Tell HN: Old Reddit now requires login | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Old Reddit now requires login

88 pointsjay_kyburz18 comments

I think I'm finally done.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740217

Still work from my machine, but if it happens then that's the end of Reddit for me.

P.S.: To be more-specific, I was already betrayed once. A power-user since ~2007, enough discussion comments to fill literal books, invites to those lame "more than X karma" subreddits... and then one morning I was secretly shadowbanned, everything I'd ever made disappeared from public view--including others' replies.

Mystified, eventually found out what was going on and went to the appeals page. My appeal was granted... but nothing was actually repaired. No information in moderation logs, and if my post/comment was approved by moderators a mysterious force always switched it back later. Now the system claims I don't need to use the appeals page because the account is in good standing. Other routes of filing help tickets, nothing.

Seeking help, I made another account to try some of the help subreddits.... And then that one was killed too. The injustice rankles.

This echoes my experience too! You write one thing that can be misinterpreted as offensive to someone somewhere and suddenly you are an enemy of the Reddit state

The thing is, I was never (admin) suspended before, and I can think of only two or three small-subreddit moderator bans in the last 10 years, the mystery-shadowban had zero communication involved, and the appeal was (at least on-paper) determined to be granted because it was a mistake...

So I'm assuming this was some case where my ISP rotated my IP to one that was previously assigned to someone else, or vice-versa, or just accessing the site through some coffee-shop free wifi, etc.

That said, I'm quite willing to believe it's gotten way worse since then, especially since nowadays "moderation" can be outsourced to an LLM that doesn't reliably understand context, sarcasm, or quoting the other guy's posts.

I grew a fitness subreddit to 100,000 members from 0. A fitness sub, after sometime, reddit mod team came up with list of possible moderators, I looked at them most of them were fake accounts shilling for some supplement company.

I was also offered money by supplement companies to promote supplements on our sub which I never accepted.

Unfortunately, reddit mod team is of no use, they cannot really tell who is high quality contributor vs who is getting nuked by fake accounts created by competitors/supplement companies etc...

Very clear that was going on in other subreddits too. E.g., moderators in r/worldnews conspiring to promote certain views while suppressing others.

there's a cabal of power mods that control a large number of the most popular subreddits it's definitely used to push certain views on Reddit.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-re...

Archive link: https://archive.is/aSdCI

Here's an interesting article on just that

Just opened https://old.reddit.com/ in private Firefox on Windows and did not get a login wall. Able to click into comments and view links.

What platform are you using?

I'm done on mobile when this happens. I can't stand the new Reddit UI, and it's so buggy in mobile browsers that it's damn near unusable. Like, why is it so bad at remembering what pages I previously visited here? I shouldn't be kicked from a post to Google search, or have to specifically click the subreddit name to view the list again.

Maybe you've started using a VPN recently? Only time I'm login blocked.

Over Tor you can still access it without much fuss https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...

Phased rollout over a month according to announcement (via ArsTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/reddit-will-require-..., Wayback Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260630180024/https://old.reddi...) so not everyone will be blocked yet.

At the same time that they launched a for you recommended feed and set it as the default on the new one.

Reddit built its house out of Digg doing stuff like this - it’ll be interesting to see if someone else comes and just provides a service that cares about its users again.

It's still working for me

No login

Tested with https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reddit.com

Can't reproduce.

maybe reddit is done when moderator can be applied by AI bots?

old reddit is useful for osint :-(

(tor friendly)

Yeah, welcome to the new age of advertising

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