posted in Technology

Reddit forces login to access old.reddit.com

As of a few minutes ago old.reddit.com now seems to requre logging in to access it.

Shame as it was still the best place to browse for info about some niche interests.

Edit: Seems like they might be testing the change as it is hit or miss at the moment.

Edit: Adding this to My flilters in uBlock Origin seems to fix the issue for the time being:

||reddit.com^$header=referer:

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
the logo of Reddit on a smartphone screenArs TechnicaReddit signals ominous upcoming "changes” for old.reddit.comReddit says the beloved site is used for some "bad behavior."

Replying to @⁨HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve moderated a subreddit for about 15 years now, it’s built up to ~40K members and ~100K visitors per week, ~1M views per month, and over 95-99% of that traffic is mobile (varies by the day). New Reddit (desktop) runs 0.5-3%, and old.reddit doesn’t even register in the bar graphs. Still, my shortcuts all go to old.reddit.com - and not just for moderation, but it’s also how I browse reddit.com.

If they cut off my old.reddit.com interface, I’ll likely abandon my moderator’s post - no telling what happens to that community after that happens.

en

Replying to @⁨cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works⁩

Before the IPO, close to 100% of old.reddit likely contributed. For submitting, the old.reddit interface had better options for the experienced user. It was faster and easier to submit complex longer comments and posts.

The interface isn’t that great for reading comments/post. The third party phone apps did it better.

Besides you had to have a tiny bit of experience with the platform to know how to find that setting. Not something most casual readers who hit the site via a search engine would know to do.

Since the IPO it’s likely mostly few old-timers checking the niche subs. Probably very little engagement. Honestly, it’s likely still around because of some critical tool for moderators or bots that would be extremely expensive to upgrade. Definitely not because they care about the user.

Replying to @⁨KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca⁩

There’s an interesting thing about scale… At 40K subscribers (collected over 15 years), my subreddit is pretty small niche. I tried duplicating it on the Digg reboot last year (yes, Digg sucked, sucks, and will continue to suck for the foreseeable future, but it was an informative experiment anyway)… because the niche is so narrow, and the Digg user base was so small, it never flipped over into growth mode. I’d promote it, get a couple of posts and a couple of subscribers, then crickets. After several rounds of that I walked away from new Digg. Meanwhile, on reddit with its billion+ users, 100 million+ active daily, the narrow niche continues to grow and because it has enough content contributing users, it’s not my personal soap box, it’s a truly user maintained community. But, that 90-9-1 rule definitely applies, probably even more skewed in my experience: 40K subscribers, probably less than 40 occasionally active content posters - an average of maybe 4 new posts per day, but… 40 posters are enough to keep the 40K engaged and growing.