Reddit Keeps Bricking Up The Open Web, One Login Wall At A Time

While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz's role in founding" Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company's early journey. His infogami" project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access to information - which was Swartz's lifelong mission. The code behind infogami is considered instrumental in the launch of the Internet Archive's Open Library.

So it's a real shame that Reddit has been doing its best to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the open internet. The latest, of course, is Huffman announcing that Reddit is moving to a logged-in-only" experience.

Reddit will start testing the login requirement in select," non-US markets in Q4. The company will use those tests to decide what a logged-in-only Reddit will look like globally," per Huffman.

Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition. We are excited and moving quickly," the CEO added, noting Reddit's intent to become a direct daily habit for every Internet user."

Huffman admits that he's doing this in part because traffic from Google had declined massively, which can be (understandably) blamed on Google's AI summaries on search results.

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.

People have long known that for certain searches on Google you got better results by adding reddit" to the keywords you searched for, so that Reddit results got prioritized. At the time, people argued that this showed Reddit was becoming a better search engine than Google," and that the company had room to build on that and maybe even compete with Google.

It hasn't really turned out that way. Over the last few years, Reddit and Huffman seem to be seeing how much of the open web they can cut off in pursuit of locking things into silos they can charge for. You may recall three years ago when Reddit cut off a bunch of third party developers (some of whom made it possible for subreddit mods to do their job) all in pursuit of a paid API with the belief that by locking down its tools, the company could profit off the content of its users (despite Reddit not holding the copyright on their content, and not sharing any of the money it would make back with the content creators).

Reddit signed a big $60 million/year API deal with Google, and that should have been seen as the beginning of the end. Now, instead of working on making its site better for users, Reddit was deep down the enshittification curve of making it worse for users to support its business partners who paid the bills. Last year we called out the company for its horrifyingly problematic lawsuit against SerpApi, in which it claimed that because SerpApi made Google search results available to third parties as an API, it violated the DMCA 1201's anti-circumvention clause.

The whole thing made little sense, because it was difficult to see how Reddit could claim standing with a straight face. It was complaining about a service that operated on Google, not Reddit, that made it possible that others could find links to Reddit posts, with content from Reddit's users (again, not Reddit's own IP). That case is still ongoing, but it was yet another attack on the open internet by Reddit, as it seeks to wall off the openness in pursuit of a form of scarcity it can charge extra for.

And, certainly, part of this new effort is in the hopes that the more they lock up their own content, the more they may be able to cut licensing deals.

Cutting off logged-out visitors is just the latest step. In Huffman's writeup, he admits that this is an anti-open internet move, which he claims is new to him:

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.

But, again, Huffman has been moving squarely in this direction for the past three years, so I wouldn't say it's entirely accurate to say this is a big change" for him.

Huffman and Reddit think this will lock more users into Reddit, but I would bet that long term it will do the opposite. Just as locking down the API to cut a deal with Google didn't bring more traffic to Reddit itself, locking out logged-out readers seems likely to push people toward alternative sources of information rather than into Reddit's silo. Huffman argues that logged in users are more profitable and valuable for the company, so is betting that this strategy will trade drive-by visitors for more valuable logged-in users, but I wouldn't take that bet.

There is some extra irony here as well, given that when the Australian government began pushing its under 16 social media ban" and included Reddit in the list of social media, we were told it wasn't really a ban, because you could still enjoy Reddit without an account. You just couldn't have an account if you were under 16. But now, if you don't have an account, you'll be much more limited in what you can access. There apparently will still be a front page that you can read without logging in, and they want to build some sort of incognito" mode, but the site is clearly moving to a siloed logged-in experience.

It's also why I'm concerned about efforts to require a license for all scraping, which is exactly the logic behind Reddit's lawsuit. That would also be the death of the open internet. The more we wall off the internet to fight AI, the more we lose the wonders and value of an open internet. If people want to support a true open internet, where anyone can build, we're going to have to figure out a better overall system than just putting up walls and saying everything must be licensed.

Meanwhile, I'm extremely biased on this, but I will note that ATproto Spaces has been in alpha for a couple months now and should be more widely available soon. And one thing it will enable developers to do is to create Reddit-like spaces on the open internet that no central entity can control. As the old web starts closing down, perhaps we can see the rise of a new open web, where the users are in control, rather than giant companies on the enshittification curve.