Reddit Is Closing Off Its Old Site and Turning Off RSS
Reddit plans to limit Old Reddit to people who are logged in and who used Old Reddit in the six months before the change, with enforcement expected in the next few months. The Verge
Reddit recently started requiring a login for Old Reddit. The company said this was to fight abuse and that it helped reduce automated copying.
The next step adds a recent-use rule. Only accounts that used Old Reddit in that six-month window will keep access. Reddit says that includes most Old Reddit users. The rule is about recent use, not how old an account is or how much karma it has. Logged-in moderators will keep access even without recent use, so they can keep doing their work.
Reddit will also turn off RSS feeds on November 13th. The company said RSS is now often used for large-scale automated copying and abuse. RSS gives simple updates that any computer can check again and again without logging in, so it is cheap for bots to copy and gives Reddit no login history or behavior clues to spot abuse.
The company maintains an official redditinc.com news page titled 'Modernizing Reddit's Infrastructure and Moderation Tools' that discusses planned changes involving Old Reddit. Reddit Its Privacy Policy states that Reddit allows moderators to access content using moderator bots and tools, while the User Agreement addresses training AI and machine learning models and copying the Services without Reddit's prior written consent.
The broader context here is like an old side door that is easy to slip through. The old pages are simple and were built before current protections such as logins, limits on requests, checks that software is genuine, and tools that spot strange activity. They are easy for automated browsers and networks of computers to fetch in bulk. A login wall will not stop every bot, but it makes copying harder and forces bots to reuse accounts that can be tracked and shut off. Approved copying will need to use logged-in moderator tools, with rules set in the User Agreement instead of the voluntary robots.txt file that simply asks bots what not to copy.
In my view, this is less about how Reddit looks than about locking those easy doors. If you still use RSS or collect pages without logging in for research, monitoring or saving archives, you will need a logged-in option or that work will break. Over time, the upside should be a Reddit that runs better for everyday readers.
