Reddit updates its site design for logged-out users

This is the social network’s second update rollout for the logged-out experience this year. In March, it made the pages screen reader-friendly along with making the web pages cleaner.

The latest updates will be available across both mobile and desktop web experiences, the company said. The mobile site, however, still shows an annoying popup asking users if they want to open a post in the app, as many users pointed out under the announcement post. I have also seen the popup appear as soon as I open a Reddit link on the mobile browser.

Last week, the company announced that it is testing its own verification mark through “official” badges with limited accounts. It also promised that in August, the platform is introducing new accessibility features for its apps to make the screen reader-friendly. However, the communities protesting Reddit’s API changes — which forced a lot of third-party apps to shut down — were not pleased by these promises.

Reddit’s change to accommodate users without an account is a welcome change. Last month, Twitter briefly forced users to have an account to see any tweet before removing that requirement. While users can see particular tweets without logging in, they can’t explore the site. Meta’s Threads app also lets you see accounts and posts, but it doesn’t have a fully functional web service. The decentralized social network Mastodon is an exception and lets you explore different posts on the mastodon.social server.

The platform’s change to its web experience comes as more users are looking to use Reddit as a search engine — even if they are appending “Reddit” to their Google search queries. Plus, it’s another surface for the company to show ads as it focuses on profitability.