From PC Mag: Reddit plans to require all visitors to log in with a registered account to combat web scraping bots and retain human users.
“We're going to evolve Reddit to being a primarily logged-in experience,” CEO Steve Huffman wrote ahead of the company’s earnings report.
It’s a huge change, considering Reddit has allowed anyone to visit without an account for the last two decades. The platform's posts are especially prevalent in Google search results, but Reddit is now joining the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, and X by requiring visitors to sign in.
Huffman indicated that unauthorized scraping of Reddit pages for AI training was one reason the company was mandating logins. “Today, the vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit (basically the scraping and stealing of Reddit’s data) happens through our logged-out experiences,” he said.
Although Reddit will continue licensing its data to third parties, including Google, Huffman signaled that the company needs to crack down on other bad actors who copy Reddit pages without consent. “Without those guardrails and that intentionality, we can't control who has access to Reddit data, where things go, or what they're used for,” he said.
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