I stopped using reddit once they required logins for old reddit.
But this genuinely seems like a terrible business decision. Requiring logins just to see content has to be bad for growth. I feel like most people I know just hit the back button anytime a website throws up a modal and says "login to continue".
Nah this makes sense. Reddit has been investing in their app significantly and it’s paid dividends in their user metrics. It’s not the kind of thing that would appeal to people who go on tildes, but people who go on tildes aren’t a very numerous nor lucrative market, so it doesn’t really matter.
It also puts a lot of pressure on search engines. Google’s AI answer is heavily dependent on Reddit data. The more Reddit locks down their data, the more they have search engines like Google over a barrel. I suspect the next time their deal renews it will be very much more expensive for Google.
but people who go on tildes aren’t a very numerous nor lucrative market, so it doesn’t really matter.
The most recent numbers I can find, though. is that many people do in fact visit reddit without an account. I imagine that is a non-trivial amount of ad revenue.
Google’s AI answer is heavily dependent on Reddit data
Google still has an 8 figure deal with reddit. Maybe Claude and OpenAI will feel it, but this is actually a huge win for Gemini.
Even then, this probably just turns into a game of cat and mouse with how to scrape reddit. If 30 year legacy suites like adobe are being reverse compiled, some website that isn't trivially indexable isn't going to be be a real moat.
I suspect the next time their deal renews it will be very much more expensive for Google.
Who knows? Google can do the above and join the scrape race, or they can argue against how AI-ridden the site is and argue terms down.
And it makes using some things especially difficult. After reddit did the api stuff that killed phone apps I quite successfully quit using it unless it popped up on google. I moved my brainless scrolling activity to twitter.
TWICE they pulled some shit to try to claim I was a robot and that I had to give them my face or an ID. The first time I did some nonsense where I made hand signals. That let me back in for like 2 more months but that is no longer an option. I've had my same twitter account since 2009 and now I can't log in.
Which means I can't functionally use the site. I have to use nitter instances if I want to see anything beyond the initial post and a low res version of the picture on the post. All while twitter, like reddit now, is mostly bots anyway that are able to post scott free. It's beyond stupid.
Yeah, I don't get this one. Everything else has been shitty for people, but good for the next quarter. This one seems like... a very bad idea? Won't that just kill traffic?
I think you're right, but... they're not. Everyone around me knows what those three things are. I don't think there's a single non tech person at the office I work at who knows what Reddit is.
I still use old reddit, I go 3 pages deep before it becomes cumbersome to browse and I decide thats enough internet for me today. They took away my third party app so I use old Reddit on a mobile browser like a total freak.
I’ll still continue to use it long as it’s there. Ive seen the new Reddit and it just doesn’t look appetizing.
You can download it from normal app stores. It's allowed for disability accommodation, so it's probably safe. You can also still use the old apps, I believe with a free personal API key. Some people are still using rif because @talklittle is the man.
TL;DR: Are you ready for the pain of using a third party Reddit client in the year of our Luigi 2026?
Just today I was struck by how annoying it is to actually use Reddit. I have an allergy to advertisements, and I'll go to ridiculous lengths to satisfy this neurosis, and I just picked up my iPhone Duo (I promise this is relevant). So, because my pain needs to be good for something, I'm recounting my experience here.
Problem: I would like to browse reddit on occasion, mainly for images. Yes, this means mostly adult content, their collection is still very good (until they inevitably burn that Library of Alexandria to the ground out of sheer malice) but browsing it in the app is painful. It's also not optimised for the folding display, but I can deal with this.
Solution: The app that was sort of-kind of meant to work around this, Artemis, has been... deleted from the App Store. I dig up an old build through my App Store history, and I can download it. But by now, they've removed Reddit from that app entirely and only support Lemmy and Pixelfed. Next.
Solution 2: Use a different client. I don't mind paying, but I would like to avoid it since I don't really actively use Reddit anymore. Options here are Narwhal, which has no free tier at all, citing Reddit's insane API pricing for this. Dystopia is the only one on the App Store that is exempt from the general API ban, because of some technicality about accessibility rules. It works, surprisingly, but it has not been updated since the Biden administration. It's not great.
