Things are changing once again at Reddit, and again not for the better. Reddit CEO revealed plans to limit what guests can see when they open the website or use other means of access.
Huffman’s post is terribly vague, except for the benefits that Reddit customers will see when using an account. According to the post, it is to give users “the best version of Reddit” through personalization and to protect the business and meet regulations.
While part of Reddit’s user base may agree that personalization is helpful, guests who accessed the site without issues before may beg to differ. The point is, there is room for personalization without blocking anyone from accessing the site as a guest. This approach takes away choice from visitors of the site and it may very well be another nail in its coffin.
Furthermore, Reddit requires an account already for certain site content. Access to any page with mature content is, for example, blocked and the only two options are to leave it or log in.
What Huffman does not mention is that guest access is not as lucrative as traffic from members of the site. Sure, most of scraping happens without sign-ins according to the post, but there may be options to prevent much of that through other means. Rate-limiting access is one option, for example, or keeping a block list of sorts.
Reddit may be fighting a battle here that it can’t win. By locking down the site for the most part, likely copying a page out of X’s book in offering snippets of published content only, it will annoy a portion of guest users who visit the site.
It is too early to say how many will sign up for an account and how many will put Reddit on their “never visit again” list. Still, with AI rising in popularity and Reddit becoming less of a place that is welcoming to everyone, it is possible that the site won’t do so well anymore in the future.
There is also links from websites to consider. Will Reddit receive less links from sites, because visitors may not really access the content published on Reddit when they follow it?
They did this several weeks ago on oldreddit. They just want to push the crap in the sidebars, “curate” your feed, following in facebooks footsteps.
They can spew all the corporate double talk they want, does anyone believe that crap anymore? Logging in provides them with more valuable data to sell, increases profit, and blocks the AI’s, that’s the bottom line.
I’ve been using “https://safereddit.com” but looking at it right now, it’s returning a 503.
If I can’t find a way to read the very few subs I do now without logging in, it will definitely go on my “never visit again” list.