Reddit announces a huge change: it will 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 range of topics. I know I’m not the only person adding “reddit” to many Google searches to find answers to things written by real humans rather than robots. But that openness made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to sue over alleged unauthorized access to its data and to make changes to the product, such as limiting access to “Old Reddit.”
There is no firm timeline on when this change will be rolled out to all users, or how the site will work if you are logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and he’s not logged in, what will he see?) For starters, Reddit will test the login requirement in “select markets outside the United States” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We will look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the entire Reddit ecosystem, determine where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and re-released the Reddit app’s incognito mode.
Huffman says the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and advertising business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized access to Reddit occurs “through our logout experiences,” although the company still enters into licensing deals for its data with companies, such as the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit doesn’t need to know the identity of a logged in user – “Honestly, we don’t want to know” – just that the user is logged in at all. And he claims that more connected users allow the company to serve “more relevant ads.”
“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed loginless access to virtually all of Reddit for the past two decades,” Huffman said. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open Internet, this is 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 third quarter 2026 results, released today. Search traffic “decreased significantly” in the third quarter, Huffman said in the company’s shareholder letter, with offline traffic and web traffic most heavily impacted. “In October, we saw that search traffic dropped by over a million referrals on average per week,” says Huffman.
However, Huffman notes that daily active and logged in unique users account for “over 80% of monetization on Reddit,” which he says is “a testament to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”
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