Reddit will force everyone to log in

Reddit will force everyone to log in.

Reddit 将强制要求所有人登录。

Reddit is becoming a ‘logged-in-only experience,’ says CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit is announcing a huge shift: It’s going to start requiring users to log in.

Reddit 首席执行官 Steve Huffman 表示，Reddit 正在转变为一种“仅限登录”的体验。Reddit 宣布了一项重大转变：它将开始要求用户登录。

Right now, you can browse Reddit without having an account, and the site is generally a great resource for crowdsourced information on a whole range of topics. I know I’m not the only person who appends “reddit” to a lot of Google searches to find answers to things written by actual humans instead of robots. But that openness has made it a target for scraping and automated traffic, leading Reddit to file lawsuits over alleged unauthorized access of its data and make product changes like limiting access to “Old Reddit.”

目前，你无需账户即可浏览 Reddit，该网站通常是获取各类主题众包信息的绝佳资源。我知道我并不是唯一一个在谷歌搜索时加上“reddit”以寻找由真人而非机器人撰写的答案的人。但这种开放性使其成为了数据抓取和自动化流量的目标，导致 Reddit 就所谓的未经授权的数据访问提起诉讼，并做出了一些产品调整，例如限制对“旧版 Reddit”的访问。

There’s no definitive timeline on when this change will roll out to all users, or how the site will work if you’re logged out. (If I send my friend a link to a thread and they aren’t logged in, what will they see?) To start, Reddit will test the logged-in requirement in “select markets outside the US” in the “coming months,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. “We’ll look at the impact on the user experience, on our business, and on the whole Reddit ecosystem, figure out where the right boundaries are, and go from there.” Reddit has also rebuilt and is rereleasing the Reddit app’s incognito mode.

目前还没有关于这一变化何时向所有用户推广，或者如果用户处于登出状态网站将如何运作的明确时间表。（如果我给朋友发送一个帖子的链接，而他们没有登录，他们会看到什么？）据首席执行官 Steve Huffman 称，Reddit 将在“未来几个月”内首先在“美国以外的部分市场”测试登录要求。“我们将观察其对用户体验、我们的业务以及整个 Reddit 生态系统的影响，找出合适的界限，并以此为基础继续推进。”Reddit 还重建并重新发布了 Reddit 应用的无痕模式。

Huffman claims the login requirement is better for Reddit’s user experience and its ads business and is “more protective of Reddit data.” The “vast majority” of unauthorized Reddit access happens “through our logged-out experiences,” though the company will still strike licensing deals of its data with companies, like the deals it made with OpenAI and Google in 2024. Huffman notes that Reddit does not need to know a logged-in user’s identity — “Honestly, we don’t want to know” — just that the user is logged in at all. And he says that more logged-in users lets the company deliver “more relevant ads.”

Huffman 声称，登录要求对 Reddit 的用户体验和广告业务更有利，并且能“更好地保护 Reddit 数据”。绝大多数未经授权的 Reddit 访问都是“通过我们的登出体验”发生的，尽管该公司仍将与 OpenAI 和 Google 等公司达成数据许可协议（类似于 2024 年达成的协议）。Huffman 指出，Reddit 不需要知道登录用户的身份——“老实说，我们不想知道”——只需要知道用户已登录即可。他还表示，更多的登录用户可以让公司投放“更相关的广告”。

“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 says. “And I don’t know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it’s a big change for me. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business.”

“这对 Reddit 来说是一个巨大的变化，因为在过去的二十年里，我们基本上允许对所有 Reddit 内容进行免登录访问，”Huffman 说。“我不知道你怎么想，但作为一个生活在开放互联网时代的人，这对我来说是一个巨大的改变。但我得出的结论是，这对我们的平台和业务来说是正确的决定。”

Reddit is making this announcement alongside its Q3 2026 earnings, which were released today. Search traffic was “down meaningfully” in Q3, Huffman says in the company’s shareholder letter, with logged-out traffic and web traffic being the most heavily impacted. “During October, we have seen that search traffic has dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week,” Huffman says.

Reddit 在发布 2026 年第三季度财报的同时宣布了这一消息。Huffman 在致股东信中表示，第三季度搜索流量“大幅下降”，其中登出流量和网页流量受到的影响最为严重。“在十月份，我们观察到搜索流量平均每周减少了超过 100 万次引荐，”Huffman 说。

However, Huffman notes that app and logged-in daily active unique users make up “over 80% of the monetization on Reddit,” which he says “speaks to the strength of Reddit as a destination and the impact of our ongoing product work.”

然而，Huffman 指出，应用端和已登录的每日活跃独立用户占“Reddit 变现来源的 80% 以上”，他认为这“证明了 Reddit 作为目的地的实力，以及我们持续进行的产品工作所产生的影响。”