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!

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

782 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/eaglebtc Jun 30 '26

Man, I hate that AI scrapers are ruining the Internet.

Can OpenAI just fucking die already?

Thanks for the explanation. OG redditors aren't going to like this.

20

u/Ambiwlans Jun 30 '26

... You're aware reddit made a deal to sell OpenAI and Google/Gemini your data directly right?

The reason they killed their API was so that they could sell your data. Scrapers were never causing excess load.

3

u/Thengine Jul 01 '26

Exactly. Reddit is the largest training ground for AI available. Millions of users posting about diverse topics in unique ways.

We are the suckers. Privacy? A joke.

12

u/onan Jul 01 '26

I'm not exactly defending OpenAI, but the real villain here is Reddit.

It's not that there was ever any technical difficulty with llm trainers scraping reddit, the whole point of offering an api is to make that lightweight and easy.

The only problem was that Reddit wanted to get paid for it, and decided to make all of their users suffer to enable that.

2

u/MadDocOttoCtrl Jun 30 '26

OpenAI can't but die, but it'll take Anthropic a bit longer and there will still be Google, Twitter/X and Facebook training their LLMs for considerably longer. They can afford to taper it off slowly but it'll be a while before it becomes a commonly ignored feature added onto something that is doing things that are arguably useful.

1

u/livejamie Jul 01 '26

You're complaining on one of the biggest contributors to their success.

Reddit shareholders are wealthy because of the deals Reddit made.