Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them. It is better for our business because we will have more signals for ads targeting, and being logged-in leads to higher engagement generally. It also allows us to protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data, and helps us better adapt to emerging regulations around the world.
Ostensibly, this is because people aren't going to reddit, they're going to their favorite LLM overlord and the LLM is then relying on data scraped in part from reddit. This means search-referral traffic is down.
“During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week. If this rate of decline continues, current trends would suggest that total DAUqs [or daily active unique users] could fall in Q4, by a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million DAUqs,” Huffman wrote.
I believe many people have predicted that the result of widespread use of LLMs would be the building of walls around every platform. X already requires logins to read, reddit seems to be coming soon. It seems like you can still view Instagram and TikTok posts without logging in (although the experience is a little clunky) and Facebook is semi-visible (only public pages can be viewed without login?)
I find this trend unpleasant: the open, public internet has been a source of great joy to me, and seeing it Balkanized like this is sad.
But also I think it is the opposite of what people should be doing: if anything we should be focusing on increasing the cost of posting on the internet, not reading. Or am I wrong about this?
You don't want to be in a position of fighting against demand trends.
If users are preferring to interact with a clanker, then the moves are something like a) make your service more appealing to human users or b) make the business model work with a primarily clanker audience.
Choosing c) make my service harder to use for both people and clankers, doesn't seem promising.
and this is why I have embraced zapping clankers
you prefer interacting with someone else's prompt from a few months ago that autogenerated a reply even while you could simply have a clanker reply to your own fit-for-purpose prompt if you were wondering about something?
Why?
Because I like zapping on here
Very nondiscriminative of you.
ZAP
Looks like they appreciate it
I wonder, like Ahab after his white whale, about the particular product that uses (c) to achieve (a).
this is good for stacker news
If we can pinpoint more exactly where monetary moderation starts and ends, then we can increase the associated costs too, I think, for us. It's not going to save reddit tho. Nor is it going to turn the tide on literacy or clankerless authorship, at least not globally.
Any effects will be local. Local has a lot of room to grow, but I doubt that it'll ever be mainstream, or even appealing to mainstream to pay more for anything. That's not the economy we live in, because there's no leverage at scale.
Only if you can leverage more will it work. Your entire life, PII, your home and your pension is already collaterized, but maybe your kidney is a good means to get something for free. Then you can move on without effort. Get your free stuff. And use it to get nothing, just like ultimately, no end user truly got anything meaningful from FB, Reddit or tiktok.
The best you could have gotten is disposable fake money.
Well said! Darn near poetry at the end there, sir -- even if it's tragic.
Saving Reddit isn't very interesting, but turning the tide on clankerless authorship sure is. It may even be the holy grail (for me, at least). It certainly confirms my feelings that working on this weird thing that is monetary moderation is worth the time.
Right. So perhaps my question is: how does one neutralize Cantillionaire Effects (of any form, i.e. fiats/bitcoins, cronies, skills) in favor of quality, in a monetary moderation system?
Personally, I can hardly imagine that an overtone of plutocracy, cronyism or even a technocracy is a desired outcome, despite any of these being a potential outcomes. Maybe I am wrong about that desirability, however, I think that all of these are boom/bust cyclic and deteriorating outside appeal during boom more than appreciating it during bust.
I currently have captured 230MB worth of 5-minute
litsnapshots since2026-09-05T10:20:02Z. Maybe one day it can be of use.Reddit bans anonymous accounts, if you use Reddit behind tor your posts get shadow banned and you do not even realize you are being censored. Reddit like X wants you to sign in so they can spy on your activities and log what you do. Boycott X and Reddit, both are horrible. If someone wants information heard they shouldn’t post on such platforms
I agree with you. The aggressive auto-moderation on Reddit is really frustrating. I can believe that some of it serves the purpose of defending communities from the onslaught of bots and spammers, but it also conveniently allows Reddit to harvest ever more data from users.
Who knows, maybe the internet will become such shit that people just go back to in-person living. The internet was cool, lot of great things, but a lot of harmful things too. If people unplug themselves from internet discourse and return to in-person communities, is that such a bad thing?
socially, perhaps not. But we've embedded connectivity into our lives so deeply at this point (banking, bill paying, work communication/coordination, shopping, recipes, and so on) it's hard to imagine a world without the non-social uses of the internet.
...and if we have connectivity, it's hard to imagine humans not using it for social purposes to.
My phone-free, internet-free, computer-free childhood wasn't bad at all. But, like the pre-industrialized world, I don't think we can ever get back to it.
I meant socially. I still think we'll have interconnected apps for banking, gaming, work, etc.
I don't know about the future of open message boards. The degradation of slop is too high. They'll gate things behind payment, reputation, proof-of-human, or something else.
I worry especially about the future of academic research and open source. Things that were primarily about the open production and sharing of information.
They should all accept defeat and open it all up.
They can't. The best they can achieve is 4chann style, but if you have visited that place lately you will recall that they require about 2 and a half minutes of captchas just to post (but you can read 4chann with just the cloudflare check -- although I don't know what is actually being done there).
Couldn’t be more thrilled about this change. Why? It forces me to stop using it.
I used Reddit some
Times in the worst way possible: mindless scrolling of what ever. I hate it. Some nights before bed I would tell myself over and over “no Reddit no Reddit no Reddit” just to find myself scrolling away with zero purpose.
Yeah, I have self control issues. Yeah, I’m an addict.
But leave it to inconvenience to break a bad habit. Ever since they implemented this, I don’t use it. And it was the only scrolling vice I had left.
Good riddance
That late night pre-bed scroll is the worst. The only solution is to remove the app from the phone and block the site in your browser. Or maybe develop a really strong habit of not bringing your phone into your bedroom.
Welcome to SN, Reddit refugees, the only barrier here is that you actually like to read and have something to say
Hmm. Maybe I should
wget -mWumbo's Reaction:
Doesn't quite make sense to me as they put it, I think they're just coping with the death of an old model they haven't updated.
Serving reads is relatively cheap and scales horizontally.
If clankers etc are reading stuff you host, some percentage of those clanker operators are going to create an account on the site. "There's no bad publicity" theory.
So this implies it's not about costs or new signups, but metrics that are somewhat arbitrary in the first place, what counts as an active user.
Users, perhaps otherwise registered already, are probably by-passing login to lurk via clanker and not counting. So this seems to be geared towards making lurking count toward DAU
Anonymous lurkers presumably make each ad served less valuable to the advertiser, but clankers drive up reads so you ultimately serve more ads. This I'd think this should make it a wash, make ad serving cheaper but do it 10x more... perhaps there's some exponential value with targeting we don't have insight into?
Chicken-egg problem, reddit afaik doesn't have any value-add to warrant charging to post.
If they started charging to post, there would be less posts, which runs contrary to their moat of network effect/being a corpus. Less posts erodes their lurker count, making posting there even less valuable. Doom Loop.
Pay-to-post is the shallow end of the pool, the "what" that ignores the how and the why. Can reddit say the poster is paying for curation? identity? data to construct the post more effectively? Not as constituted, I think they're simply trapped and are in the phase of squeezing out whatever value they can of posts that were made in a by-gone era.