The end of open Reddit: no login, no reading

Reddit is about to do something it hasn't done in almost two decades: shut the site to anyone who isn't logged in. CEO Steve Huffman announced the shift alongside the company's third quarter results, calling the future Reddit a "logged-in-only experience."

There's no timeline for everyone yet. Reddit will first test the login requirement in select markets outside the US in the coming months, look at the impact on users and the business, and then decide where the boundaries go. It is also rebuilding and rereleasing the incognito mode in its app.

The reason is blunt. People increasingly get answers from AI search and never click through, and Reddit feels it directly: search traffic was down meaningfully in the quarter, and in October the site lost more than a million search referrals a week on average. US daily users fell from 53.2 million to 50.7 million, and the company warned that if the trend holds, overall daily users could drop by a low double digit percentage next quarter.

The other reason is data. Huffman says the vast majority of unauthorized access to Reddit, meaning scraping for AI training, happens through the logged-out experience. Closing it protects what Reddit sells to AI companies under license, like its 2024 deals with OpenAI and Google. Logged-in users also mean "more relevant ads." Huffman insists Reddit doesn't need to know who you are, only that you're logged in: "Honestly, we don't want to know."

The money looks fine: quarterly revenue rose 53% to $895 million and net income jumped 74% to $283 million. Huffman admits it's a big change for someone whose life was defined by the open internet, but says it's the right call.

Adding "reddit" to your search query may soon stop working without an account.