[danudey]

I'm not sure about that. On the one hand, they might mistakenly think that this will drive engagement by encouraging people to sign up for accounts. On the other, a lot of their traffic comes from Google searches by people who are looking for a specific solution to a specific problem, and losing that Google traffic would hurt their metrics even more.

What I could see them doing is something like:

1. Allow anonymous browsing of the default front page

2. If you want to browse through to someone's profile, or browse a subreddit, or maybe even seeing the comments section entirely in some cases, you need to log in

Pinterest did a great-slash-horrible approach, where you can see a result on Google image search, you can click through to it, but if you want to actually see where it came from or get any useful information (like browsing the board the poster put it in) then you need to log in. Pinterest has done a great job of weaponizing their user's posted (or, more commonly, stolen) content against the internet as a whole, and even though Reddit fucks up everything they touch I can imagine them trying something similar.