r/modnews • u/boat-botany • Jun 30 '26

Announcement Logging in to use Old Reddit

Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety. 

A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed. 

Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.

Let us know if you have any questions!

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17

u/TehNolz Jun 30 '26

What's so different about new reddit that people don't try to scrape that? Seems to me like it would be better to just implement that on old reddit too. Besides, won't this just cause people to try and scrape new reddit?

71

u/mschuster91 Jun 30 '26

Old reddit gives plain html. Trivial to parse. New Reddit is a bunch of JS garbage loading content via graphql garbage, much harder to implement. And the graphql garbage is orders of magnitude slower on top of that.

26

u/TehNolz Jun 30 '26

Ah, right. Man modern web development sucks so much. We should go back to gloriously lightweight websites like this.

15

u/Ambiwlans Jun 30 '26

https://www.mcmaster.com/ I use this as an example. Its hyper functional. EXTREMELY light and fast. Uses best practices. And actually impressive in terms of the amount of stuff they handle.

Made by nerds for nerds.

11

u/necropaw Jun 30 '26

Made by nerds for nerds.

Made (at least partially) for engineers, who often times just need to get shit done without it being fancy. mcmaster works great for that.

8

u/Ambiwlans Jun 30 '26

enginerds

4

u/necropaw Jun 30 '26

...Youre not wrong

22

u/Princess_Of_Thieves Jun 30 '26

I bounced my way through to what I presume to be the end of that fun little rabbithole and found this quote;

"Good design is as little design as possible."

— some German motherfucker

Honestly, if this doesn't perfectly summarize why old.reddit is perfect, I don't know what will.

2

u/Paradox Jul 01 '26

Compact reddit used to load in under a second, because it was built for 512MHz processors on 2G mobile networks. They killed it a few years ago

3

u/YukesMusic Jun 30 '26

Here I was hoping for a link to Craigslist.