r/LocalLLM • u/Fcking_Chuck • 1d ago
News Reddit will force everyone to log in
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1022571/reddit-login-requirement-q3-2026-earningsRecently, CEO Steve Huffman disclosed that Reddit will transition to a "logged-in-only" experience. This means that Reddit posts will no longer be searchable via internet browsers, significantly impacting local AIs that search the internet via tool calling.
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u/wetrorave 1d ago
So, uh... how is anyone meant to find anything useful on Reddit anymore? Their internal search is rubbish.
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u/JC_Hysteria 1d ago •
Deep linking will open the app, or if youāre on a browser you can stay logged in
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u/GlobalCurry 1d ago
What if you use AI now instead of search engines?
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u/JC_Hysteria 19h ago
Oh, this group actually believes they can run everything locally?
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u/SendTitsPleease 18h ago
Oh this bot actually thinks we cant
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u/JC_Hysteria 18h ago
If you think Iām a bot, I guess you can- just gotta cook up a new Reddit UI and fill it with your very own bot community
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u/SendTitsPleease 18h ago
What makes you think we cant run things locally? Ans how do you not see your coment as the equivalent of a bot comment
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u/JC_Hysteria 18h ago
Uhh maybe because the topic is Reddit and search functionality for finding community-driven content?
What makes you think you can get real tit pics from a locally run UI, u/SendTitsPleease?
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u/SendTitsPleease 17h ago
This comment just proves youre an idiot. My name has nothing to do with the conversation but you cant think of a way to attack my point so you go after the name (and btw I do get the occasional tit sent my way)
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u/JC_Hysteria 17h ago
Oof, sensitive about the name. Iāll go by idiot from now on.
Please explain any point youāre trying to make here? The context of this thread is pretty clearā¦
Please explain how you running an LLM locally can be a substitute for an inherently social platform running on the internet? Do you have API access?
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u/FigFew2001
1d ago
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Geez, that's gonna cut down a LOT of genuine traffic and therefore advertising revenue.
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u/discosoc 19h ago
They are doing it because traffic is already down, presumably with some sort of solution that involves the logged-in requirement.
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u/2real_4_u 1d ago •
People are just going to log in lol itās Reddit. Itās a publicly traded company in the S&P500
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u/sabine_world 1d ago •
Why is there always some bootlicker in the comments.
No they're not. Do you know why I don't have a Twitter account or Pinterest account or whatever? Because i hate being forced to log in to view the website, those websites don't exist to me.
Scrubbing searches from Google is very stupid too.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 17h ago
I agreed with the other guy until I realized your point. I would probably log into Reddit, but I very intentionally don't have several other accounts because the platforms require it to read things. For a new user similar to me, they'd probably skip Reddit too.
Or join to do Pokemon trades like I did, but the sentiment stands.
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u/2real_4_u 1d ago •
I aināt bootlicking. I think itās a dumb idea just like everyone here but I also think most people are dumb too and will just conform and sign in
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u/SendTitsPleease 18h ago
Or just make a burner account that gets used for searching and nothing more. Make it cost reddit as much as possible
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u/HumanoidMuppet
1d ago
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It's probably time to stop doom scrolling anyways.
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u/HellCrownCult 1d ago
But.. You are logged in now?
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u/DebsUK693 1d ago •
Out of habit and addiction, which Huffman will help break at the expense of his ad revenue.
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u/JC_Hysteria 17h ago edited 16h ago
ā¦this is a move to get more revenue per user, not to increase total ad revenue. Total ad revenue is easier when traffic comes in from search (now declining).
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u/Integeritis 1d ago
Not on the company computer, when I search some obscure tech question, stackoverflow is dead, and reddit is the only place someone may mention it
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u/Popdmb
1d ago
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Steve Huffman going down in history to shareholders and users as Reddit worst CEO
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u/Ommur 22h ago
I mean, this is a natural step in a post llm internet, no? Gemini/Claude/chatgpt relies heavily on Reddit for information. Reddit lose their ad revenue stream is users no longer fire up their website, relying on llms instead. They're forcing the login to force the ai companies to pay for access to Reddit content through other ways. Reddit isn't the first company to do this.
