Reddit will soon be exclusively available to logged-in users, minus a few pages to reel in new users, according to a letter to shareholders from CEO Steve Huffman, marking a major shift for a site that has let anyone read public subreddits without an account for two decades. Until now, moderators could decide whether their communities were public, restricted, or private (though Reddit started requiring approval for big subs to go private after the 2023 blackout protests). Now the whole site is effectively going members-only, with private subreddits as an extra permission layer on top.
The company will begin testing the login requirement in select non-US markets this year and will use the results of those tests to decide how to implement the logged-in experience globally. Though we can just call it now: “They went great! Something, something user experience. We’re rolling it out to everyone.”
Huffman wrote in the letter:
“Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally. It also allows us to protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data, and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world.”
He later wrote in an announcement post on Reddit (which at some point in the future, you’ll need to log in to read):
“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades. And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”
Okay, thanks for the corporate jargon, but why is Reddit really becoming walled off?
The site is losing search referral traffic fast as AI companies scrape the shit out of its data and answer questions without sending people to the site, which effectively means Reddit has lost its incentive to remain open. Organic traffic from Google and other search engines (but let’s be real, mostly Google) was down more than 1M referrals per week in October after an already poor Q3, with the largest hit coming from logged-out users and web traffic. Huffman believes the trend will continue in Q4 unless the company takes decisive action to become less dependent on search engines.
It also obviously comes down to money — both AI licensing agreements and ad revenue. If Reddit continues to be open, any AI company can scrape its data. If it’s closed, the company can better control access to it and charge accordingly. And if Reddit is open, it can’t target ads as well, since logged-out visitors are mostly anonymous. If it’s closed, every visitor comes with an account, a history, and a list of subscribed communities to target against.
While I oftentimes take the “Fuck you Reddit!” stance when they make major changes, I can’t hate on them for this one. AI is literally eating the entire web alive like a massive algorithmic black hole, and the only way to protect your data, content, and IP is to wall yourself off from it. Major AI firms have already proven that they don’t respect your ownership of it, so the honor system is no longer an option.
I called this one a few weeks ago when I wrote:
“The ‘open Internet’ is losing its openness. Social media platforms don’t want your link posts taking users off their platforms, AI is replacing your search traffic with answers, and Google is burying your newsletter in its Promotions tab. It’s like we’ve come full circle, and the Internet has become early AOL again, a self-enclosed walled garden of content, with no way out to the broader Internet.”
It’s a sad, but inevitable end to the open Internet.
The news about becoming a logged-in-only platform dropped the same week that Reddit announced it is rolling out a new home feed worldwide over the next few weeks that lets users switch between two tabs, For You and Following. For You blends posts from communities a user has joined with recommendations from other communities based on their interests, while Following surfaces only content from joined communities. Reddit will open to whichever tab the user last had open, and it plans to test more controls next, like hiding posts and telling the feed what to show less of.
