Reddit plans to require all visitors to log in with a registered account to combat web scraping bots and retain human users.
“We're going to evolve Reddit to being a primarily logged-in experience,” CEO Steve Huffman wrote ahead of the company’s earnings report.
It’s a huge change, considering Reddit has allowed anyone to visit without an account for the last two decades. The platform's posts are especially prevalent in Google search results, but Reddit is now joining the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, and X by requiring visitors to sign in.
Huffman indicated that unauthorized scraping of Reddit pages for AI training was one reason the company was mandating logins. “Today, the vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit (basically the scraping and stealing of Reddit’s data) happens through our logged-out experiences,” he said.
Although Reddit will continue licensing its data to third parties, including Google, Huffman signaled that the company needs to crack down on other bad actors who copy Reddit pages without consent. “Without those guardrails and that intentionality, we can't control who has access to Reddit data, where things go, or what they're used for,” he said.
Earlier this year, the company also began requiring logins on the "Old Reddit" interface and has since tightened access further. In May, those who frequent Reddit on mobile browsers found their sessions interrupted by pop-ups that encouraged them to download (and log in to) the official app.
The other driver is how Reddit can offer personalized content and better ad targeting for logged-in users. The same personalization could also help users find interesting forum posts that’ll keep them on the platform. “Reddit works best when people participate, set the norms in their communities, and vote to determine what’s great, and what isn’t. We all benefit when more users have that intentional relationship with Reddit,” Huffman added.
The platform plans to test the logged-in requirement in markets outside the US in the coming months. "There are still plenty of questions that are unanswered, particularly around where the boundaries should be between logged-in and logged-out experiences. For example, the front page being available logged out is useful and important,” he noted as an exception.
"This is a test, but we are going to make this transition," he added in the earnings call.
Still, a focus on personalization might raise concerns about user privacy and potential tracking. However, Huffman says that, "when we talk about logging in, we're talking about literally logging in. We don't need your name. We don't need to know who you are. We don't need to know your identity. Honestly, we don’t want to know. Reddit doesn't require this (and won’t with this change), and neither does our ads business.”
The logged-in requirement might hurt Reddit's traffic, but it was already down amid the growing use of AI to find content. In his shareholder’s letter, Huffman noted that search referral traffic is “down meaningfully in Q3, with the decline accelerating later in the quarter.” In the earnings call, Huffman also cited Google's growing use of AI Overviews, which can place Reddit pages lower in search results.