old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login | Hacker News Reader

old.reddit.com Now Requires a Login

71 pointschucksmash73 comments

You maniacs! You blew it up!

Redirect URL:

https://old.reddit.com/login/?reason=lor2&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fold.reddit.com%2Fuser%2F<YOUR_SN_HERE>%2F

Page text:

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

By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy.

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Earlier today I started getting a "Get the app to keep using Reddit" popup when browsing while logged out on my phone. (I prefer to use Firefox Android exclusively in private mode to reduce the temptation to doom scroll and to have the added friction of manually logging in when commenting on any site.)

Unlike the prior nag screens, this one was modal, blocked any scrolling, and had no way to close it. It seemed to pop up about 15 seconds after I first start scrolling any page - either a list of threads on a subreddit, or a thread page itself.

Man I miss the old iOS-looking Reddit mobile (m.reddit.com, IIRC).

My Reddit account is now just a few months short of US drinking age. I've been using the site since before subreddits were a thing (back when the only topic-specific alternative to the general front page was programming.reddit.com). I've posted a lot, modded some, and stuck with them through a lot of stupid decisions over the years. But I'm beginning to think it's finally time to move on; I'm just not sure where to.

Alas, you are already on the alternative. Hacker news feels like one of the last hold outs of the old internet.

Literally why I started to come here. r/programming because a derelict wasteland. What commentary you got was frivolous and unhelpful. Posts about CockroachDB there would all be jokes or other commentary on its name, while you'd have the engineers who created it in here. I started to notice a lot of posts with mediocre discussion had a related post in the r/hackernews. While I had come here now and then, I started to see that I could actually still learn stuff here and decided to skip the middle man.

skill issue /s

self selection in action

also quite a haven for bots these days. with robust monetization and a need to assure people that you're interacting with actual people (budling consensus) or clicking ads, you need some measure of "prove they're real". HN don't do that.

I started getting this occasionally months ago. I added these ublock rules and haven't been bothered since but I suspect they will change to a hard wall in future

! 28 Apr 2026 https://www.reddit.com www.reddit.com###app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-direct > .bg-transparent www.reddit.com###app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-direct

www.reddit.com###xpromo-bottom-sheet reddit.com#?##app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-seo:remove() reddit.com#%#//scriptlet('prevent-addEventListener', 'touchmove', 'preventDefault') reddit.com#%#//scriptlet('remove-class', 'rpl-scroll-lock|scroll-is-blocked', 'html, body', 'asap stay') reddit.com#$#html, body, shreddit-app { overflow-y: scroll !important; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch !important; touch-action: pan-y !important; overscroll-behavior: auto !important; } www.reddit.com##.rpl-bottom-sheet www.reddit.com##body:remove-class(rpl-scroll-lock)

insert double space following newline for <code></code> formatting or use double newline to force a break. double space before newline works on Reddit but not on HN

Difficult on mobile I wish hn would allow ``` blocks and not insist on blank lines to show new lines as I always forget to double space my bullet points too

It really gives me the heebie jeebies when people refer to Reddit (or any website) as an app, and in general demand that everything that used to be a simple website get turned into a data-hoovering Electron abomination.

They started it late last week on the new reddit. I'd been browsing unlogged in for ages because I'm pretty certain logging in from work via my VPN killed my old reddit account that was 13 plus years old at the time for "ban evasion" from a sub I'd never been banned from. Of course the appeal process was no help so I'd just been browsing offline to avoid the chance that'd happen again with my new account too.

It's been taking place over the last month. A workaround was incognito on browsers, till they blocked that. Then it was switching location through VPN, till they blocked that. Then it was going through TOR which they also ended up blocking and prompting the login/signup screen as with the previous workarounds.

This is all so that in a few months time they can say that demand for old.reddit.com has dropped so they'll no longer be supporting it and force everyone to use that horrible tiktok style layout, controlling every pixel of a users device and deciding what they see.

What a downhill ride this has been.

Not surprised. They've tried this many times before but never stuck with it for long as far as I can tell because I was able to see it fine a few days later.

Can't see how it works out well for them. More hoops to jump through has to equal less views and less advertising revenue. Reddit has already become quite shit in the last 10 years so it's not like I'm keen to jump through extra hoops to use it. I'll just go elsewhere.

im guessing since last year they banned so many real users, most with multiple accounts. they mustve lost genuine traffic to the site, which is mostly filled with AI/BOTS now, and is actually started to annoy people. also openAI, google needs constant fresh data to scrape. so i think reddits response was to force lurkers(who were likely banned before) to make a datamining account.

