Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Old Reddit Now Requires Login

47 pointsquincepie33 comments

Can confirm that this started happening today.

> Log in to use old Reddit

> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.

I don't participate in Reddit conversions and only use old.reddit.com to browse some specific subreddits as a guest.

That sounds like just the kind of risky behavior that was a huge threat to Reddit! Glad they did something about checks notes people browsing from the open web.

It's been 9 days that way for myself but I visited their log on would be required announcement page 20 days ago, so my IP / fingerprint was probably mapped and thus first to be flagged. I noted at least one other comment at HN confirming they too had struck a request to log in the same day I found old.reddit effectively walled off. It's rare I find myself landing at reddit by way of a search, most times it is by way of following an interesting post from HN.

The new reddit site only serves me the OP of a thread (Probably my fault, my configuration I have blocked a couple of intrusive PII gathering services disguised as APIS and a bunch of other sites with intrusive scripts ) -- it's the comments where the value is at so reddit is now totally useless to me - I suppose I should get around to adding the site to my growing deny list.

Edit: clarity.

So who is going to make the xcancel version for old reddit?

edit: https://safereddit.com/ is an instance of https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

"Sadly, you must enable JavaScript to get past this challenge. This is required because AI companies have changed the social contract around how website hosting works. A no-JS solution is a work-in-progress."

One of the best things about old.reddit.com was that it didn't need JS. Now we need someone to make a safesafereddit.com that just lets people see reddit posts without JS enabled

I'd settle for a Safereddit Enhancement Suite. Hmm.

First I made a userscript that auto-redirects me to old.reddit, then they did this. So now I have my userscript fetch the .json version of the url, and render a minimal hackernews style UI instead of the bloated normal site.

Mind sharing the script? I am certainly not logging in just so they can track me better.

https://github.com/IsaacPushButton/reddit-reader-userscript

I got fable to whip it up, use at your own risk

Thanks!

Suddenly started happening to me out of nowhere while browsing. Really does feel like one of the last pillars of the old internet just toppled - that reading is open to anyone. New Reddit is basically unusable.

Edit: I still am a strong believer in anonymous usage of the internet. Increasingly it feels like we've become an endangered species.

Getting the same. I stuck around as a lurker cause some subs were still good. I'm definitely not creating an account or subjecting myself to new reddit.

I wonder if this was about killing old.reddit in two steps, forcing people to create accounts, or LLM scrapers.

Update: looks like they want LLMs to have to buy their data: https://web.archive.org/web/20260716201346/https://old.reddi...

Reddit will require you to log in to use old.reddit.com

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

(Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...)

I can still access https://old.reddit.com/ using Firefox with Ublock, NoScript Privacy Badger and Old Reddit Redirect addons.

Using Chrome I get: You've been blocked by network security. If you think you've been blocked by mistake, file a ticket below and we'll look into it. File a ticket

If I go to https://www.reddit.com/ using chrome then replace www with old it works.

I've been working on https://treehouse.net/

Not a direct substitute old.reddit.com in that we don't support creating custom communities, but the idea is to create something reminiscent of the original reddit, or perhaps a version of Hacker News with a more broad scope of topics. Oh, and you can filter out topics, like AI.

Cannot duplicate. What I'm getting is a temporary/false "You've been blocked by network security" page but refreshing then brings up the reddit page as per usual.

May I suggest - https://old.lemmy.world/?listingType=All&sort=New

Yeah lemmy is just too full of tankies for me. I mean, reddit was full of half baked political takes, but at least they didn't spout apologia for North Korea.

Really? I've been there for several years now, and not seen any of that stuff. You must be subscribed to the wrong kind of forums. :)

I almost never log in to any of these sites (hence my problem with reddit requiring login), it would have been the front page. I will say I haven't gone to lemmy recently, so perhaps it's changed.

OTOH the worst offender [1] is lemmy.ml (run by lemmy's lead dev), and it's still federated and going strong.

[1] https://lemmy.world/post/29072279

Ah, I see. I only use Lemmy.world which has blocked .ml. The beauty of federation, eh?

I don't think it has? https://lemmy.world/instances lists lemmy.ml under "linked instances", and not under "blocked instances."

Oh right. Well I've still never seen any dodgy stuff on .world. Lots of foreign language posts though, which ticks me off a bit.

Thanks for that. I lurk lemmy every once in a while but found it really hasn't hit a critical mass yet, but man, it's amazing how a good interface improves the situation. At the very least it's a good methadone for my suddenly cold turkey reddit addiction...

Is this unique to lemmy.world or does the "old" trick work on other servers?

Yeah, it's interesting how a familiar interface really improves the accessibility. I struggled with standard Lemmy because I didn't like the UI. I'm not sure if it works with other instances. I haven't tried.

Guess I'm not using it anymore

Isnt this going to decrease a massive amount of traffic from Google searches and whatnot?

the regular reddit.com can still be accessed without a login, but that's the bloated webapp with tons of ads and tracking and takes dozens of MB to load over hundreds of network requests.

Forgot I had auto redirects setup. So lame

I sadly lost the old reddit cookie on my iPad and now I can't get it back :(

Is this truly the end?

Feels like a moment

Also getting slammed with the "to keep Reddit safe" bullshit.

How do banned users access Old Reddit? Do they just Not?

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