Reddit, the American community forum platform, will make an account mandatory to access most of its content. Its co-founder and chief executive, Steve Huffman, announced this on 29 October 2026 in his letter to shareholders. Today, 76.8 million of its 130.3 million daily users read Reddit without being logged in. The first tests will take place in the fourth quarter of 2026, in countries outside the United States.
What Reddit announced
The change appears in the letter to shareholders published with the results for the third quarter of 2026 and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US securities regulator. In it, Steve Huffman announces Reddit's move to a "logged-in only" experience, then speaks of a "mostly logged-in" Reddit. "This is a big change for us, and for me," he writes.
It is a test to begin with. According to the letter, Reddit will start fully testing mandatory login in the fourth quarter, in selected markets outside the United States. The results will be used to define an "optimised" version for the whole world.
The details come from a post by Steve Huffman on Reddit, reported on 30 October 2026 by Inside IT, a Swiss IT news site. The home page would remain accessible without an account. Posts opened from a search engine or an external link would in principle remain visible. Reddit would decide only after the tests which content stays open without an account.
To read without linking their activity to their account, Reddit promises a revamped incognito mode in its app. According to Steve Huffman, quoted by Inside IT, this mode will allow users to read and search content. Commenting and voting will not be possible in it.
Why Reddit is requiring an account: the reasons given
Steve Huffman puts forward four reasons, in his letter and in his post. These are statements by the company:
- personalisation: "Reddit is now so big that, without some personalisation, it is simply no longer relevant, or worse, it no longer works," he writes, according to Inside IT;
- advertising: according to the letter, a logged-in user provides "more signals for ad targeting" and engages more;
- protecting Reddit's data: the letter aims to protect access to an "extremely valuable" body of data; according to Inside IT, most unauthorised access comes through logged-out visitors, notably through automated content harvesting (scraping) and artificial intelligence (AI) bots;
- regulation: login would help Reddit "better adapt to emerging regulations around the world", which the letter does not name.
The AI bot argument has a commercial counterpart. Inside IT points out that Reddit itself licenses its content to AI companies such as OpenAI. Its privacy policy states that third parties pay licensing fees to access large amounts of content.
Steve Huffman also says that privacy will not be sacrificed. An account would require neither a name nor an identity: "Honestly, we don't even want to know who you are," he writes, according to Inside IT. In his letter, he adds that almost all major advertising-funded platforms have already made this transition.
Logged-in or not: what the figures show
Logged-out visitors are in the majority, and they are the ones growing fastest. The tables in the letter to shareholders measure unique visitors active each day, averaged over the quarter.
| Daily users (millions) | 3rd quarter 2025 | 3rd quarter 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logged-in, worldwide | 50.2 | 53.5 | +7% |
| Logged-out, worldwide | 65.8 | 76.8 | +17% |
| of which logged-out outside the United States | 37.3 | 49.5 | +33% |
| Total | 116.0 | 130.3 | +12% |
Source: Reddit, letter to shareholders for the third quarter of 2026.
The economic weight is the reverse. According to the letter, logged-in users and app users account for "the vast majority" of engagement and more than 80% of Reddit's monetisation. Logged-out visitors to the website therefore account for less than 20% of revenue, by our calculation.
What is the link with the drop in traffic from Google?
The letter itself makes the link. Traffic sent by search engines fell "significantly" in the third quarter, and the decline accelerated towards the end of the period. The strongest effect is on logged-out traffic and the website, Reddit writes. The stock market's reaction to these results was covered in detail by 2clics in the article "Nasdaq en recul : Intel et Reddit chutent de 29 %".
Reddit puts a figure on the risk ahead. If the October trend continues, the total number of daily users could fall in the fourth quarter by a low double-digit percentage compared with the current base of 130 million. This is a company projection, not an observation.
Our analysis: mandatory login is a response to this decline. Reddit is mainly losing casual visitors, those who bring in the least. It is trying to turn those who stay into logged-in users, the group that generates most of its revenue. The letter also targets the app: only about 13% of eligible mobile web visitors currently see the prompt to install it.
Creating a Reddit account from Switzerland: what data?
Reddit's privacy policy, in force since 1 July 2026, details what an account involves. It still states that there is "no need for an account" simply to browse. Our reading: this sentence would no longer match practice if mandatory login were rolled out generally.
- Registration: a public username, chosen or generated automatically, with no mandatory link to one's real name. A password depending on the sign-up method: email address, sign-in with Apple or Google, or phone number.
- Interests: Reddit asks users to choose at least one when creating the account, in order to recommend content or "select more relevant advertising".
- Activity: pages viewed, votes, links clicked, search terms, interactions with ads and communities.
- Technical data: IP address, browser, operating system, device identifiers. Reddit deletes IP addresses after 100 days, except the one used to create the account.
- Inferred data: Reddit estimates age range, gender or preferred language from the information it holds.
Reddit may also receive demographic or interest information from advertisers. It matches it to the account using a common identifier, such as the hashed version of an email address, according to its policy. Users can opt out of this use for personalised advertising in the Privacy section of their settings.
What rights does a user in Switzerland have under the FADP?
The Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP), often called the nFADP, applies to Reddit despite its headquarters being abroad. According to its article 3, published on Fedlex, it covers situations that have effects in Switzerland, even if they originate abroad. The act has been in force since 1 September 2023.
For Swiss users, the data controller is Reddit Netherlands B.V., in Amsterdam, according to the privacy policy. Its data protection office can be reached at dpo@reddit.com. The data is stored on servers in the United States. Reddit, Inc. states that it is certified under the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the framework for data transfers between Switzerland and the United States.
The FADP grants several concrete rights:
- Right of access (art. 25): to know whether Reddit processes data about you, which data, for what purpose and for how long. The response is free of charge, with exceptions, and generally arrives within 30 days.
- Data portability (art. 28): to obtain, in a common electronic format, the data you have provided, or to have it transferred to another service, under the conditions set by law.
- Rectification and erasure (art. 32): to demand the correction of inaccurate data, and to ask a court to prohibit processing or order the erasure of data.
- Reporting (art. 49): the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) can open an investigation following a report, if there are sufficient indications of a breach.
The right of access also covers the existence of an automated individual decision and the logic behind it, a point detailed in our page on automated decisions under the FADP. The Swiss framework applicable to AI tools is set out in our page AI and data protection.
Reddit's policy, for its part, grants Swiss users the rights of access, rectification, erasure, portability, restriction and objection, as well as the right to lodge a complaint with the local supervisory authority. Deleting one's account does not erase one's messages: posts and comments remain visible if they were not deleted beforehand, Reddit states.
What we don't know yet
- The test countries: the letter speaks of "selected markets outside the United States" without naming them; Reddit has not said whether Switzerland is among them.
- The content that will stay open without an account: Reddit will only decide on this after the tests, according to Inside IT.
- The data processed in incognito mode: the privacy policy currently in force does not mention this mode.