It's difficult for me to post on Reddit now; it's very restrictive, mainly because my karma score is too low. There will be even more restrictions going forward; AI automation is becoming too powerful.

It doesn't matter if you did post on Reddit: the userbase is so hostile that you'd be instantly downvoted unless it's one of the sub's existing 10 talking-points.

Sounds a bit like the story of Stackoverflow.

I noticed that too... There are still ways around it, but I don't think it'll last long. I don't know, I'm thinking of giving up on Reddit altogether

reddit is already blocking other methods to remove the login popup, they arnt rolling it out all at once for fear of public backlash. they are trying to sneak it in slowly.

The main thing I notice about new Reddit is the amount of autoplaying videos.

I wonder if this is at least partially motivated by the more addictive endless scrolling design of new Reddit.

or the amount of Ai reposted, and some posts vid/pics are AI generated too.

Are there any decent alternatives to reddit? When they finish killing off old reddit I'm gone, and will need a new time waster.

Lemmy (part of of fediverse), HN, Tildes, Lobste.rs.

I can’t seem to read comments on Lobsters or I don’t know where they are. Do I need an account to see the discussion over there?

Nope, I can see them just fine without any account. Not sure what the problem might be on your side. They're in the same place as on HN.

Oh I see it now. The adblocker on my phone was hiding the comments. How weird.

Thanks!

On desktop they're same as HN, on mobile click the number in the bubble on the far right hand side.

i liked lemmy but was put off by how mixed the quality was, and how many random images seemed to link to dubious image repos or otherwise set off malware alarms.

reddits heavy monetization means they at least try to keep out a majority of the bad actors but lemmy always seemed a wild west. perhaps i will revisit soon.

Strange... I don't ever recall ever coming across an image linking somewhere outside of lemmy. Most people just upload images directly into their instance when creating posts.

In general never felt like I saw some dodgy link or anything nefarious

i dont know which instance you joined, but most lemmy doesnt encounter those links, you mustve went to a spam/botting part of lemmy. Each instance of lemmy is essentially its own little "Reddit". the ones you shouldnt join is ml, lemmygrad, or hexbear those are "far left" tankies.

Lobste.rs deliberately blocks Brave due to the maintainers having ingested all the FUD.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249931

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49248862

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49103041

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48753129

Still cannot duplicate here. Only a 'network security has blocked you' deterent screen that goes away on refresh then old.reddit works fine. Not a uniform change for everyone it seems. Can also log in if an actual user and set preference to old.

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

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49005747

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48753129

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857

Australia here. I have been playing around with this on various machines.

It seems to be using some cookie system that is bypassing this for the moment. Older machines I have still can use it without issue. But a fresh browser on the same connection will be prompted for the login.

Regardless, it is clear what direction this is going in. Age verification is also being tested in some places.

I can trigger the login redirect with /s/ in the URL

Otherwise I can still access Reddit without an account, e.g., /r/... and /r/.../comments/...

It seems the company still has not fully implemented this change

The notice suggests it should already be completed by now, but it isn't

Oh the irony - the anti-ai movement will destroy companies that are best providers of ai training data.

The www.reddit.com shows me a banner after 10 seconds to login/signup. So annoying. I refresh multiple times to make that banner go away. It sometimes does sometimes doesn't. Such user hostile stuff.

3 or 4 zaps with uBlock Origin and you are good to go. The last layer is a fullscreen overlay that also needs to go.

Let's see how long it will last. Started yesterday during the evening.

It’s been requiring login to old Reddit from Mexico for 1-2 months. In out

I've seen many people point out that, despite AI being heralded as increasing engineering productivity by 10x or more, we don't seem to have gotten a decade worth of new disruptive sites and apps like we got multiple times a year in the early 2010s. Not that surprising to me, as product fit was always the bottleneck, rarely engineering.

But I can say that where AI and its externalities truly excel and have rapidly accelerated is in taking away or at least hobbling the value of many sites. This is another victim, I think. Reddit needs to figure out how to make money, and their main valuable asset now is a trove of somewhat organized (compared to, say, Discord) text conversations. They have so far been too incompetent to turn being one of the only way to get good results from google searches into revenue, so they're scuttling that with this and the normal site paywall in hopes of LLM corpus cash.

