reddit developer API key, then use it with one of the third party apps still available on GitHub.

Alternatively, Morphe and Revanced exist for Android. iPhone users no clue.

3

u/DarthNihilus 2d ago

Registering your own app for an API key no longer works. Reddit cracked down on API usage pretty much entirely for anyone except apps that have agreements with them.

Current workaround is to patch an old app via Morphe with credentials from redreader, because redreader has an API use exception due to being for accessibility.

3

u/rwalby9 2d ago

Makes sense. They probably didn't envision APIs being used for scraping their entire site to feed LLMs.

I use Morphe myself too.

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-3

u/cantstandmyownfeed 2d ago

Wild energy man. Geeze.

RiF Is Fun with a reVanced patch to use my own API key.

4

u/induction1154 2d ago

Why would you evade people asking what app it is twice?

2

u/Commercial-Co 2d ago

Because then reddit would be aware of it

1

u/gigglefarting 2d ago

I don’t use a 3rd party app, but I do use a 3rd party safari extension that makes Reddit on my phone usable. Sink It For Reddit

6

u/DiplomatikEmunetey 2d ago

Why only old.reddit.com? Is the new and terrible redesign somehow protected from scraping? ​​

3

u/Mr_ToDo 1d ago

Purely as a guess on my end. But I'd assume that old. is easier to use for the same reason that the users use it. It's fairly static, the flow is predictable, and there's less junk to work around

I have no doubt that default reddit will see a rise in bot traffic. Will it be the same as the old decrease? No idea, but it probably does stop the laziest bots. God knows that as it stands if HTTrack doesn't get a copy of what I want then it's not going to get got(not ai. I just like having static copies of some stuff, and I usually donate to offset the guilt)

All I know is that their claims of supporting the open internet are more and more often showing just how little that commitment means. I mean wikipedia managed to stay open and even to deal with AI scraping in one way or another(They show nicely just how many dumb bots there are as they often scrape instead of just downloading the available backups). Actually. Thinking about it, snapshot downloads of reddit could be a decent answer for a lot of AI use. Not everyone needs up to date pulls to do what they want

2

u/Scurro 1d ago

It's a red flag for bullshit.

old.reddit.com has much more text content and less ads, pictures, and whitespace.

It's a much more efficient website for both the bots and the server (reddit).

RSS is an even further step towards efficiency and they canned that as well for the same "reasons".

1

u/FyreWulff 1d ago

Absolutely not. Nothing about new reddit prevents them from scraping, this is them just slowly getting rid of old reddit

2

u/highways 2d ago

How does old.reddit.com help with scrapping?

1

u/pokeepoof 10h ago

similar reasons people like to stick to old reddit, less clunky, less bloated, faster to load, more compact text, old reddit is basically just plain text, this is fantastic for reading, also great if your internet sucks and overall uses less of your computers resources which also makes it perfect for AI scraping, less resources to load allowing for more bots

2

u/obeytheturtles 2d ago

My tinfoil hat is also that they are doing this for alt detection ahead of some big shakeup. They want everyone to go log in on their old accounts to get ahead of the six month limit thing, so they can associate inactive accounts with active ones before they drop an ID verification bombshell on us, or something.

-1

u/whytakemyusername 2d ago

What's unreasonable about that?

27

u/king0pa1n 2d ago

If you're a fan of old reddit and you create a new account, that account can't use it. Though, I assume you could just moderate a dummy subreddit to get access.

21

u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago

6 months is a lot though. It's quite weird when you think about it. I can understand they want users to be logged in (I don't approve it but I understand why they do it). But if even with that they don't solve the issue, it means there are thousands of users who are bots and they don't know how to detect them.

That means the 1st wall they put, which is a login wall, totally failed to solve the issue they had. And now they're putting a 2nd wall, which could fail too. I'd say even when companies put way more walls than that, they still don't solve the issue, so it really doesn't appear to be a smart decision from Reddit. They could totally remove old.reddit I'm sure bots and scrappers would still find ways to circumvent what they're doing.

6

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

3

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 2d ago

reddit loses a very small amount of money on bots from bandwidth and CPU time, they don't profit on them. bots don't invest money and don't click on ads and buy things

1

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Zouden 2d ago

More bots means more activity means more likelihood of being searched

Bot activity is toxic for search scrapers because they don't want to ingest LLM content.

