Will you sign up for an account?

Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.

Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who appends “reddit” to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to “Old Reddit.”

There’s no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you’re logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren’t logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app’s incognito mode.

Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user’s identity — “Honestly, we don’t want to know” — just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver “more relevant ads.”

“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”

Reddit is making this announcement alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today. Search traffic was “down meaningfully” in Q3, Huffman says in the company’s shareholder letter, with logged-out traffic and web traffic being the most heavily impacted. “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” Huffman says.

However, Huffman notes that app and logged-in daily active unique users make up “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”

  • lasta ( lasta@piefed.world ) English
    11·
    8 hours ago

    It’s been a series of greed-motivated decisions that have made Reddit a worse experience for users over the last few years:

    • API changes that killed off third-party apps
    • Allowing AI training on its content
    • Hidden/curated profile nonsense (yes, I know it’s easily bypassed)
    • Limiting access to old.reddit
    • Removal of r/all
    • Age verification
    • Killing RSS feeds

    Now requiring log-in to view all content and talks of paywalling some subreddits (put on hold, but I wouldn’t put it past them to bring it up again).

    Despite Reddit being on the decline for a while now, I would browse without being logged in or through Redlib because there is still interesting and helpful information and niche communities to be found there. I recently noticed some subreddits were not appearing among search results on Redlib and not being able to access posts that appear on its Redlib’s front page either. I hope there will be a workaround.

    • supersquirrel ( supersquirrel@lemmy.ca ) English
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Even if there isn’t a huge wave immediately, by continuing to engage here even if the communities we have here are small, we prove that it is possible to do what we are doing without centralized bigtech corporations, and longterm/medium that is an existential attack on their legitimacy (as it should be).

      We just have to keep this place going to win, we don’t have to grow virally or convince everyone to move here instead of migrating to Yet Another Corporate Social Media Silo… we have to establish thorough proof over a significant stretch of time that the narratives out of Silicon Valley about what social media is and how the only way to make it “sustainable” is profit and surveillance capitalism are delusional and offbase narratives. We prove that a little bit every moment we spend here…

      Corporate Social Media must prove the rule that Bigtech Corps are needed to run social media, we have a much easier job, we must only prove the exception while demonstrating we are only one possible alternative of many.

      • Captainvaqina ( Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works ) English
        3·
        14 hours ago

        Same for me. I refused right then and will continue to do so, forever. My continued authentic human expressions will never again contribute to their brazen intellectual theft.

        I’m mostly curious what will happen if they lock out search engine queries from even seeing the page containing the answer - that was no doubt given by a helpful human user; benevolently and without compensation I might add.

        Will they keep the human created and subsequently stolen important information hostage unless the reconnaissance targets (you and I) are forced to log in?

        • artyom ( artyom@piefed.social ) English
          2·
          6 hours ago

          I’m mostly curious what will happen if they lock out search engine queries from even seeing the page containing the answer

          Very possible they expect outsiders to use the site through LLMs or otherwise pay for the privilege of access to community-generated content.

  • galacticworm ( galacticworm@piefed.social ) English
    3·
    13 hours ago

    Deleted my account a couple of years ago when I moved to Lemmy, but I do still find handy info without login via Google every now and again… when this happens, I hope the links are stripped from Google and not left as links to a ‘please login’ page.

    I seem to remember Google giving them a bucket of money, so I am guessing not

    • Sina ( Sina@beehaw.org ) English
      2·
      11 hours ago

      I think not much chance of that. Users that post there are unaffected & lemmy rarely shows up in search results…

      This will make Google / DDG searches less useful than before, so even more people will use Ai instead of search.

      In fact I would argue that this is a really bad business decision on Reddit’s part. I can totally see them come around & revert it in a couple of months.

    • zen ( zen@lemmy.zip ) OPEnglish
      17·
      20 hours ago

      I’ve posted a few links to Lemmy on the Reddit discussion. Don’t want to obviously overwhelm the moderators here, but hopefully we get a few new users.