Solution side quest: Someone revived Apollo, the app that I was using before Rexit and who's subsequent banishment from Mount Reddit caused me to abandon the platform in the first place, as an open-source project you need to sideload! I can do that, I develop for the platform, so I clone the project, make some minor changes and slap it onto my new phone. Wow! It looks so pretty, and it even has a complete folding UI before the official app does!
Problem 2: You can't log into Reborn Apollo. You have to make an application on your Reddit account settings. I try that. Without an error message, it fails every time I try. I go to the GitHub to figure this out: Lo and behold, in their infinite wisdom Reddit has disabled this self-serve development portal (but god damn inexplicably, not removed it from the menu).
The official workaround? Download Dystopia and log in, then wait for the email that confirms you've connected an App to your Reddit account, copy the App ID (it's only ever shown in that email) out of the Email, paste it into Apollo and set the user agent to mimic Dystopias. And, finally, at last, it works.
Except I still can't see adult content, it just tells me that I need to use the official app for that. That's a lie, by the way, because Moderators get to still do that. Any moderator. So I create a burner subreddit, set it to private, give myself moderation permissions, and suddenly all the smut I could ever want arrives over my pirate radio API.
Like, come on, I get wanting to limit people's access to your platform if they don't make you money, but I've never seen a more user-hostile platform continue time and time again to saw off the only branch they're sitting on, this being their user base.
I was just thinking about Luigi because I got a $500 bill for some blood tests because my health insurance plan declared that they don't cover labs for diagnostic purposes.
Like.....how is the doctor supposed to make informed decisions without labs? What is the purpose of a $20 copy if I can't afford to have my doctor attempt to diagnose the reason I called the doctor? This entire joke of a healthcare system needs dismantled, the sooner the better.
I've never seen a more user-hostile platform continue time and time again to saw off the only branch they're sitting on, this being their user base
Why wouldn't they continue down this path? You've jumped through all these ridiculous hoops, so they get to keep almost all of their user base, they get to make life hard for companies trying to scrape them, and they push the normal people to use their official app and New Reddit - both of which almost certainly increase time-in-app (a slower, heavier app that doesn't pre-fetch means it takes ever-longer to burn through your feed), ad-impressions, and get them more analytics
You'll have to explain what the downside is to Reddit, not you. Some users will bail, but Reddit's apparently quite happy to trade their fickle, flighty, hard-to-monetize users for users that accept the restrictions Reddit's put in place while being way less likely to have any form of ad-block.
There's no reason for them not to, I understand this. But I do wish that, considering how many of their employees were active users, old r/reddit.com style redditors, they'd take the user experience a little more seriously.
How does anyone even use Reddit without an account? If I can't make it show me only the subreddits I follow and nothing else then I'm out. Not having an account and browsing the main page is like walking into a hive of scum and villainy, it resembles what I would expect to find on a teenagers social media account: nothing but trash.
My Reddit experience:
Firefox with Ublock Origin
old.reddit.com
Set to only show subreddits you are following and nothing else.
Any one of those stops working and I'm officially done. Mostly I'm using it for the local Country/Province/City subreddits and a few Literature subreddits also stuff like Askphysics, AskHistorians.
You can navigate to specific subs one-at-a-time, or bookmark a multi-reddit (e.g. /r/AskPhysics+AskHistorians will create a multi with posts from those 2 subs. Tildes doesn't seem to like the + but not sure how to format it in a way it likes).
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite as well, and the moment these things stop working my Reddit usage plummets even further.
The niche subs keep me around, but I could probably do without as all these small changes have made me use Reddit less and less over the years.
I debated getting Reddit is Fun up and running again using the patch and API key, but I also figured it would be better to not give myself that extra Reddit time and use it for reading instead.
I self-host a Redlib instance, which has been a wonderful way to browse un-enshittified reddit. Lately though, it's a constant headache to keep up with reddit's effort to break any access to the site that isn't via a logged-in account on reddit.com.