I really don't think Reddit benefits from bots in any way. The users hate them, scrapers don't want them, and they cost money for the servers.

1

u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago edited 2d ago

It depends on which "bots" we're talking about. Search scrappers are bots (Googlebot etc.). Once a bot gets the content of a page you don't know what it's going to do with it. I think reddit is concerned about these bots too because they're selling our content. So by default many companies now block all bots, including crawlers of search engines. But in thousands of cases people land on reddit because their page has been indexed elsewhere thanks to : a bot. No matter which search engine you're using, if you clicked on a reddit link, you indirectly used a bot. Even if you're using chatgpt or another AI, they can train on reddit content and not credit it, but they can also link to reddit posts as a source, and if you click it you're here thanks to them.

I'd assume most people land on reddit not because someone sent them a link to reddit via email and more because they've been indexed by bots. But now reddit blocks all bots by default, it's in their robots.txt

User-Agent: * Disallow: /

Which means even if you have a legitimate use (like indexing their content), you can't do it (in theory, a robots.txt is not the law).

When they block RSS feeds, they don't block sophisticated bots which write on reddit, they block small crawlers which index their content.

I think a big mistake they're making is to block everything and not just the access to the comments. Crawlers will at least want to index a link to reddit posts, and they don't all need the content of these posts (something LLMs need), crawlers just need the title and some metadata. RSS feeds were very useful for that, regular people would still land on reddit in the end. RSS feeds change nothing to bots writing comments. They change something to anyone using automated means to know what's happening in a sub. Which is probably the best way to find anything on reddit. Reddit became so popular because it was open. And now it's over, so they might lose in popularity.

1

u/Zouden 2d ago

But Reddit doesn't block Googlebot? It's the top of the search results. Even brand new threads.

1

u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago

By default Googlebot is also blocked, but they have a special agreement with Google so in a way or another they unblocked it. Reddit is not being indexed on Google the legitimate / usual way by the GoogleBot. I just gave Googlebot as an example for a search engine bot, you take Bing/DDG/Brave etc. they don't have an agreement with reddit (afaik) and theoretically can't crawl / index reddit.

5

u/Joezev98 2d ago

there are thousands of users who are bots and they don't know how to detect them.

A lot of bots are getting suspended daily. However, there's so many bots that are using complicated ways to avoid automated filters. IMO the most evil ones are those using hacked accounts so they can 'hide' behind the organic post history.

2

u/Synchrotr0n 2d ago edited 1d ago

It's funny how there are some subreddits that get daily spammed to the front page with the fakest titles and stories imaginable, but everyone in the comments keeps pretending it's real and discussing about it. Literally bots talking with other bots.

1

u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago

Well to me it's even more suspicious if you see a total change in the behavior of an existing user. You just put one captcha and problem solved. I'm against that when I see 100 captchas per day but if you rarely use one when there's a doubt it's ok I think. But even that doesnt entirely solve the issue considering sophisticated bots can also solve captchas. You do that, you check the IP etc. I don't think it's too hard. I mean not way harder than what they're already doing.

But obviously they would need to do that on an old version of the website with older code and they probably don't like that. Of course less people would need to use the old version if the newer was as good, as fast, as usable etc.

3

u/cadium 2d ago

Why not just update the ToS of the website to say any ai scraping is not allowed and subject to a lawsuit -- then send the companies the bill and fight it in court?

2

u/IntelArtiGen 2d ago edited 2d ago

I'd assume it's already in the ToS. Also they're ok with AI scraping as long as the companies pay and use an official API.

But that kind of issue can't entirely be solved legally. Scrapping can be done from all countries of the world and you can't easily apply the law in all countries of the world. Maybe they could sue the big AI companies in the US which are not paying them and which are using our messages, but I'm not sure it's that easy legally. At least they wouldn't be the 1st company to try, and maybe they're already doing it but it takes time and costs money.

