Overview
- Reddit announced Thursday that it will run fourth‑quarter tests in unspecified markets outside the United States to make the site primarily accessible to logged‑in users.
- CEO Steve Huffman said the move aims to improve personalization and ad targeting by linking browsing to accounts and to limit automated scraping that he says mostly occurs when people are logged out.
- Key details about which pages will remain viewable without a login, how shared links and search results will behave, and which countries will be included will be decided during the tests.
- The company reported that 76.8 million of its 130.3 million daily active users were logged out in Q3 and that more than 80 percent of monetization comes from logged‑in and app users, and the stock fell over 17 percent after the announcement.
- The login tests follow a sequence of prior data controls — paid API access, an updated robots policy, planned RSS and public API shutdowns, data licences to firms like Google and OpenAI, and lawsuits accusing AI companies of unauthorized scraping — and could change how casual readers access Reddit.