# Reddit Wants You Logged In. Discord Wants You on Google.

> Two announcements, two days apart. Reddit is putting the whole site behind a login after three years of closing doors on the people who built it, and Discord is opening public servers up to search. Neither one is giving communities their data back.

2026-11-04 · Tim Cadenbach · https://www.tcdev.de/blog/reddit-locks-up-discord-opens-up/

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Last Tuesday Discord [announced](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/27/discord-is-making-its-public-communities-more-searchable-and-people-have-concerns/) that its public servers are getting their own web pages and that messages from them will start showing up in search results in December. Two days later Steve Huffman went on Reddit's Q3 earnings call and said Reddit is moving to a [logged-in-only experience](https://www.engadget.com/2301687/reddit-will-move-to-logged-in-only-as-ai-eats-search-traffic/), starting with a test in "select markets" outside the US.

So in the same week, the two biggest places where communities hang out online went in completely opposite directions. One is opening up, the other is locking the last door that was still open.

What stuck with me was how Huffman framed it. In [his own words](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/10/30/0155237/reddit-will-force-everyone-to-log-in) the login wall is "more protective of Reddit data". Reddit data! That's twenty years of people answering each other's questions for free, about cars and tax returns and broken Docker builds, and on an earnings call it's the company's data. (Looking at how Reddit has treated that stuff for the last three years, I don't think it was a slip.)

The other reasons are the usual mix. Logged-in users give more signals for ad targeting, search referrals [dropped by more than a million a week in October](https://www.engadget.com/2301687/reddit-will-move-to-logged-in-only-as-ai-eats-search-traffic/) because Google's AI Mode answers the question without sending anyone over, and according to Reddit the "vast majority" of unauthorized access comes through the logged-out site. Since the test runs outside the US first and I'm sitting in Germany, there's a decent chance I get to watch this one up close.

## Three years of Reddit closing doors, one at a time

None of this came out of nowhere. If you line up the last three years it's a very consistent story, it just never got told as one.

It started with the API in 2023. Reddit announced that big third-party apps would have to pay, and Apollo's developer Christian Selig worked out that at $0.24 per 1,000 calls it would cost him [about $20 million a year](https://waxy.org/2023/05/reddits-new-api-pricing-would-cost-apollo-20-million-annually/) to keep his app running. Apollo [shut down on June 30](https://www.shacknews.com/article/135875/apollo-reddit-app-shutdown-api) along with most of the other good clients. Thousands of subreddits [went dark in protest](https://www.imore.com/apps/heres-how-we-got-to-a-reddit-blackout-happening-right-now), and Reddit's answer to the ones that stayed closed was to throw the moderators out. r/malefashionadvice ended up with [a replacement mod team picked by Reddit](https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/09/reddit-male-fashion-advice-mod-take-over-api-protest/), made of people with next to no experience running that kind of community.

Then the money showed up. By early 2024 Reddit had signed data licensing deals [worth $203 million](https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/reddit-says-its-made-203m-so-far-licensing-its-data/) over two to three years, with Google's reportedly worth about $60 million a year on its own. And once the content has a price tag, everyone who reads it for free becomes a problem:

- July 2024, the robots.txt [blocks every crawler except Google's](https://9to5google.com/2024/07/24/reddit-search-engine-block-google-deal/), so Bing and DuckDuckGo stop showing new Reddit posts.
- August 2025, the Wayback Machine [gets cut down to archiving the homepage](https://gizmodo.com/reddit-is-blocking-the-wayback-machine-from-archiving-posts-2000641546), because AI companies were apparently scraping Reddit through the archive.
- October 2025, Reddit [sues Perplexity and three scraping firms](https://searchengineland.com/reddit-sues-perplexity-serpapi-scraping-google-463681). My favourite bit of that complaint is that Reddit made a test post only Google could see, and it turned up in Perplexity's results within hours.
- June 30 this year, [old.reddit starts requiring a login](https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/reddit-is-ending-anonymous-browsing-on-old-reddit-and-longtime-users-are-not-happy/), and by the end of September that's [narrowed again to accounts that actually used old Reddit in the last six months](https://runtimewire.com/article/reddit-restricts-old-reddit-six-month-usage).

Every one of those steps came with a reason that sounds fine on its own, whether that's abusive scraping, AI freeloaders or privacy for deleted posts. And to be fair, the AI scraping is real. Perplexity's citations of Reddit allegedly went up fortyfold after Reddit told them to stop. But look at who got locked out each time. The app developers, the archive, the other search engines, the old.reddit diehards, and next it's everyone without an account, which is quite a move for a site that grew up on people landing from Google. The only ones who keep a key are the AI companies with a signed contract.