Last year they purged so many accounts and lost a ton of users, and now its full of AI bot slop accounts. I think the forced login is a way to bring back that engagement? Also i noticed they today hid comments behind"login to see the conversation on a mobile browser.

The AI moderation is completely out of control. They'll permaban 15 year old accounts for chatting about WW2 history because they used phrases like "<person> should have killed <person> when they had a chance, and we paid for it as a result". I got an account suspended for a week for a (positive, happy tone) joke that had nothing to do with violence or aggression, think "Hell yeah bro, go for it!" A human confirmed it, which makes me think, assuming it is a human, that the human just mashes buttons to reach KPI requirements.

>I think the forced login is a way to bring back that engagement?

I just don't see it when they've decided that (a) bans, sometimes perma bans, are the solution to any (often hallucinated) misbehavior and that (b) the new user experience is to be as terrible as possible in as obtuse a way as possible.

It really seems like they're going hard for ragebait as their main driver of engagement. AITA, GirlDinnerDiaries, etc. Reddit is where your average oversocialized office worker with a boring life goes to read about peoples' drama and problems. The Jerry Springer show for millennials.

I feel like I see so much AI generated text on reddit. I don't think the average redditor even notices that they're arguing with bots that are trying to astroturf

Try using https://github.com/mkornreich/old_reddit

>needs a logged-in Reddit session

This might be useful for active Reddit users once they sunset Old Reddit for good, but this doesn't solve the issue of lurkers being unable to use an Old-Reddit-like interface.

The current alternatives being:

- RedLib

- That one userscript https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983857#48988887

i think reddit users got burned when they purged so many accounts last year, that people dint want to risk getting banned again, so they all lurk now, including me. because how reddit filters work and the subs too, you can get banned very indiscriminately. and its almost impossible to appeal shadowbans.

It works when logged out

Thanks for this!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49249931

It does not require me to login. I am from Japan tho. Maybe this requirement is kind of European freedom stuff lol.

Places like Japan are always treated very differently on social media from the rest of the world. The system doesn't work, the contents don't work, memes don't work. They won't do anything that shrinks an already postage stamp sized Japanese community on Reddit.

I think it's just a divide and conquer approach: if they killed it everywhere at once, there would be a larger backlash, so they are careful to roll out the change gradually.

More or less it becomes like facebook and meta apps,.very intrusive login requirement to see content

As of today, we now have this restriction even in Japan.

I guess I'm just not using Reddit on my phone anymore.

Have people. Unable to see comments while not logged in. They hid the comments behind a login prompt.

I'm visiting from EU in a private tab and not getting any login prompts or redirects, fwiw.

It seems to be random, I tried it a few times during the last few weeks due to people talking about it, and sometimes it lets me use old.reddit.com, while other times it redirects to the login page.

It still works for me. Maybe they are still rolling out the change.

Yes. Works for me to. For now. They will pull the same shit they pulled with i.reddit.com

What did they do with i.reddit.com? That still works for me too as far as I know. But as long as I remember, it's needed some awful looking session identifier.

It cannot be possible.

i.reddit.com is 301 permanently moved to www.reddit.com

Hmm maybe I meant i.redd.it .

It's still working for me, even in an incognito window.

Is it really “keeping Reddit safe” or is Popular in United States still all the Indian teenagers subreddits because they’re still riding residential proxies into the site?

said it here before but will say it again: that was the only thing keeping me using the site on the regular.

i've got a regular account i use if/when i need to log in and ask a question or interact, but that's the exception not the rule.

done w/ the site in general.

And nothing of value was walled in.

I mean there is still some decent stuff but it is so rare nowadays. The value has been dropping for years.

Completely pointless smug comment, given that there are thousands of subcommunities of wildly varying quality.

old.reddit.com is remnants of a product they're trying to distance themselves from. People who like it are not the target market. It's not that they want you to go away, they'd much rather you be a scroll zombie addicted to the tripe on the front page. But if that's not an option they'd rather you fuck off. All the thoughtful subreddits I used to visit are ghost towns now, with 1-4 posts a month.

they did ban a ton of people in large purges last year, they lost all those users that couldve generated content and now its filled with bots/Ai posts.

reddit sucks, its owned by chyna, censoring free speech, and their paid champagne socialists

spez, is the one that controls the site, china really has very little influence on the site.

Fuck spez

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