Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.

Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who appends “reddit” to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to “Old Reddit.”

There’s no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you’re logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren’t logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app’s incognito mode.

Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user’s identity — “Honestly, we don’t want to know” — just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver “more relevant ads.”

“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”

Reddit is making this announcement alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today. Search traffic was “down meaningfully” in Q3, Huffman says in the company’s shareholder letter, with logged-out traffic and web traffic being the most heavily impacted. “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” Huffman says.

However, Huffman notes that app and logged-in daily active unique users make up “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”

For chronological accuracy, I have been using the old name and gender when referring to a past, pre-transition person, and the new name and gender when referring to them generally.

But I had a realisation that this could be considered rude. I'd like to hear from some trans people on their opinion.

Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?

Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn't you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?

You can use uBlock Origin to block certain keywords in posts!

Why

If you're like me, you're really tired of seeing the lemmy homepage and every community fill up with really bad news from the US.

How

First, open the uBlock Origin dashboard, navigate to My Filters tab and add the appropriate line.

# lemmy.world
# thanks to /u/zkfcfbzr
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Musk|ICE|Vance|slop|Microsoft|Grok|Republican|Democrat|Republicans|GOP|Democrats/i)

# lemmy.zip
lemmy.zip##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Musk|ICE|Vance|slop|Microsoft|Grok|Republican|Democrat|Republicans|GOP|Democrats/i)

Because the Lemmy HTML is generally the same on each instance, the above should work if you change the first part to the Lemmy domain. Then replace the | pipe separated keywords with your own list.

Here are some other things you can do:

# filter comments
# thanks to /u/Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
lemmy.world##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/trump/i)))

# filter posts with certain words, with exceptions
# thanks to /u/zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3/i):not(:has-text(/word4|word5|word6/i))

Originally posted a year ago.

This 1960s Auto Worker hated his job. He felt like a robot. He felt that his job had little meaning and was unbelievably repetitive and boring. He said that he came home from work feeling like a zombie. And he didn't see automation coming - automation that would change his job forever. Change it for the better? Or change it for the worse?

Herbert Slater worked on automobile assembly line in 1964. He was an industrial worker who had not graduated high school. He bluntly described how he felt in this film clip. He felt a complete lack of connection to the work he was doing. He was trying to figure out a way to improve his life and his depression. He was not thinking about the coming of automation, AI, and the rapid changes that were coming as we moved from the industrial age to the information age.

Also presented in this clip is Edwin Land, the founder and CEO of Polaroid who was aware of these kinds of repetitive mind-numbing jobs and could see the coming of automation as having value for some and creating less available work for others. He and the management at Polaroid were trying to figure out what to do about this for their employees and for the company.

At the time, I was a young documentary filmmaker/cameraman and felt so good about my work. I couldn't see myself working on one of those production lines even though they had a secure salary and job. Those workers didn't think they could ever be fired (although a few hoped that they would be).

At the time, I also didn't see the coming of the information age and of information technology and of automation. So I recorded people like Herbert sympathetic to their situation but with no advice for how they could improve their lives and the lives of their families. I also did not know enough about depression to see just how depressed Herbert Slater felt.

From the video description.

In my country, Australia, there were six long lockdowns. Not being able to socialise regularly over that chunk of a few years could have affected people.

I am Gen Y and in my early-mid 30s now. I was actually homeschooled my entire life. I felt that being homeschooled really affected my ability to socialise. I was learning basic social skills into my mid 20s, which was fairly embarrassing for me.