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.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.
It absolutely wasn’t doomscrolling thirteen years ago. Upvotes took things to the front page if you fucked with that. Otherwise it was just another forum, except it had sub forums for literally everything. One forum to rule them all. It wasn’t even legitimately a “social media” till after they released the official app and “new reddit.” Were you even out of school back when reddit was coming up? It wasn’t an infinite scroll and was intended to be checked once a day. You’d check reddit after your emails while drinking your coffee. Like, it absolutely wasn’t doomscrolling. Doomscrolling wasn’t a thing. It was just a forum for any/every thing and people largely hung out in whatever corners they settled into. Like every post used to be filled with professionals or experts on the subject and there was considerable valuable discussion. Old reddit was very much a remnant of the old internet.
Out of school? Kind of. I wrote my first programs on a PDP 11 on a TTY. An actual perforated paper, daisy wheel TTY. No CRT. I was an admin of a Wang VS100 in the late 80’s. Later I was a systems Manager at a small campus, and admin’d one of the servers myself, in the gopher/usenet era. My first browser was mosaic (Or was it Lynx? can’t remember), and I coded my first website in HTML, no version number, HTML. Last time I bothered to look, my reddit account was 17 years old, and that was my second acount, I lost the password to my first, older account. So yeah, I was out of school. I do look younger than I am.
Well I certainly feel older after reading all that garbage. Feel better about yourself now? Might wanna get your memory checked then since you’ve clearly forgotten that reddit predates doomscrolling. It’s absolutely that now, but for nearly a decade it was just a user driven content aggregator forum. Doomscrolling wasn’t a thing. Infinite feeds weren’t a thing. Prior to Cambridge analytica rage engagement feed algorithms weren’t commonplace. I’m not sure why you’re insisting it was always doomscrolling, all of that kicked up from basically nothing into high gear during Trump’s first term.