- Reddit has announced plans to switch to a primarily logged in experience
- This would mean most of the site won’t be accessible without creating and logging in to an account
- Reddit users seem almost universally unhappy about this planned change
Reddit — a site that once had the tagline “the front page of the internet” — looks set to become a lot less accessible, and therefore far less of a front page, as the company plans to require users to be logged in.
Currently, you can access pretty much the entire site without having to log in or create an account, and this has a lot of upsides. It means people who get there through search results can find the information they’re looking for more easily and seamlessly, and it means you can browse Reddit without giving the site any information about yourself, or being subject to any personalization algorithms.
But in a post on the site, CEO Steve Huffman (known as Spez on Reddit) has explained that the site will now evolve to become a primarily logged-in experience.
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Tests of this change will begin in select markets outside the US in the coming months, but once the details have been ironed out and tested, it sounds like this shift will become global and permanent.
According to Huffman, this is being done 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,” but despite Huffman’s claims, it’s a change that isn’t going down well with users.
Heading down a worrying path
Responses to Huffman’s post include “hard disagree,” “knew it was going to get worse,” and “truly fascinating to witness a CEO consistently act against their company’s interests,” among many others. In fact, just about every reply to the post is negative.
Beyond not wanting to be forced to log in for all the reasons above, users also worry that this change will lead Reddit down the same road as Pinterest. As one commenter said: “this sounds like exactly what Pinterest did… and then Pinterest kinda died.”
So, this sounds like it’s going to be a bad change for just about everyone other than Reddit’s C-suite, though if it does die, then it’s bad for them too. Hopefully, though, if this does lead to a meaningfully worse experience, we’ll see an alternative rise up to take its place, much as the likes of Bluesky and Threads did when Twitter became X. Still, it would be sad to see Reddit go.
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