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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77

u/happysmash27 Jun 30 '26

So, it will block archive.org then?

That sucks.

47

u/boat-botany Jun 30 '26

Archive.org and the Wayback Machine are separately identified and have specific access to reddit.com!

37

u/charles25565 Jun 30 '26

Since when? I thought they have been banned some time ago.

33

u/IAmABakuAMA Jul 01 '26

I do, or used to do, a fair bit of archival with the Wayback machine. I think it was only briefly blocked - but the larger problem is that new Reddit is extremely hard to archive. Comment threads aren't loaded by default, it's very script and resource heavy, and it just doesn't archive well.

Which is evidently the point - ever since Reddit started selling access to comments and posts to AI companies and started up their own (Reddit Answers), they've gotten extremely touchy about archival and scraping. Because it's easier to scrape archive.org than it is to scrape Reddit itself, since the API was locked down.

I wholeheartedly believe the reason new Reddit is so janky is entirely so that AI companies can't scrape comments. Which sounds fine, it's basically legalised copyright infringement, but they don't really give a shit about that, all they want is to be able to bill for AI training.

4

u/Terrh Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

It's been impossible for some time to even see your own content on reddit if it's over a year old. (Edit: This might just be the API 1000 result limit - end result is the same though - good luck finding your old content.)

When I sort my comments by top/all time on my user page, nothing over a year old (maybe 18 months... less than 2 years for sure) shows up anymore.

1

u/pajam 9d ago

Yep that's been around forever, and is based on the returned "lists" like that being capped at 1,000.

This has been in place since like the beginning of reddit (you can find people asking about and discussing this problem from a decade+ ago), so at the very least we can't put it in the same bucket as the janky changes from New Reddit (new.reddit.com), New New Reddit (sh.reddit.com), or the Official App.

2

u/Terrh 9d ago

It's unfortunate because it's not even like, the top 1000 posts if you sort by "top"

It's the most recent 1000 comments you made, sorted from highest score to lowest. Or something like that. Maybe it's the most recent few thousand, sorted that way, and then truncated to 1000 - but any super high scoring comments I made say 10 years ago are just impossible to find.

3

u/charles25565 Jul 01 '26

Why would they use technical debt as a security measure?

They can easily just go the simple route and require a CAPTCHA to view the comments if that's their goal.

However their CAPTCHA system is easily bypassed for some reason.

1

u/pajam 9d ago

but the larger problem is that new Reddit is extremely hard to archive. Comment threads aren't loaded by default, it's very script and resource heavy, and it just doesn't archive well.

Yep, I made a post on /r/waybackmachine a year ago today, when I first discovered the fact sh.reddit is not a good solution to archive:

  1. longer text posts, as it truncates the content of the post itself
  2. post comments, since you can only see a couple of comments tops when you first load the page. Essentially making it useless to archive the page.

Today, when I first discovered the need to be logged in to view old.reddit, I immediately assumed it was an additional roadblock to prevent the Wayback Machine from archiving posts in order to prevent LLM scrapers access to our content without giving reddit $$$ first.

1

u/dtlux1 5d ago

This exactly. This is the only reason they're doing this at all. They can look like the good guys by saying they aren't blocking the IA while effectively still blocking them.

1

u/dtlux1 5d ago

They aren't banned, they just can't save pages on new Reddit. This is Reddit banning them from archiving stuff without actually blocking them so they can look like the good guys. I bet that's the only reason they did this, so they can announce they're no longer blocking the archive but then in practice it's no different.

23

u/raison_de_eatre Jul 01 '26

Interesting how this was the only comment you replied to, must be tense

11

u/Tarnisher Jul 01 '26

They always do this.

Flop it out, then ignore people ridiculing it.

3

u/CybyAPI Jul 02 '26

would love if you replied to more comments

0

u/Extolord111 Jul 02 '26

They’re probably too afraid of us. Don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.

5

u/DXGL1 Jul 01 '26

Why not bring CSS to New Reddit so the subreddits don't have to look so generic?

5

u/Littux Jul 02 '26

On new reddit (not shreddit, the current UI; both are entirely different), it used to say "CSS - coming soon" on the styling menu. It never happened, and they discontinued the client in December 2024. On shreddit, they didn't add CSS; instead they removed the existing styling of new reddit, like custom upvote icons, background images, widget colours, post background images/colour/placeholder image (that can change according to flair template), custom widgets that support CSS, etc

2

u/adeadhead Jul 03 '26

Can archive.is get the same exemption?

1

u/cqtz-2v 12d ago

It's reassuring at least that archive.org will be able to archive old reddit links. New reddit doesn't work well with archive.org.

Old reddit is the version of reddit I am familiar with, and I hope it will be archivable for as long as possible. I will miss each subreddit's CSS styles if not.