Old Reddit, the 21-year-old desktop version of the site still preferred by many longtime users and moderators, could become the next casualty of Reddit’s war against AI scraping. The company is warning users that it plans to make unspecified “changes” to the legacy experience.
In a blog post, the company said that changes are necessary “in order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming.” Mysteriously, the company doesn’t indicate exactly what changes it has planned, though it says it will “work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack.”
Reddit said at the end of June that it would block access to Old Reddit if users aren’t logged in. “Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform,” Reddit admin boat-botany shared at the time. So far, it seems that this particular change hasn’t fully gone into effect. At the time of this writing, I was able to access Old Reddit without being logged in, but was later met with a message that it has been “blocked by network security.” A Reddit spokesperson said the change is happening “gradually.”
While Reddit doesn’t indicate what its long-term plans for Old Reddit might entail, the fact that it’s trying to move bots and moderation infrastructure away from it, is sure to raise questions about how long the company will continue to support the older version of its site. The company has already hinted at the possibility Old Reddit could go away. In a comment on the post from boat-botany last month, the Reddit admin wrote that “we can’t promise it will be around forever.”
When asked by Engadget if the company was planning to shut down Old Reddit entirely, a spokesperson for the company didn’t answer directly. She said that the company is “exploring different options” for Old Reddit. “We don’t have a hard timeline right now, but we will work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on our systems and make sure to keep everyone updated,” she said.
Reddit has taken increasingly aggressive measures to fight AI scraping and unauthorized use of its data. In 2023, the company began charging for access to its API, citing concerns that its data was being used to train large language models. That change effectively killed third-party Reddit clients which prompted a site-wide protest.
Now, Reddit says it will begin to phase out its API entirely. The company will “continue supporting limited public API access” but “will gradually restrict new requests and require third-party apps to transition to and operate on Reddit’s Developer Platform.” Reddit’s Developer Platform, also known as Devit, lets developers build bots and other experiences on top of Reddit but is more tightly controlled than its API. The company has already been offering incentives, including a $1 million “app migration program,” to get developers to make the switch. Now, it’s clear that developers won’t have a choice. It’s not clear whether Reddit will continue to offer API access to select researchers.
The company also shared that it’s overhauling its moderation infrastructure. Reddit’s expanding tests of its LLM-based moderation system, Rules Hub, which allows subreddit moderators to control how rules are enforced. According to Reddit, Rules Hub is an improvement over the longtime AutoMod system because it’s able to “to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases” since it can interpret the “intent of a rule” rather than relying on keyword matching. A Reddit spokesperson said the company’s goal is for Rules Hub “to eventually replace the AutoMod enforcement capabilities” but that “all other aspects of AutoMod will remain.”
