from the fun-while-it-lasted dept

While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz’s role in “founding” Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company’s early journey. His “infogami” project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access to information — which was Swartz’s lifelong mission. The code behind infogami is considered instrumental in the launch of the Internet Archive’s Open Library.

So it’s a real shame that Reddit has been doing its best to hammer the final nails into the coffin of the open internet. The latest, of course, is Huffman announcing that Reddit is moving to a “logged-in-only” experience.

Reddit will start testing the login requirement in “select,” non-US markets in Q4. The company will use those tests to decide what a logged-in-only Reddit will look like “globally,” per Huffman.

“Pretty much all of the major ad-based platforms have gone through this transition.…