When Reddit significantly changed its user interface way back in 2018, there were widespread protests from those who preferred the original. The company has retained access to this at old.reddit.com, and last year promised this version would continue to exist for as long as people kept using it.
That promise may now be under some degree of threat as Reddit says that it “plans to make changes” to Old Reddit in order to protect against AI data scraping …
Reddit already made a big change to help fight AI when it started introducing account verification procedures. But the company now says it needs to do more, and that this will involve changes to Old Reddit.
In order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming, over time we plan to make changes involving Old Reddit, the legacy desktop web experience for Reddit that was built 21 years ago.
The news post is brief and vague, stating that the first change we’ll see is a requirement to be logged-in while using it, and hinting at moderators being required to use the new AI.
In the short term, we will continue to require users to be logged in to access it and will work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack.
Beyond this, however, we don’t know what else may be in store for those who persist in using the older UI. CEO Steve Huffman promised last year that Old Reddit wasn’t going away, but how much of it will survive remains to be seen.
Reddit has also announced that more AI moderation tools will be used to help fight spam, abuse and rule breaking as it expands tests of its automated Rules Hub.
We’re expanding our test of Rules Hub, a suite of new moderation tools. With Rules Hub, moderators will be able to choose which rules should be automatically enforced, decide what happens when a rule is triggered (send to queue, filter, or remove), preview the experience before enabling it, and review logs and insights to understand how community rules are performing.
The platform says this approach is likely to be more effective than older auto-moderation tools that rely on exact keyword matching.
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Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!