## So who actually owns a subreddit?

The blackout answered that in 2023, and it's not the people in it.

The mods thought they did. They built those communities, wrote the rules and cleaned out the spam for nothing, and then Reddit replaced whole mod teams the moment they got inconvenient. As far as I know a subreddit has never had an export button. Its mods don't get a vote on which AI company licenses what their members wrote, and soon they won't get a say in whether strangers can read it either.

If your open source project, your product or your hobby community runs its support through a subreddit, I'd take this seriously now rather than later. You're a tenant, the landlord has been changing the locks for three years, and you never had a copy of the place anyway. The day your users can't find the answer on Google without making an account first, a lot of them just won't bother....and nobody's going to send you a notification about it.

## Meanwhile Discord is doing pretty much the opposite, and I'm not sure how I feel about it

Discord has been the black hole of community knowledge for years, and I'm part of that. When I started the [MadeWithCards Discord](https://www.tcdev.de/blog/madewithcards-updates-february-22/) back in 2022, the reason I gave was that the entry barrier was way lower than the alternatives and it was free for everyone. All true. It also means every Adaptive Cards answer anyone ever gave in there is invisible to the next person googling the same problem. And when I sketched out the [paid tier for Smoower](https://www.tcdev.de/blog/smoower-two-questions/), one of the first things on the list was a Discord bot, because so much real community lives in Discord and none of it shows up in a public crawl.

Now Discord wants to change that. Starting November 16, every Discoverable Server (the public, listed ones with at least 1,000 members, [about 63,000 of them](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/discord-to-let-search-engines-index-public-server-messages/)) gets its own web page with automatic summaries of what's being discussed. From mid-December, selected messages can show up in search results. Admins pick which channels go public, members can opt out in their settings, usernames and avatars aren't shown, and DMs and private servers stay out of it. In the EU, the UK and a handful of other countries it's [off by default for legal reasons](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/27/discord-is-making-its-public-communities-more-searchable-and-people-have-concerns/).

The part I actually like is where the decision sits. Reddit decided centrally that nobody without an account gets to read your community anymore. Discord at least lets the people running a server pick what goes out onto the open web and lets members say no, which is more of a say than Reddit has offered anyone since 2023.

But I'm honestly not sure it's good. People posted in those servers assuming it would stay in the server, and the opt-out [only covers future messages](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/discord-to-let-search-engines-index-public-server-messages/), so whatever already went public stays public. Plenty of users are already worried it ends up as AI training data, which after watching Reddit is a pretty fair worry. And Discord has its own reasons. It [filed confidentially for an IPO](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/securities-law/chat-platform-discord-is-said-to-file-confidentially-for-ipo) in January, and a company heading for the stock market wants traffic it can show investors. It's a funny bet to make in the same week Reddit told its investors that search traffic is drying up.

## Both of them still own the house

Opening windows is nicer than locking doors, for sure. But as far as I can tell there's still no button that hands a server owner their community's history in a format they could take anywhere else. The channels, the threads, years of people helping each other, all of it still lives on Discord's machines under Discord's rules, and those rules can change the next time someone needs a better quarter. Reddit just showed everyone how that goes.

Discord opened some windows. The keys are still in San Francisco.

That's the bit neither announcement touches. Both platforms grew on free work from the people who run communities, and both treat what those people built as something the platform gets to decide about. One decided to lock it up, the other decided to put it on Google, and the communities got a settings toggle at best.

## Which is why I'm building Wridder

I'm not neutral on this one, so let me just say it. I'm building [Wridder](https://wridder.com), a community platform for the internet we actually have now, with AI agents showing up in conversations, nobody quite sure who's human anymore, and platforms quietly making money from what their communities write. It started from exactly the stuff in this post. Communities build the knowledge and the trust, and they get almost no say in how it's used, who gets to read it, or whether it ends up training someone else's model. It's built here in Germany and it's still early, which is kind of the point of telling you now.

You can reserve your @handle today. It goes on a founding wall for your country (your email stays private), it becomes your profile at wridder.com/u/yourhandle once we launch, and the founding generations keep their perks for good. If you run a project or a community, organizations can reserve a founding spot too.

The good short handles always go first. Go grab yours at [wridder.com](https://wridder.com) before someone else in your country does.