Reddit will make you log in to read it, and the first tests skip the US

Reddit is going to ask you to log in before you read it. Co-founder and chief executive Steve Huffman told shareholders that the site is shifting to what he called “a logged-in-only experience,” which ends the open browsing that let anyone land on a thread from a search engine and read it without an account. If you add “reddit” to the end of a Google query to find answers written by actual people, that habit is about to meet a sign-in screen.

The change will not arrive everywhere at once, and the United States is not first in line. Reddit will start testing the requirement in select markets outside the US and use those results to design the version everyone gets. That puts readers in Europe, Asia and Latin America at the front of the queue, and outside the US is where most of Reddit’s logged-out readers are.

The company’s own figures show how many people this touches. Reddit averaged 130.3 million daily active uniques in its third quarter, and 76.8 million of them were logged out, according to its letter to shareholders. That is 59 percent of its daily audience. Outside the US, logged-out visitors averaged 49.5 million a day, up 33 percent from a year earlier, against 30.1 million international users who were signed in.

Huffman gave three reasons in the letter. Logged-in users find more relevant communities, they give Reddit “more signals for ads targeting,” and a login requirement “allows us to protect access to Reddit’s extremely valuable corpus of data.” That last line is about AI. Reddit licenses its archive of posts to companies such as Google and OpenAI, and Huffman said the “vast majority” of unauthorized access to the site happens through its logged-out pages, as The Verge reported. He also wrote that the change helps Reddit “adapt to emerging regulations around the world,” which Engadget read as a likely nod to age-verification laws.

There is a second cause, and it sits on Google’s results page. Search referrals to Reddit were “down meaningfully” in the quarter, the letter says, and during October they fell by more than 1 million a week on average. If that pace holds, Reddit warns, its daily audience could shrink by a low-double-digit percentage this quarter. On the earnings call Huffman named the reason, as quoted by The Verge: “The reality is, AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody, as far as I know.” When Google’s AI answer sums up a thread at the top of the page, the click that used to send a reader to Reddit never happens.

What Reddit has not explained is where the wall will stand. In a post on Reddit, Huffman wrote that “there are still plenty of questions that are unanswered, particularly around where the boundaries should be between logged-in and logged-out experiences.” The company has acknowledged that a logged-out front page matters, and on the call Huffman said people arriving from a shared link or a search would see “some version of Reddit” before what he called “that hard prompt,” according to Engadget. How much of a thread that version shows is still undecided. Commenters under his announcement worried that Reddit will start to look like X or Pinterest, where a shared link often opens onto a login box, Android Authority reported.

An account does not have to carry your real name. Reddit usernames have always been pseudonyms, and Huffman said the company only needs to know that a reader is logged in, not who they are. “Honestly, we don’t want to know,” he said, according to The Verge. Reddit is also rebuilding the incognito mode in its app, which the letter links to people who delete and reinstall the app over and over.

The login requirement continues a long tightening. Reddit priced most third-party apps out of existence when it began charging for its API. Since July, Old Reddit, the classic text-heavy design many longtime users prefer, has required an account, and Reddit later cut it off for accounts that had not logged in within the previous six months. On mobile browsers the site already nudges visitors toward its app, although the letter says only about 13 percent of eligible mobile web users see that prompt so far.

The business case looks strong on paper. Reddit reported $895 million in revenue for the quarter, up 53 percent year over year, and net income of $283 million, up 74 percent. Logged-in and app users already account for over 80 percent of its monetization, the letter says. Huffman calls them the company’s “most valuable users.”

The first tests begin in the fourth quarter, which ends in December, in countries Reddit has not named, and there is no date for a global rollout. Huffman said the results will shape “an optimized version of logged-in-only Reddit globally.”

“This is a big change for Reddit, where we’ve allowed logged-out access to basically all of Reddit for the last two decades,” Huffman said. If you read Reddit without an account from outside the US, you may be among the first to see what an internet with a front door looks like.

Tags: Folarin Balogun, Baker Mayfield, Google, Gong Yoo, social media, reddit, Steve Huffman, AI Mode