New Delhi: Reddit is preparing to make users sign in before accessing its content, signalling a shift away from the platform’s largely open browsing experience. CEO Steve Huffman confirmed the plan in a letter to shareholders accompanying the company’s third-quarter 2026 results on 29 October.
The company will begin testing the feature in select markets outside the US during the fourth quarter, before deciding how to introduce a logged-in-only experience globally.
In his letter to shareholders, Huffman said that requiring users to log in would provide the platform with more information to personalise advertising and encourage engagement.
“Moving to primarily logged-in will ensure our users have the best Reddit experience possible, and can find the content and communities most relevant to them,” he wrote.
He added that being logged in would provide “more signals for ads targeting” and help protect “Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data”, while allowing the company to adapt to emerging regulations. Social media platforms are increasingly seeking to control how their vast collections of user-generated content are accessed and used by AI companies, including through licensing agreements. By placing content behind login requirements and restricting automated scraping, these companies can potentially monetise it through commercial partnerships with AI developers.
The announcement comes as Reddit faces declining traffic from search engines. According to data from the same letter, Huffman said search referrals fell by more than 1 million per week on average during October. He warned that daily active unique visitors could decline by “a low double-digit percentage” in the fourth quarter if the trend continues.
While not mentioned explicitly, this decline is linked to how AI chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini have supplanted traditional web browsing by providing answers within the chatbot itself.
The company’s third-quarter results, meanwhile, showed revenue rising by 53 per cent year-on-year to $895 million, while net income increased by 74 per cent to $283 million. Reddit’s global daily active unique users stood at 130.3 million during the quarter.
The announcement has also drawn criticism from Reddit users concerned about losing access to public discussions without creating an account. Discussions on subreddits such as r/technology and r/enshittification highlighted concerns that login requirements could discourage casual visitors and make it harder to discover communities through search engines.
After X and Instagram
Reddit’s proposed change follows similar moves by other major social media platforms. In June 2023, X introduced a login requirement that prevented logged-out visitors from viewing posts. Elon Musk attributed the restriction to efforts to prevent data scraping. However, the platform reversed the restriction within days, allowing users to view posts without signing in again.
Instagram adopted a more gradual approach in 2019, introducing prompts that required visitors to log in or register after viewing a limited number of posts on public profiles. The move was intended to encourage visitors to join the platform, while also preventing the secret stalking of profiles from users they have muted or blocked. This is a bigger problem for Instagram, where users are encouraged to be public and open.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
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