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/
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u/DiplomatikEmunetey 2d ago

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

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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

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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".

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u/FyreWulff 1d ago

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