      • Gate F-Con2 ( g8phcon2@k.fe.derate.me ) 
        3·
        20 hours ago

        @zen@lemmy.zip I hope so. The “don’t have to login” part though, while technically possible, I suspect will be less usable here, just due to nature of federation (and, while I think its a good thing IRL, discovery isn’t helped that some of the biggest instances have blocked each other).

    • DdCno1 ( DdCno1@beehaw.org ) English
      4·
      20 hours ago

      Unlikely. Reddit is too big and mainstream and the lemmyverse too small, too confusing - and too far-left politically, to be frank. Most of it is a ghost town. I also doubt it would be able to withstand a sudden massive influx of users from both a technical and organizational perspective.

        • DdCno1 ( DdCno1@beehaw.org ) English
          5·
          17 hours ago

          34k is absolutely nothing for an entire network of communities. I used to mod for a stagnating/declining gaming forum that was just in a single language (not English) and much larger than that - and even it felt quite small.

          Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of users on any online community are near permanent lurkers and do not contribute with even brief comments - or even by voting. What matter is how many people are actually submitting links, writing posts and comments.

          Look at this community: It’s the largest “general” technology community on the lemmyverse (I think), yet there are just a small handful of people posting, often days between posts and on average (going by the last three pages of submissions), tons of posts where not even a single user is commenting. Anything that isn’t controversial and does get comments is usually in the 3 to 7 comments range.

          That’s a ghost town. I can practically see tumbleweed slowly rolling across the page. My perception might be a little skewed though, because the way I interact with posts is by annoyingly inserting myself into existing conversations or at least replying to unanswered comments that already exist, so I tend to avoid empty posts.

          Part of this emptiness is certainly due to forums in general going the way of the dodo (thanks to Facebook, twitter, instagram and especially Discord, as awful as all of these are at replacing conventional forums) and part of it is due to reddit having absorbed much of the user base that is still interested in forums. My hypothesis is that reddit losing users due to ongoing enshittification would just result in the overwhelming majority of them ending spread out across the aforementioned services instead of ending up here. I’m terrible at predicting things though, but the big reddit exodus (or whatever actually materialized) largely skipped the lemmyverse in the past and I don’t think conditions have changed enough for anything different to happen this time, should this recent boneheaded decision by reddit’s management result in fewer people using their site.

        • DdCno1 ( DdCno1@beehaw.org ) English
          5·
          19 hours ago

          The lemmyverse is center-right in your opinion? Or did you misread and thought I meant reddit with that? Sorry if I caused any confusion.

          • Maeve ( Maeve@kbin.earth ) 
            4·
            19 hours ago

            Obama was right of Nixon. Nixon gave us the EPA and wanted universal health, until Kaiser businessmen made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

            • DdCno1 ( DdCno1@beehaw.org ) English
              3·
              17 hours ago

              You might want to look up how certain political positions switched from being supported by both sides of the aisle to becoming wedge issues. Obama was most certainly not right of Nixon. That’s just absurd.

              To get back to my question though, I don’t feel like you answered it clearly. Does your reply mean - since Obama was and still is very popular on reddit - that the site is center-right from your point of view? From a European perspective this might be the case, but not in the way the current American political spectrum is organized. The political spectrum is not an absolute thing, but instead applies to the current reality in a certain place and the relationship of its participants to one another.

              There’s also the issue that people who are politically further away from the center perceiving those that are closer to it as more extreme than they actually are, e.g. a far-right person might consider a moderate to be far left and a moderately left-wing person might consider a centrist to be center-right.

            • SolacefromSilence ( SolacefromSilence@fedia.io ) 
              2·
              18 hours ago

              Nixon signed those things into law with a (unbelievable now) left wing Democrat majority in the Senate and House that would have passed it over his veto. He could either get on board and claim some semblance of credit or weakly resist.