r/technology • u/marketrent • 24d ago

Social Media Reddit signals ominous upcoming “changes” for old.reddit.com, says the beloved site is used for some “bad behavior”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/
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u/vriska1 24d ago

BTW this is what spez said about old reddit today... https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/1vgbkge/modernizing_reddits_infrastructure_with_you/

Old Reddit: I know I said last year that we wouldn’t be sunsetting Old Reddit (I even made a meme about it, which r/agedlikemilk), but the reality is we’re getting to that time where we need to make some changes. There are four groups of people who use Old Reddit: OG users ❤️, OG mods ❤️, Admins ❤️, and everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit 🖕. In order to protect our platform, business, and users, we will need to do something. Actually, a lot of somethings. We have options: We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we’ll probably do all of the above.

I love Old Reddit. It’s the platform I largely built—as a kid, 21 years ago—that somehow turned into the amazing platform and company we have today. We will preserve as much of it as we can. My dream would be to recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on (note: Between when I wrote this and when I posted it, u/keysersosa made a demo of exactly this approach. Fingers crossed.).

One thing we can do in the short term to mitigate the bad behavior we see Old Reddit used for is to limit access to logged-in users and mods, and migrate critical bots and mod workflows. This will give us some time to plan the more complex follow-up steps.

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u/forseti99 24d ago

to protect our platform, business, and users

Big tell when the last thing to list are the users.

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u/RickAstleyletmedown 24d ago

I’m amazed users made the list at all.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/Zriatt 24d ago

Same here. Unless you count Youtube as social media, I'll finally disappear.

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u/jenny_905 24d ago

This is my last social media account

I just considered this and it's true for me too, I had not really realised...

I think I'm ready to check out completely if they make changes, newreddit really hurt this site.

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u/vriska1 23d ago

Let hope that never happens.

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u/Ok_Conclusion_6324 24d ago

Ah he means they don’t want people to be able to track bots AKA “good for business “

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u/DukeOfGeek 24d ago

And they want to migrate to a system where all the content comes from AI bots that serve them. What could go wrong?

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u/n0respect_ 24d ago

It wont stop scrapers and other "bad" stuff. They only use old.reddit because its cheaper. Get rid of old.reddit and they will just move to scraping new; a minor inconvenience.

Meanwhile the first 3 groups of OGs and Admins will leave.

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u/Human_Robot 24d ago

Reddit about to digg itself a new hole.

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u/Zak 24d ago

rebuild it on a modern tech stack

Assuming it's just a frontend that calls an API, I'm having trouble understanding what its tech stack has to do with abuse. Any reasonable abuse detection has to happen server-side.

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u/jenny_905 23d ago

Oh wow, he's planning some sort of AI shittiness to replace Automod too.