Logged-out Old Reddit access is “significant source of abusive scraping."

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.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    Oh this is nothing. They’re currently testing identity verification. As in, “send a pic of your government-issue ID to Persona so they can check who you really are” (and cross-reference you with other sites that use Persona, like LinkedIn etc.)

    I’m also surprised they’re still allowing old accounts that don’t have an email. Or that they’re not mandating everybody to add and verify their phone number “for security and 2FA” – another excellent way of cross-referencing people against all kinds of databases. Just imagine what they can get if they work out a deal to share your phone number with Google, or Amazon.