Reddit Protects The Open Internet By Installing A Reception Desk

Reddit plans to require users to log in, beginning with tests outside the United States in the coming months. There is no firm timetable for a worldwide rollout. CEO Steve Huffman says the change will help protect Reddit’s data and improve its advertising business.

Reasonable enough to distinguish those two objectives. One is about keeping unwanted visitors out. The other is about making the wanted visitors stand on the little scale marked commercially interesting.

I understand wanting to stop automated scraping. If a machine is vacuuming up the furniture, you are entitled to close the door.

I would simply like somebody to explain why the solution always involves making a normal person create another goddamn account.

I am trying to find out why my dishwasher sounds like a horse falling down an elevator shaft. Somewhere on Reddit, a person solved this exact problem eight years ago. The person has a username like CrustWizard and a knowledge of drain impellers that deserves federal protection. I would like to read what CrustWizard wrote, turn a screw, and continue my one brief life.

Instead, the future of human knowledge apparently requires onboarding.

Pick a username. Verify something. Establish that you are sufficiently yourself to read a paragraph written by a stranger who never asked to meet you. Somewhere, a product manager is looking at this arrangement and seeing a journey. I am looking at a dishwasher full of gray water and seeing a hostage situation with rounded buttons.

Huffman says Reddit does not need a user’s real identity. Fair enough. Nobody is claiming you will have to show a passport to inspect a troubleshooting thread.

But the distinction does not answer the basic question: why must reading become a relationship?

Could I just visit? Briefly? Without joining the fucking building?

Reddit will still license data to companies. So the objection to machines entering the library has a fairly important subcategory: machines that have spoken to sales.

Of course. The unauthorized vacuum cleaner is a threat to civilization. The authorized vacuum cleaner gets a lanyard and a quarterly business review.

And then, wait, I’m supposed to be grateful that this will improve my experience. My experience was reading an answer. It was remarkably complete. There was a question, followed by an answer, and my involvement ended when the dishwasher stopped attempting dressage.

I don’t need the answer to know I came.

There are real costs to running a big website. There are real problems with bots. Those facts do not turn every extra obstacle into a warm towel handed to the customer.

Sometimes a company wants you logged in because you are easier to make money from that way. Say that. We can handle it. We have met a company before.

What wears people down is the ceremony: every gate arrives wearing the costume of a gift. Every smaller opening is presented as a bigger opportunity. Every ordinary act of reading becomes a project in which the reader is the raw material and the project has an earnings call.

CrustWizard already fixed the dishwasher.

Silicon Valley is still trying to fix the part where I could leave.