Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In

Probably kills Reddit RSS feeds for good, not that they weren’t nearly dead already.

All part of Huffman's plan.

In a few years, Reddit will be completely ruined and he'll cash out and move on.

I have a different take. I actually applaud Reddit for keeping Old Reddit going, even if it's on life support. Old Reddit clearly appeals to a certain age demographic that, let's face it, is aging out of using websites like Reddit. To stay relevant and maintain users, they need to adopt to trends targeting younger users. That is clearly what New Reddit is for. It's visually and functionally appealing to younger users. I showed my nephew (a Reddit user) old Reddit and he couldn't understand why I would want to use something like that (it's "ugly" and "clunky" and nearly impossible to use in an app/mobile interface). He's right.

Any other website would have killed off that old UI by now. Facebook slashed their old simple AI, including mobile.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com. Reddit actually let's us keep using the old one. I applaud them for that. I'm sure they will pull the plug at some point but at least they are throwing a bone to the hardcore long term users by not shutting it off when they easily could and are probably getting pressure among some internally to do so ASAP.

I suspect the logged-in requirement is more to do with minors getting around age verification rules and bots scrapping content. The login requirement will do a lot to stop the first case, a little to stop the second case.

Fuck 'em.

Frankly, the quality has declined so precipitously in recent years, and older threads ruined by redactions, that it's a wonder it's still going. It's just a shame more people aren't taking up the Fediverse, as with Twitter; it's only for their sake, and the effective SEO that results, that I even find what I'm looking for most of the time through a search. We need a better public square, but in the meantime it can rot just like all the other platforms led by grifters. I'll soon learn to stop following links leading to Reddit, just as with X.

> We need a better public square

We have a better public square. It's called the open Internet. It's where we are right now, having this discussion.

All of these services - Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Reddit. Instagram, TikTok, Hacker News - are a cancer attacking societal health. They don't work because, as soon as they start working, they become targets. It happened to Twitter, a system that is nothing but a pipeline to extremism and mental health issues. It produces people who are so angry about irrelevant stuff that they willingly destroy society just to feel like they're destroying the people they hate.

It's happening to Reddit now. Putting "reddit" in Google searches used to be a trick to get helpful answers. So then LLM-based search engines started to rely on Reddit as a reliable source of information. This has resulted in Reddit now being full of context-poisoning spam just to make sure that when you ask Perplexity "what's the best vacuum robot", some shitty company can get mentioned in the results.

These systems can't work because they are inherently vulnerable to such attacks. Whether it's fake bot accounts on Twitter to make people angry, or context-poisoning garbage on Reddit, all of these systems are doomed to fail. They will never be beneficial.

But the real Internet, where real humans have their own spots, the real public square, that also still exists.

If old reddit disappears or any of the alternative front ends stop working, that'll be it for me and reddit. I still get some value out of it as I have a handful of not shitty subreddits I subscribe to, so I'd be sad to see it go. But the "modern" version is so awful that I just can't abide it.

> We have a better public square. It's called the open Internet.

I love the (open) Internet. The Internet is awesome.

To rephrase: we need a better *civic* public square. The 'net is great, but social media and these large public fora brought people together. Decentralisation is great for nourishing communities for those who know about and can reach them, but terrible for ordinary people who just want to reach one another to discuss stuff. Is there, or will there ever be, such a forum, where the bad commercial incentives don't exist? Probably not until nations start to regard it as useful, and even then there will be incentives for the most powerful to fuck it all up by using it as political leverage. But in the meantime, perhaps the fediverse could be made more welcoming to the unwashed masses. I don't see Discourse forums and the blogosphere outside niches like ours, and Usenet is far too retro.

"We have a better public square. It's called the open Internet."

That's like saying my town's public square is the interstate highway system, or perhaps private properties near its exits. That's not what a public square is.

"social media and these large public fora brought people together"

People came together before those things existed. There do not need to be, and, in fact, should not be any commercial "public squares" that attempt to commercialize people's ability to talk to each other. These systems are the opposite of a public square: they are private media that monetize your ability to be heard.

"That's like saying my town's public square is the interstate highway system"

No, it's not. You didn't really make a specific point supporting your claim, so I'm tempted to not just leave it at that, but I won't.

The Internet is built for people to talk to each other.

You can have your say on your own website, and people can listen to you or not based on what *they* want, not based on what a commercial entity wants them to hear, or what you pay to make them listen. You can talk to people on an email list or on a system like Usenet or in a hundred other ways.

The entirety of that, the actual open part of the Internet, not some private corporation's commercial website, is the public square.

Completely crazy to me that anyone yearns for (or even believes possible) a civil centralized place where the whole internet can gather. How many more lessons do you need to learn?