The Redlib community has done a great job coming up with fixes, and my instance is working well for now, but I worry the writing is on the wall. It's a shame because when it works, it's honestly great.
In certain jurisdictions, due to age verification laws, Reddit is one of the last websites where you can freely view porn without an account. Now if you want DIY advice, tech support, or to see boobs, you must login.
Huffman and reddit inc: let's sell access to our vast library of niche human knowledge and experiences to Google and OpenAI.
Also Huffman and reddit Inc: ever since we sold all our data Google and OpenAI, the amount of referrals to our website from Google have decreased dramatically.
Not surprised. not even Pikachu. Google took all the reddit data and used it to train AI, so where folks would've previously got their answer by clicking the top reddit search result (or just adding "reddit" to the search and clicking the actual top result), now they mostly read the Google AI result, which Google naturally features above the sponsored links, which are above the non-sponsored links (where the actually relevant human conversation exists, in forum threads, like reddit).
They sold their main asset to the folks who drove their traffic, then ask "where did our traffic go?!"
Short sighted in every way. And this latest development is just as blind. There was nothing wrong with the open model. They made money hand over fist and were generally liked by folks. As far as I can tell, this is enshittification eating the enshittifiers, who, in turn, see the only move forward as "poop more".
So I noticed the site doing this to me a couple weeks ago on specific subreddits but not others. I exclusively browse on my iPhone through safari and found that if you use the “hide distracting items” feature you can remove the 2 overlays that stop you from browsing. It is more tedious and has definitely cut down me going into the subs that require this work around, but somehow I am stubborn enough to just keep doing this.
I use my iPhone as well but I use Opera because it blocks a loooooot of reddit's BS like "promoted" posts and what not. But also I'm logged in and I use new Reddit, so I'm probably a bad use case. I actually do participate in a few niche subreddits that only have other communities on like... Instagram and the YouTube comments of my favorite podcast's episodes.
I user reddit fairly intermittently these days and when I do, I only ever go to specific subreddits for whatever I'm interested in at the moment. I like being logged in, because I do occasionally upvote and comment; usually just to help people out. I helped a guy fix his handheld the other day with a quick explanation.
I can't recall the last time I went to the frontpage, just to look at my subs.
I logged in to an old alt already for the times I end up back there. I don't vote/post/comment on it, but I decided I would rather do that than use new reddit. And I didn't want to log in with my main account because I don't want there to be any signal to them that "mods who left are returning" or something like that. I guess they might still be able to figure out it's "me" based on browser fingerprinting.
There isn't much motivation to move somewhere else when you can share a link and anyone can see it. If the people they try to share the link tell them they can't view it without an account they may be motivated to find another site with the info to share.
derekiscool | 11 hours ago
I stopped using reddit once they required logins for old reddit.
But this genuinely seems like a terrible business decision. Requiring logins just to see content has to be bad for growth. I feel like most people I know just hit the back button anytime a website throws up a modal and says "login to continue".
stu2b50 | 10 hours ago
Nah this makes sense. Reddit has been investing in their app significantly and it’s paid dividends in their user metrics. It’s not the kind of thing that would appeal to people who go on tildes, but people who go on tildes aren’t a very numerous nor lucrative market, so it doesn’t really matter.
It also puts a lot of pressure on search engines. Google’s AI answer is heavily dependent on Reddit data. The more Reddit locks down their data, the more they have search engines like Google over a barrel. I suspect the next time their deal renews it will be very much more expensive for Google.
raze2012 | 9 hours ago
The most recent numbers I can find, though. is that many people do in fact visit reddit without an account. I imagine that is a non-trivial amount of ad revenue.
Google still has an 8 figure deal with reddit. Maybe Claude and OpenAI will feel it, but this is actually a huge win for Gemini.
Even then, this probably just turns into a game of cat and mouse with how to scrape reddit. If 30 year legacy suites like adobe are being reverse compiled, some website that isn't trivially indexable isn't going to be be a real moat.
