Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In
Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”
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Perhaps more alarming for old-school Redditors is that boat-botany’s post left the door open for Reddit retiring old.reddit.com.
“New” Reddit is a janky, slow, bloated mess of a website that mostly displays text, images, and videos. “Old” Reddit is ugly but functional.
Previously:
Update (2026-07-24): Cole Kurashige (Hacker News):
New Reddit will not load anything more than the post itself without Javascript (JS).
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Cynically, it seems like Reddit discovered they can make scraping harder by making your browser load more and work more, which they had already done by rewriting a nice piece of HTML into a 5x more bloated mess of web components or whatever.
Based on other’s people reports, it seems like Reddit might be requiring auth now [for RSS].