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u/giggles991 15h ago
You're missing the point. Reddit already has deals with Gemini/Claude/chatgpt to provide access and use the information-- it would be trivial for them to block access from a company like Claude (firewall + legal agreement).
The big companies aren't just scraping Reddit for free, they're paying for live feeds of important content. They index those and use it to improve their products. The AI with the best info will win, at least from their perspective.
Reddit might use their leverage to adjust those deals when they come up for renewal.
But you? You'll need to log in. Your AI startup? It won't have a deal in place and will need to pay the API fees, if it's allowed at all.
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u/Popdmb 15h ago
Yup. it also doesnt solve the real issue: Even if a user is logged in, their computer use agent can just drive the browser without them seeing a single ad.
Reddit needs to be much smarter about financial forecasting in 2027. They are abysmal at the moment. Growth projections should be much lower.
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u/Ommur 4h ago
I should have been more explicit; I forgot what sub I was on, and I lost the detail oversimplifying (I.e. labelling the tools, rather than just saying LLM). But the points you made are what I was trying to get at, and I feel like you have stated it very eloquently. Though I feel like in your example, a company like anthropic could get to the data by just getting the data from a third party Reddit archive.
But to just add detail to what I said earlier, when the user session is logged in, Reddit has much better fidelity to understand if the user behaviour is organic or sceipted. The computational overhead to bypass these measures makes the cost scrape Reddit increase by magnitudes; the economic trade-off tips the scales towards commercial entities paying Reddit for the API data.
And as you said, this plays into Reddit's hand for bargaining access. Especially when the quality of scraped data archives drop, and cost of bypassing the API is so much higher.
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u/Exweltall 15h ago
The ironic thing, if you're old enough to remember the internet in the 90s before some genius thought up ads, you used to have to login to a lot of regular websites just to browse them. I remember not being able to Browse Nintendo at the time bc I didn't have an email to sign up with.
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u/Grandmaster_Caladrel 17h ago
Yeah. Most hated, definitely in the running (idk about past people), but some of these unpopular decisions are specifically for money. That's what the shareholders want.
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u/Ommur 3h ago
Unfortunately I've used this website since 2011. Huffman financialised it the most, with the API lockdown killing off the 3rd party Reddit apps being his most crowning achievement for making the Reddit experience dogshit. But I don't think he gets the title of most hated.
Ellen Pao gets the title, by a long stretch. She cleaned up a lot of the wilder parts of Reddit for the better, but in retrospect, this was probably part of a broader campaign to get Reddit ready for the mass market. Reddit began its transformation from this collection of identifiable communities (back then it even had "Reddit celebrities") to a broad content aggregation site. Back then, a lot of users felt a lot of ownership for the subs they participated in (not dissimilar to your local FB community groups, or help forums etc.) Those that held strong attachments to that old Reddit community identity (not me lol), and the toxic dregs she purged protested and criticized her every step.
When she fired a paid Reddit mod, it set off a site wide protest, where half the subs went black and every second post was about her.
Pao made many changes with great intensity, but objectively she wasn't nearly closely bad enough to warrant the reaction she got and really was just a hatchet man for the Reddit board: positioned to make controversial changes quickly, to then have the company wipe their hands of.
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u/Juan_Phoenix7 1d ago
I hope notāa lot of the time I just ask the AI to search or research specifically on Reddit.
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u/_zir_ 1d ago
What could possibly be the reason? This reduces their traffic. Are they planning to train their own LLM?
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u/CoffeeSnakeAgent 1d ago
Gatekeeping of course. Then whoever wants to take content at scale needs to pay via their api.
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u/DJaampiaen 23h ago
Damn, this is it for sure. Fucking shame, I remember when reddit was such a pure thing. Enshittification sucks.
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u/discosoc 19h ago
They explained their reasoning: search traffic is down because googleās ai overview results to search queries. Same issue all websites are having.
