Reddit is planning unspecified changes to its 21-year-old legacy desktop web experience, known as Old Reddit. The company intends to protect its platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming through these updates.
A Reddit admin named boat-botany stated that the logged-out experience on Old Reddit is a significant source of automated traffic and abusive scraping on the platform.
We can't promise it will be around forever
The company is also planning to migrate moderator workflows and critical bots from the Old Reddit interface to its modern stack.
API restrictions and moderation shifts
Reddit's efforts to manage data access include phasing out its public API by restricting new requests and requiring third-party applications to transition to the Reddit Developer Platform (Devit). This follows a 2023 decision to charge for API access, a move designed to prevent generative AI companies from using platform data to train large language models for free. Those 2023 changes effectively ended most third-party Reddit clients, resulting in a site-wide protest.
The API shift will apply to all API apps, with the exception of those explicitly granted exceptions by the company. To encourage this transition, Reddit reportedly offered a $1 million app migration program to incentivize developers to switch to the new platform.
In tandem with infrastructure changes, Reddit is testing a Large Language Model (LLM) based moderation system called Rules Hub. The system is intended to improve the existing AutoMod system by using intent interpretation to better handle natural language, nuance, and edge cases.
To eventually replace the AutoMod enforcement capabilities
While Rules Hub aims to replace certain enforcement capabilities, other aspects of AutoMod are expected to remain. These developments occur alongside broader legal and technical measures against unauthorized scraping, including lawsuits against Perplexity and Anthropic, blocking the Internet Archive, and restricting crawler access for search engines that do not have deals with the company.
Reddit spokesperson Rosa Kim stated that the company is exploring different options for Old Reddit, though no hard timeline has been established. Kim noted that the company will work directly with developers, moderators, and communities that depend on these systems to provide updates.