Who knows? Google can do the above and join the scrape race, or they can argue against how AI-ridden the site is and argue terms down.
tape | 11 hours ago
And it makes using some things especially difficult. After reddit did the api stuff that killed phone apps I quite successfully quit using it unless it popped up on google. I moved my brainless scrolling activity to twitter.
TWICE they pulled some shit to try to claim I was a robot and that I had to give them my face or an ID. The first time I did some nonsense where I made hand signals. That let me back in for like 2 more months but that is no longer an option. I've had my same twitter account since 2009 and now I can't log in.
Which means I can't functionally use the site. I have to use nitter instances if I want to see anything beyond the initial post and a low res version of the picture on the post. All while twitter, like reddit now, is mostly bots anyway that are able to post scott free. It's beyond stupid.
Raistlin | 10 hours ago
Yeah, I don't get this one. Everything else has been shitty for people, but good for the next quarter. This one seems like... a very bad idea? Won't that just kill traffic?
Lexinonymous | 10 hours ago
They're probably betting on the idea that they're as popular as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
Raistlin | 8 hours ago
I think you're right, but... they're not. Everyone around me knows what those three things are. I don't think there's a single non tech person at the office I work at who knows what Reddit is.
I'm really curious as to how this will go!
[OP] DefiantEmbassy | 11 hours ago
A follow-on to the previous announcement that old.reddit.com would be login gated, you'll now be required to be logged in to use "new" reddit.
vord | 11 hours ago
And just like that, what little relevance Reddit had before in my searches evaporates.
zoroa | 6 hours ago
God I wish Reddit had little relevance to my searches.
I haven't idly browsed the site since I joined Tildes, but goddam do I still end up there all the time when I'm searching on random information.
vord | 5 hours ago
Kagi, I downgrade reddit answers.
snake_case | 11 hours ago
I still use old reddit, I go 3 pages deep before it becomes cumbersome to browse and I decide thats enough internet for me today. They took away my third party app so I use old Reddit on a mobile browser like a total freak.
I’ll still continue to use it long as it’s there. Ive seen the new Reddit and it just doesn’t look appetizing.
moocow1452 | 11 hours ago
Hopefully Redreader's days as the last app to lurk on Reddit aren't numbered.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
updawg | 10 hours ago
You can download it from normal app stores. It's allowed for disability accommodation, so it's probably safe. You can also still use the old apps, I believe with a free personal API key. Some people are still using rif because @talklittle is the man.
Raistlin | 10 hours ago
shhh, don't tell them about it!
delphi | 11 hours ago
TL;DR: Are you ready for the pain of using a third party Reddit client in the year of our Luigi 2026?
Just today I was struck by how annoying it is to actually use Reddit. I have an allergy to advertisements, and I'll go to ridiculous lengths to satisfy this neurosis, and I just picked up my iPhone Duo (I promise this is relevant). So, because my pain needs to be good for something, I'm recounting my experience here.
Problem: I would like to browse reddit on occasion, mainly for images. Yes, this means mostly adult content, their collection is still very good (until they inevitably burn that Library of Alexandria to the ground out of sheer malice) but browsing it in the app is painful. It's also not optimised for the folding display, but I can deal with this.
Solution: The app that was sort of-kind of meant to work around this, Artemis, has been... deleted from the App Store. I dig up an old build through my App Store history, and I can download it. But by now, they've removed Reddit from that app entirely and only support Lemmy and Pixelfed. Next.
Solution 2: Use a different client. I don't mind paying, but I would like to avoid it since I don't really actively use Reddit anymore. Options here are Narwhal, which has no free tier at all, citing Reddit's insane API pricing for this. Dystopia is the only one on the App Store that is exempt from the general API ban, because of some technicality about accessibility rules. It works, surprisingly, but it has not been updated since the Biden administration. It's not great.
Solution side quest: Someone revived Apollo, the app that I was using before Rexit and who's subsequent banishment from Mount Reddit caused me to abandon the platform in the first place, as an open-source project you need to sideload! I can do that, I develop for the platform, so I clone the project, make some minor changes and slap it onto my new phone. Wow! It looks so pretty, and it even has a complete folding UI before the official app does!
