Reddit Announces Migration to a "Primarily Logged-In Experience"

The CEO of Reddit announced that the site will be moving to a "primarily logged-in experience."

Reddit is one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the internet, earning its former tagline "the front page of the internet." Discussions on the site show up search results can commonly contain information you can't get elsewhere.

You never needed to log in to simply view content on Reddit before, but now the CEO is seemingly looking to change that.

Unsurprisingly, part of the reason cited for making the change is their ad business:

We’re making the change because it’s better for user experience, better for our ads business, is more in line with safety regulations, and more protective of Reddit data. And we can do this while continuing to ensure user privacy.

According to him, "Reddit is so big now that without some personalization, it's just not relevant. Or even worse, it just doesn't work."

The fact that every user previously saw the same thing is cited as a drawback. Personally, having the option to view Reddit neutrally and then log in for more personalization seems like the more logical option.

He also cites data scraping as a reason for the change.

Reddit had previously restricted access to unknown bots and crawlers in order to curb the onslaught of AI training scrapers, but with some exceptions like the Internet Archive.

Later, they decided to block the Internet Archive anyway because AI bots were scraping from the Wayback machine instead of directly from Reddit.

Then, they announced they would be closing public access to their API and RSS feeds.

They restricted access to old.reddit.com to only logged-in users in the same announcement.

You also may have noticed an increase in annoying popups asking you to download the Reddit app on mobile, something they've been doing for years at this point.

This announcement now brings that restriction to the main site. It's almost refreshing to see a CEO being so forthright that they want to be able to use your data to serve you personalized ads:

It will make it easier to adapt to emerging regulations around the world, and of course, more users being logged in allows us to deliver more relevant ads. This is better for business outcomes, but it's also better for users. A non-targeted ad is just a waste of space for everybody.

It's unclear what effect this will have on alternate Reddit frontends like Redlib.