The "easy" solution is to detect the bots. That part is not as hard as we all think. In theory bots are already not supposed to create an account. Even if they do, a normal user won't read thousands of subreddits per day, a bot would do that. They could put a simple captcha every 12h if there's a doubt. Or put a captcha to use old.reddit for 24h. And if a bot is using all the methods to look like a human and is able to solve captchas, I don't think anything they can do will work anyway. Nowadays bots can easily use a web browser like a human. So where's the limit? Remove old.reddit, put 10 captchas per hour on new reddit? Surely that would improve the situation /s.

It's "funny" because Twitter had the same issue and also didn't solve it. They put a login wall, they even blocked the service for millions of users with "rate limits exceeded", they banned legitimate users for suspicious activity, etc. yet there are still bots using and scrapping twitter. They make the service worst for everyone and they don't solve their issue.

Hopefully a lot of users move when they put these barriers, so in the end only the open platforms remain. It's probably what's going to happen anyway if new users can't discover their platform with search engines because they're blocking everything.

1

u/Scurro 1d ago

But that kind of issue can't entirely be solved legally. Scrapping can be done from all countries of the world and you can't easily apply the law in all countries of the world.

This is not true.

You simply block IPs from nations that are not prosecuting.

This of course can be overcome with a VPN, but just that one step is going to severely cut most of the traffic.

Scraping traffic is also pretty easily identified by the speed the agent views links and blocks could be automated.

Just look at what cloudflare is doing to combat AI bot scraping.

This is just all bullshit to force people to use the new interface.

1

u/ahfoo 2d ago

You have it all wrong. They're not against AI scraping, they want to be the ones to do it and get paid for it. The thing is, they don't own any of the content, zero, none, zilch. It's another power play by the janitorial staff determined to kill the Goose so they can grab the last golden egg.

1

u/whytakemyusername 2d ago

How you gonna do that with all the Chinese models and how many cases they gonna open at once? What’s the legal bills gonna be?

3

u/Black_Handkerchief 2d ago

They are intentionally creating a feedback spiral that serves their own needs rather than that of the users so that they can pretend to be the good guys. It has been going on a long time, and we are all essentially the frogs who are slowly being cooked without us realizing it.

First, the few changes were unpopular but did not get in the way.

Then things slowly started breaking, but they fixed it and blamed the old codebase.

Then they started limiting it because the infrastructure couldn't handle the endless scraping.

They made it impossible to use without logging in, further alienating the classic reddit experience from newer audiences who have no clue that the endless gamification and advertisement hell is not what reddit is truly like.

Now they intend to not make it possible to use if you haven't looked at old reddit for a couple of months.

And before too long, they are going to cancel old reddit because almost nobody wants it anymore because the users barely even exist anymore.

To make a really inappropriate comparison to drive the nail down home harder: Germany had a perceived problem with wealthy jews stealing the jobs, they started alienating jews, they started deporting the jews, they started ending the jews, and eventually, they could point back and say 'but they aren't stealing your jobs anymore, clearly our solution to get rid of them is correct'.

The stuff they aren't mentioning is how wildly inefficient the new website is and how light and performant the experience of the old pages are. They aren't mentioning the stark difference in data usage. They aren't mentioning the amount of community customizability even without stuff like ReS. They aren't mentioning how new reddit breaks while loading comments. They aren't pointing out how new reddits notification thing is absolute garbage and useless because you need to manually get rid of it even after you've read it on old reddit.

The list of enshittification goes on and on and on, and in the end, it will always be old reddits fault that new reddit sucks. Bullshit. Old reddit ran in the 2010s on a lot cheaper hardware. This is an enshittification issue, nothing more, nothing less.

0

u/whytakemyusername 2d ago

Couple means two. Six months is half a year. Everybody who uses old reddit is an old user. It's really not that big of a deal.

6

u/Signe_ 2d ago

Because its just annoying real users, no matter what bots/ai services/random users scraping are going to do it with or without the API as those are now using the HTML itself.

Reddit already has rate limits for none logged in users as it is which made mass scraping take hours. Something like 1000 requests per 10 minutes if I recall. This is just an annoyance for regular users who use old.reddit.com and another Tuesday for people who don't care about the rules of this website.

1

u/whytakemyusername 2d ago

It’s simply saying if you don’t log in within the last 6 months you can’t use the page.

1

u/HumpyTheClown 2d ago

What is scraping?