Wes Bos
Teaches web development through free and paid video courses, including JavaScript30, React for Beginners, and Learn Node, which together have sold tens of thous...
“I think the reality is that they want you to be signed in so they can serve you customized ads, and they want to stop all of these people from scraping all of the data from it, because the big ones like Claude have to respect Reddit being like, hey, don't scrape us, if you don't pay us you can't scrape us. We're starting to see that on a lot of websites. Amazon doesn't like you using agents. Taobao, you can't use an agent without getting your account locked. A lot of people are starting to say, we're not simply just going to be the fount of information while our business goes into the ground. We need you guys to pay us.”
Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Introducing the news that Reddit is making everyone log in, Bos gives his reading of why: it is part of a wider move by websites to stop free scraping and make AI companies pay for content.
Transcript
Now you know it's good.
Yes. Cool. And you don't have to log in to use it, which was one of the things people are always grumping about. You don't got to log in to use this. You just use it. Yeah.
All right. Let's talk about Reddit. You guys ready for Reddit? Let's do it. Reddit is closing its doors. So let me tell you what we mean by that. Reddit took, I don't know, a couple, about a year ago, Reddit took $60 million from Google to allow Google to use their data in their search summaries, right? You search something, you get the little summary that comes up. And as much as us like tech guys say, say we hate it, it's actually pretty good. It's pretty good. Like for a lot of quick little queries, it actually is pretty good. And a lot of that data of like what happens when you do X, Y, and Z, a lot of that comes from Reddit, right? So Reddit took that money. Then they don't see people actually click through to Reddit to read it anymore. So their traffic has like gone quite down. Their stock has dropped 29%. And I think in addition to that, Reddit is just getting absolutely hammered. Like every website with any valuable information, they're getting absolutely hammered by agents just scraping them for data so that when somebody queries how to do X, Y, and Z, they can use that as context in the result, right? And we're starting to see like cracks on that is if you search, if you ask Claude to like solve something, it will not find Reddit threads. And like at one point, I was just like doing a little bit of Googling myself and asking Claude some questions and it like clearly didn't know the answer. And…
yeah well it would be i think that's totally fine honestly i'm never not logged into reddit i always have reddit login so for me not being logged in is not a problem i i don't have any any issues with that personally uh just because i've been a user of that site for like yeah a billion and a half…
well daniel in the chat who works on a third-party reddit app i think he was the guy that initially informed us of the like react native loophole where if you sign in with a web view you can then close that web view and use that as a portal back and forth between that they they've been sending…
yeah i i don't like it but i know it's needed um because i mean i'm a long time reddit user like i'm actually not logged into reddit in a lot of places uh just because like i don't want the cookie tracking and all of that and and i like search for something i find the results and then click into…
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