If you're a Reddit user who prefers the old Reddit platform, colloquially referred to as "Old Reddit," over the newly designed one, then you're going to want to pay attention to this.
According to Reddit, the company will start blocking Old Reddit for Redditors that haven't used Old Reddit in the previous six months.
Reddit previously limited Old Reddit only to users who are logged into their account.
"In the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users)," Reddit posted in r/modnews.
The Reddit employee who posted this news added that this change will not apply to logged-in platform mods. They can continue to use Old Reddit without any usage requirements.
This latest move appears to point to the company eventually moving away from the old version of the platform, although Reddit has not yet committed to that publicly, at least.
"We’re still working on the future of Old Reddit," the employee posted alongside the usage announcement.
These changes over at Reddit, including the recently announced shutdown of RSS feeds and its public API, have been attributed to the rise of AI bots, according to the company.
"Earlier this year, we required people to log in to use Old Reddit, addressing its largest source of abusive scraping and automated traffic: unauthenticated access," Reddit said in its latest update. "That change helped reduce scraping and automated abuse, but still allowed any logged-in account to access Old Reddit, including accounts with no prior Old Reddit use."
This six-month usage requirement will be introduced to "close the gap," according to the company.
Reddit is not shutting the door on AI. The company has become a favorite source for many AI chatbots. As a result, Reddit has discovered that licensing deals with AI companies can be quite lucrative for the social platform. These latest moves are intended to shut out the AI bots that are scraping the platform's content for free.