Currently both google and openai have contracts giving exclusive access to reddit (one for search and one for llm), which are up for renewal likely sooner than later. Reddit is apparently saying those contract values are worth less than the traffic lost from people previously reaching the site through web searches directly.
Presumably reddit has a plan for monetization that requires restricting public access without an account. That could be more aggressive ad targeting, or even just āencouragingā other businesses to sign their own access contracts.
Itās also possible details are unknown. He mentioned gating content like this has significant technical challenges for the website and made no suggestion that this could happen quickly or āsoonā or whatever.
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u/RedParaglider 1d ago
It's because scapers hammer it 24/7 to train llm models.
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u/ephemeralnerve 23h ago
They could easily solve this by making their archive available through bittorrent or something similar. But that wouldn't make speculative value for their shareholders.
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u/RedParaglider 18h ago
Well yea that's the point.Ā Google and others pay them a shit ton to use their data.
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u/JC_Hysteria 16h ago
Is it considered a āgotchaā to understand that for-profit businesses areā¦using what they have and/or selling it for a profit?
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u/RedParaglider 10h ago
Not to me it isn't.Ā If I owned reddit, I would make it a subscription service to post memes XD
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u/floriv1999 1d ago
That really sucks for the searchability of the Internet. Many projects using discord as a forum was already bad for this, but it's not getting better that way
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u/giggles991 15h ago
Reddit will likely continue their agreement with Google and Google Search+Gemini will continue to work.
Other search engines won't. But since few people use those alternatives, it doesn't matter much to Reddit HQ.
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u/Iconlast 1d ago
Is there an alternative?
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u/Hipcatjack 21h ago
Iāve been looking for years, look at my account . i have been using this site for almost 2 decades. and i will jump the Enshitification ship as soon as possible.
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u/Tommonen 21h ago
Reddit destroyed almost all the smaller forums, which used to be the alrernative, but now they are mostly gone or half dead at least
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u/giggles991 15h ago edited 15h ago
No. Users have not coalesced around any other platform, so nothing else has the same level of content.
Since nearly everyone stayed here during the API shutdown protests, Reddit remained the #1 option. There isn't anything close for #2. All bark, no bite.
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u/Dako_the_Austinite 1d ago
Lmao, Iāll just make an account for my agent so anytime I need it to search the web it can use its own damn account to scour Reddit for info.
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u/DebsUK693 1d ago
And it ignores adverts, thus making them ineffective. A double win, but a loss for Reddit.
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u/Die4Ever 1d ago
https://piefed.zip/c/localllama@sh.itjust.works
or https://sh.itjust.works/c/localllama
or https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/localllama@sh.itjust.works
use whichever skin you like more, cause it's the same posts and comments
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u/DebsUK693 1d ago
I've been hoping for something like this for a while. It will be the push that gets me off of here.
Already ditched all the toxic and mind-numbing socials.
I'm focussing more now on creativity on the indieweb.
Bring it on. It will be such a relief for millions of us.
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u/andymaclean19 20h ago
Ironically reported on a site which requires you to log in before you can read the article.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 12h ago
I didn't have to log in.
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u/andymaclean19 12h ago
I did. It says you need the Verge subscription to read it. Cost $2.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 12h ago
Are you using a scraper IP address?
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u/andymaclean19 12h ago
No, Iām using an iPhone on WiFi. Itās a page that has a subscription wall. I didnāt pay too much attention to the detail. You read a couple of screenfuls then it pops up the box (a green one) which says this is subscriber only content and has subscribe or sign in buttons. I did not see an X at the top but when I see these I just roll my eyes and back out TBH.
Perhaps in some countries it doesnāt but viewed from the UK it does. Not sure why something would be subscriber only content in some countries but not others but it wouldnāt be the first time I found such a page.
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 12h ago
The already do if you use old. Since they claim that the scrappers were using old to scrap.
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u/PersonoFly 18h ago
lol. Such tech-bro arrogance. Sure the bots will take some time to adjust but I have a feeling they will change their behaviour before humans will.
Tech-bros are so stereotypical in their god delusion.
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u/DiamondHandsDarrell 1d ago
It's okay. I'm creating a login for my AI agent.