Earlier today I started getting a "Get the app to keep using Reddit" popup when browsing while logged out on my phone. (I prefer to use Firefox Android exclusively in private mode to reduce the temptation to doom scroll and to have the added friction of manually logging in when commenting on any site.)
Unlike the prior nag screens, this one was modal, blocked any scrolling, and had no way to close it. It seemed to pop up about 15 seconds after I first start scrolling any page - either a list of threads on a subreddit, or a thread page itself.
Man I miss the old iOS-looking Reddit mobile (m.reddit.com, IIRC).
My Reddit account is now just a few months short of US drinking age. I've been using the site since before subreddits were a thing (back when the only topic-specific alternative to the general front page was programming.reddit.com). I've posted a lot, modded some, and stuck with them through a lot of stupid decisions over the years. But I'm beginning to think it's finally time to move on; I'm just not sure where to.
I started getting this occasionally months ago. I added these ublock rules and haven't been bothered since but I suspect they will change to a hard wall in future
! 28 Apr 2026 https://www.reddit.com
www.reddit.com###app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-direct > .bg-transparent
www.reddit.com###app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-direct
www.reddit.com###xpromo-bottom-sheet
reddit.com#?##app-upsell-blocking-bottom-sheet-seo:remove()
reddit.com#%#//scriptlet('prevent-addEventListener', 'touchmove', 'preventDefault')
reddit.com#%#//scriptlet('remove-class', 'rpl-scroll-lock|scroll-is-blocked', 'html, body', 'asap stay')
reddit.com#$#html, body, shreddit-app { overflow-y: scroll !important; -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch !important; touch-action: pan-y !important; overscroll-behavior: auto !important; }
www.reddit.com##.rpl-bottom-sheet
www.reddit.com##body:remove-class(rpl-scroll-lock)
insert double space following newline for <code></code> formatting or use double newline to force a break. double space before newline works on Reddit but not on HN
Difficult on mobile I wish hn would allow ``` blocks and not insist on blank lines to show new lines as I always forget to double space my bullet points too
It really gives me the heebie jeebies when people refer to Reddit (or any website) as an app, and in general demand that everything that used to be a simple website get turned into a data-hoovering Electron abomination.
Alas, you are already on the alternative. Hacker news feels like one of the last hold outs of the old internet.
Literally why I started to come here. r/programming because a derelict wasteland. What commentary you got was frivolous and unhelpful. Posts about CockroachDB there would all be jokes or other commentary on its name, while you'd have the engineers who created it in here. I started to notice a lot of posts with mediocre discussion had a related post in the r/hackernews. While I had come here now and then, I started to see that I could actually still learn stuff here and decided to skip the middle man.
It's been taking place over the last month. A workaround was incognito on browsers, till they blocked that. Then it was switching location through VPN, till they blocked that. Then it was going through TOR which they also ended up blocking and prompting the login/signup screen as with the previous workarounds.
This is all so that in a few months time they can say that demand for old.reddit.com has dropped so they'll no longer be supporting it and force everyone to use that horrible tiktok style layout, controlling every pixel of a users device and deciding what they see.
What a downhill ride this has been.
I noticed that too... There are still ways around it, but I don't think it'll last long. I don't know, I'm thinking of giving up on Reddit altogether
It's difficult for me to post on Reddit now; it's very restrictive, mainly because my karma score is too low. There will be even more restrictions going forward; AI automation is becoming too powerful.
It doesn't matter if you did post on Reddit: the userbase is so hostile that you'd be instantly downvoted unless it's one of the sub's existing 10 talking-points.
Are there any decent alternatives to reddit? When they finish killing off old reddit I'm gone, and will need a new time waster.
Lemmy (part of of fediverse), HN, Tildes, Lobste.rs.
I can’t seem to read comments on Lobsters or I don’t know where they are. Do I need an account to see the discussion over there?
Nope, I can see them just fine without any account. Not sure what the problem might be on your side. They're in the same place as on HN.
On desktop they're same as HN, on mobile click the number in the bubble on the far right hand side.
Australia here. I have been playing around with this on various machines.
It seems to be using some cookie system that is bypassing this for the moment. Older machines I have still can use it without issue. But a fresh browser on the same connection will be prompted for the login.
Regardless, it is clear what direction this is going in. Age verification is also being tested in some places.
I feel like I see so much AI generated text on reddit. I don't think the average redditor even notices that they're arguing with bots that are trying to astroturf
I'm visiting from EU in a private tab and not getting any login prompts or redirects, fwiw.
It seems to be random, I tried it a few times during the last few weeks due to people talking about it, and sometimes it lets me use old.reddit.com, while other times it redirects to the login page.
It’s been requiring login to old Reddit from Mexico for 1-2 months. In out
It does not require me to login. I am from Japan tho. Maybe this requirement is kind of European freedom stuff lol.
Places like Japan are always treated very differently on social media from the rest of the world. The system doesn't work, the contents don't work, memes don't work. They won't do anything that shrinks an already postage stamp sized Japanese community on Reddit.
I think it's just a divide and conquer approach: if they killed it everywhere at once, there would be a larger backlash, so they are careful to roll out the change gradually.
More or less it becomes like facebook and meta apps,.very intrusive login requirement to see content
Have people. Unable to see comments while not logged in. They hid the comments behind a login prompt.
It's still working for me, even in an incognito window.
It still works for me. Maybe they are still rolling out the change.
Yes. Works for me to. For now. They will pull the same shit they pulled with i.reddit.com
What did they do with i.reddit.com? That still works for me too as far as I know. But as long as I remember, it's needed some awful looking session identifier.
It cannot be possible.
i.reddit.com is 301 permanently moved to www.reddit.com
Is it really “keeping Reddit safe” or is Popular in United States still all the Indian teenagers subreddits because they’re still riding residential proxies into the site?
Oh the irony - the anti-ai movement will destroy companies that are best providers of ai training data.
The www.reddit.com shows me a banner after 10 seconds to login/signup. So annoying. I refresh multiple times to make that banner go away. It sometimes does sometimes doesn't. Such user hostile stuff.
3 or 4 zaps with uBlock Origin and you are good to go. The last layer is a fullscreen overlay that also needs to go.
Let's see how long it will last. Started yesterday during the evening.
And nothing of value was walled in.
Completely pointless smug comment, given that there are thousands of subcommunities of wildly varying quality.
I mean there is still some decent stuff but it is so rare nowadays. The value has been dropping for years.
I've seen many people point out that, despite AI being heralded as increasing engineering productivity by 10x or more, we don't seem to have gotten a decade worth of new disruptive sites and apps like we got multiple times a year in the early 2010s. Not that surprising to me, as product fit was always the bottleneck, rarely engineering.
But I can say that where AI and its externalities truly excel and have rapidly accelerated is in taking away or at least hobbling the value of many sites. This is another victim, I think. Reddit needs to figure out how to make money, and their main valuable asset now is a trove of somewhat organized (compared to, say, Discord) text conversations. They have so far been too incompetent to turn being one of the only way to get good results from google searches into revenue, so they're scuttling that with this and the normal site paywall in hopes of LLM corpus cash.
Last year they purged so many accounts and lost a ton of users, and now its full of AI bot slop accounts. I think the forced login is a way to bring back that engagement? Also i noticed they today hid comments behind"login to see the conversation on a mobile browser.