‘Hardly disagree’: Reddit’s mandatory login change sparks backlash as users fear it will go the same way as Pinterest
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- Reddit has announced plans to switch to a primarily login experience
- This would mean that most of the site will not be accessible without creating and logging into an account.
- Reddit users seem almost universally unhappy with this planned change.
Reddit, a site that once had the tagline “the front page of the Internet,” looks like it will become much less accessible and therefore much less of a home page, as the company plans to require users to log in.
Currently, you can access virtually the entire site without having to log in or create an account, and this has many advantages. It means that people who get there through search results can find the information they’re looking for more easily and seamlessly, and it means that you can browse Reddit without giving the site any information about yourself or being subject to any personalization algorithms.
But in a post on the site, CEO Steve Huffman (known as Spez on Reddit) explained that the site will now evolve to become a primarily login experience.
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Testing of this change will begin in select markets outside the US in the coming months, but once the details have been worked out and tested, it appears this change will become global and permanent.
According to Huffman, this is being done because it’s “better for the user experience, better for our advertising business, more in line with security standards, and more protective of Reddit’s data,” but despite Huffman’s claims, it’s a change that isn’t going over well with users.
Taking a worrying path
Responses to Huffman’s post include “strongly disagree,” “knew things were going to get worse,” and “really fascinating to witness how a CEO constantly acts against the best interests of his company,” among many others. In fact, almost all the responses to the post are negative.
Beyond not wanting to be forced to log in for all the reasons above, users are also concerned that this change will take Reddit down the same path as Pinterest. As one commenter said, “this sounds exactly like what Pinterest did…and then Pinterest kind of died.”
So this looks like it will be a bad change for almost everyone except Reddit’s upper management, although if it dies then it will be bad for them too. Hopefully, though, if this leads to a significantly worse experience, we’ll see an alternative emerge to take its place, like companies like Bluesky and Threads did when Twitter became X. Still, it would be sad to see Reddit go away.
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