Old.reddit.com’s days appear to be numbered.
Reddit has strayed from saying that it will shutter the website, which many long-time Redditors prefer for its layout, navigation, and fewer feed recommendations.
In a blog post today, Reddit made a vague statement about upcoming “changes” to Old Reddit:
In order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming, over time we plan to make changes involving Old Reddit, the legacy desktop web experience for Reddit that was built 21 years ago. In the short term, we will continue to require users to be logged in to access it and will work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack. These efforts will help us mitigate the bad behavior and give us time to plan the complex follow-up steps.
In late July, Reddit started requiring people to log in to Reddit in order to use Old Reddit. At the time, a Reddit employee said that “Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform.”
Today’s blog post further claimed that Old Reddit is leading to unwarranted content scraping.
“These changes will strengthen Reddit’s foundation, ensure the platform is ready to support thriving communities for future generations, and preserve what makes Reddit uniquely human,” the blog says.
Ars Technica asked Reddit what specifically it means by “changes,” and company spokesperson Rosa Kim said the company is “exploring different options” without providing specifics. She added:
We don’t have a hard timeline right now, but we will work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on our systems and make sure to keep everyone updated.
This follows June comments from a Reddit employee about Old Reddit, stating, “we can’t promise it will be around forever” while noting CEO Steve Huffman’s earlier promises to keep supporting the site while people still use it.
API access
Additional previous attempts that Reddit has made at fighting unauthorized scraping have included suing Perplexity, Anthropic, and others, blocking the Internet Archive, and restricting crawler access for search engines it doesn’t have a deal with.
Reddit also infamously started charging for access to its API in 2023. Although the more immediate impact was the shuttering of most third-party Reddit apps, the initial stated purpose of reducing API access was to stop generative AI companies from using Reddit to train large language models for free.
Reddit is building on those controversial API changes by starting to restrict new requests for access and requiring third-party apps to move to Reddit’s Developer Platform, it announced today.
“We envision a future where all good, trusted automation on Reddit runs within an ecosystem that allows us to offer support and enforce our policies consistently,” Reddit’s blog said about the API changes.
The Verge reported today that developers who wish to make a third-party Reddit mobile app will continue having to ask Reddit for API access, and that Reddit hasn’t set a date for when all apps will have to be on the Developer Platform.
Kim told the publication that the shift will apply to “all API apps except the ones we explicitly grant exceptions to.”
Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.