Problem 2: You can't log into Reborn Apollo. You have to make an application on your Reddit account settings. I try that. Without an error message, it fails every time I try. I go to the GitHub to figure this out: Lo and behold, in their infinite wisdom Reddit has disabled this self-serve development portal (but god damn inexplicably, not removed it from the menu).
The official workaround? Download Dystopia and log in, then wait for the email that confirms you've connected an App to your Reddit account, copy the App ID (it's only ever shown in that email) out of the Email, paste it into Apollo and set the user agent to mimic Dystopias. And, finally, at last, it works.
Except I still can't see adult content, it just tells me that I need to use the official app for that. That's a lie, by the way, because Moderators get to still do that. Any moderator. So I create a burner subreddit, set it to private, give myself moderation permissions, and suddenly all the smut I could ever want arrives over my pirate radio API.
Like, come on, I get wanting to limit people's access to your platform if they don't make you money, but I've never seen a more user-hostile platform continue time and time again to saw off the only branch they're sitting on, this being their user base.
vord | 9 hours ago
I was just thinking about Luigi because I got a $500 bill for some blood tests because my health insurance plan declared that they don't cover labs for diagnostic purposes.
Like.....how is the doctor supposed to make informed decisions without labs? What is the purpose of a $20 copy if I can't afford to have my doctor attempt to diagnose the reason I called the doctor? This entire joke of a healthcare system needs dismantled, the sooner the better.
DFGdanger | 8 hours ago
You should inform them that the $500 bill was discontinued in 1945.
xethos | 7 hours ago
Why wouldn't they continue down this path? You've jumped through all these ridiculous hoops, so they get to keep almost all of their user base, they get to make life hard for companies trying to scrape them, and they push the normal people to use their official app and New Reddit - both of which almost certainly increase time-in-app (a slower, heavier app that doesn't pre-fetch means it takes ever-longer to burn through your feed), ad-impressions, and get them more analytics
You'll have to explain what the downside is to Reddit, not you. Some users will bail, but Reddit's apparently quite happy to trade their fickle, flighty, hard-to-monetize users for users that accept the restrictions Reddit's put in place while being way less likely to have any form of ad-block.
delphi | 6 hours ago
There's no reason for them not to, I understand this. But I do wish that, considering how many of their employees were active users, old r/reddit.com style redditors, they'd take the user experience a little more seriously.
Caelum | 7 hours ago
Does Dystopia work without logging in? I seem to be getting a 403.
delphi | 7 hours ago
If you tap that 403 error, it just dismisses it and kind of works sometimes!
baseballlover723 | 10 hours ago
Welp, I think this pushes me to the point of no return. Everything I liked about reddit in the past is either gone already, or on the chopping block.
Will probably grab a beer and just enjoy what's left until the wheels fall off.
plutonic | 8 hours ago
How does anyone even use Reddit without an account? If I can't make it show me only the subreddits I follow and nothing else then I'm out. Not having an account and browsing the main page is like walking into a hive of scum and villainy, it resembles what I would expect to find on a teenagers social media account: nothing but trash.
My Reddit experience:
Firefox with Ublock Origin
old.reddit.com
Set to only show subreddits you are following and nothing else.
Any one of those stops working and I'm officially done. Mostly I'm using it for the local Country/Province/City subreddits and a few Literature subreddits also stuff like Askphysics, AskHistorians.
[OP] DefiantEmbassy | 8 hours ago
Personally, I just hit a few subreddits I know about and nothing else. /r/all, /r/popular & whatever monstrosity of a “For You” feed is just gross.
DFGdanger | 8 hours ago
You can navigate to specific subs one-at-a-time, or bookmark a multi-reddit (e.g. /r/AskPhysics+AskHistorians will create a multi with posts from those 2 subs. Tildes doesn't seem to like the + but not sure how to format it in a way it likes).
pekt | 7 hours ago
I use Reddit Enhancement Suite as well, and the moment these things stop working my Reddit usage plummets even further.
