Reddit is planning to end the ability to read the site without creating an account, a move the company said in its third-quarter shareholder letter is the direction it is taking.
The change, described as a shift to “a logged-in-only experience” is being tested this quarter in “select markets outside the US.”
For two decades, people have been able to read content on the site without an account. But now this is ending, as the company looks to force those who want to read threads on the platform to log in.
The reason, as the letter makes clear, is that having an account provides “more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally.” In fact, Reddit says that its “most engaged and monetizable users” are those who are logged in and use the app.
This is because every page they read leaves a trace on their account, providing a complete picture of their interests, while those who read without an account leave no data behind.
The letter also mentions that the move is a way to help the company adapt to emerging regulations around the world, such as age verification, which already requires some users to hand over their government ID or perform a live face scan to a third party, Persona.
CEO Steve Huffman said that the company does not want to know who its users are – it just wants them to have an account. “Honestly, we don’t want to know,” he said.
Those who do not log in will still be able to access the site’s homepage, as well as individual threads they reach via a search engine or a shared link. However, they will not be able to comment or vote.
Reddit will allow users to install its app and use an incognito mode.
Huffman is aware that the change is “a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades.”
However, the company is determined to move forward with the plan, which it says is necessary to “protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data.” Huffman explained that “the vast majority” of unauthorized access to the site comes “through our logged-out experiences.”
The company is saying that those who scrape its data do so by accessing it as logged-out users, and that this can be stopped by making everybody log in. But this is a weak argument, since those who scrape data can just as easily create accounts and continue doing what they’re doing.
What the move will do, however, is lock out the average internet user who wants to read a thread without being tracked and profiled.
Reddit is also motivated by the fact that it is losing traffic from search engines, and expects this to negatively affect its daily usage numbers this quarter. The letter reveals that in October, the site lost more than a million referrals from search on average per week.
The company said, “Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition.”
It’s not the first time Reddit is making moves that seem to go against its own users’ interests in order to protect its own. Previously, we reported about the site requiring a login for its Old Reddit, which it said was a “significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic.”
At the same time, Reddit ended support for RSS feeds, and in two weeks, on November 13, it will cut off this functionality, citing – you guessed it – scraping and abuse.
Then there was the experiment with blocking the mobile site with a pop-up that asked users to “get the app to keep using Reddit.”
There was the time Reddit blocked the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from saving almost all of its pages except the homepage. The reason given was – again – to stop scraping.
All of these changes were introduced with the excuse of combating scraping and abuse – but the end result is the same: making it more and more difficult for people to use the site without an account.
So, while the site’s value to its users was in being an open archive of human discussion, that is now becoming just another walled garden, where the only way to read content is to give the company personal data, and allow it to track and profile you.
