Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.
Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who appends “reddit” to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to “Old Reddit.”
There’s no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you’re logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren’t logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app’s incognito mode.
Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user’s identity — “Honestly, we don’t want to know” — just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver “more relevant ads.”
“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”
Reddit is making this announcement alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today. Search traffic was “down meaningfully” in Q3, Huffman says in the company’s shareholder letter, with logged-out traffic and web traffic being the most heavily impacted. “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” Huffman says.
However, Huffman notes that app and logged-in daily active unique users make up “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”
34k is absolutely nothing for an entire network of communities. I used to mod for a stagnating/declining gaming forum that was just in a single language (not English) and much larger than that - and even it felt quite small.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of users on any online community are near permanent lurkers and do not contribute with even brief comments - or even by voting. What matter is how many people are actually submitting links, writing posts and comments.
Look at this community: It's the largest "general" technology community on the lemmyverse (I think), yet there are just a small handful of people posting, often days between posts and on average (going by the last three pages of submissions), tons of posts where not even a single user is commenting. Anything that isn't controversial and does get comments is usually in the 3 to 7 comments range.
That's a ghost town. I can practically see tumbleweed slowly rolling across the page. My perception might be a little skewed though, because the way I interact with posts is by annoyingly inserting myself into existing conversations or at least replying to unanswered comments that already exist, so I tend to avoid empty posts.
Part of this emptiness is certainly due to forums in general going the way of the dodo (thanks to Facebook, twitter, instagram and especially Discord, as awful as all of these are at replacing conventional forums) and part of it is due to reddit having absorbed much of the user base that is still interested in forums. My hypothesis is that reddit losing users due to ongoing enshittification would just result in the overwhelming majority of them ending spread out across the aforementioned services instead of ending up here. I'm terrible at predicting things though, but the big reddit exodus (or whatever actually materialized) largely skipped the lemmyverse in the past and I don't think conditions have changed enough for anything different to happen this time, should this recent boneheaded decision by reddit's management result in fewer people using their site.