The niche subs keep me around, but I could probably do without as all these small changes have made me use Reddit less and less over the years.
I debated getting Reddit is Fun up and running again using the patch and API key, but I also figured it would be better to not give myself that extra Reddit time and use it for reading instead.
WhistlePig | 9 hours ago
I self-host a Redlib instance, which has been a wonderful way to browse un-enshittified reddit. Lately though, it's a constant headache to keep up with reddit's effort to break any access to the site that isn't via a logged-in account on reddit.com.
The Redlib community has done a great job coming up with fixes, and my instance is working well for now, but I worry the writing is on the wall. It's a shame because when it works, it's honestly great.
ogre | 9 hours ago
In certain jurisdictions, due to age verification laws, Reddit is one of the last websites where you can freely view porn without an account. Now if you want DIY advice, tech support, or to see boobs, you must login.
ingannilo | 7 hours ago
Huffman and reddit inc: let's sell access to our vast library of niche human knowledge and experiences to Google and OpenAI.
Also Huffman and reddit Inc: ever since we sold all our data Google and OpenAI, the amount of referrals to our website from Google have decreased dramatically.
Not surprised. not even Pikachu. Google took all the reddit data and used it to train AI, so where folks would've previously got their answer by clicking the top reddit search result (or just adding "reddit" to the search and clicking the actual top result), now they mostly read the Google AI result, which Google naturally features above the sponsored links, which are above the non-sponsored links (where the actually relevant human conversation exists, in forum threads, like reddit).
They sold their main asset to the folks who drove their traffic, then ask "where did our traffic go?!"
Short sighted in every way. And this latest development is just as blind. There was nothing wrong with the open model. They made money hand over fist and were generally liked by folks. As far as I can tell, this is enshittification eating the enshittifiers, who, in turn, see the only move forward as "poop more".
tyrny | 9 hours ago
So I noticed the site doing this to me a couple weeks ago on specific subreddits but not others. I exclusively browse on my iPhone through safari and found that if you use the “hide distracting items” feature you can remove the 2 overlays that stop you from browsing. It is more tedious and has definitely cut down me going into the subs that require this work around, but somehow I am stubborn enough to just keep doing this.
Narry | 5 hours ago
I use my iPhone as well but I use Opera because it blocks a loooooot of reddit's BS like "promoted" posts and what not. But also I'm logged in and I use new Reddit, so I'm probably a bad use case. I actually do participate in a few niche subreddits that only have other communities on like... Instagram and the YouTube comments of my favorite podcast's episodes.
BeardyHat | 8 hours ago
I guess I'll say: This doesn't really bother me.
I user reddit fairly intermittently these days and when I do, I only ever go to specific subreddits for whatever I'm interested in at the moment. I like being logged in, because I do occasionally upvote and comment; usually just to help people out. I helped a guy fix his handheld the other day with a quick explanation.
I can't recall the last time I went to the frontpage, just to look at my subs.
DFGdanger | 7 hours ago
I logged in to an old alt already for the times I end up back there. I don't vote/post/comment on it, but I decided I would rather do that than use new reddit. And I didn't want to log in with my main account because I don't want there to be any signal to them that "mods who left are returning" or something like that. I guess they might still be able to figure out it's "me" based on browser fingerprinting.
Nemoder | 11 hours ago
Cool, now everyone can stop sharing reddit links and we can move on to better sites.
raze2012 | 9 hours ago
been asking for that for 5 years now. We'll see if this is the moment.
Nemoder | 7 hours ago
There isn't much motivation to move somewhere else when you can share a link and anyone can see it. If the people they try to share the link tell them they can't view it without an account they may be motivated to find another site with the info to share.
Goodtoknow | 3 hours ago
The irony I couldn't read this article without a paid subscription and sign in from the Verge
https://web.archive.org/web/20261029214855/https://www.theverge.com/tech/1022571/reddit-login-requirement-q3-2026-earnings