9 Ways to Become More Anonymous on Reddit
Reading Time: 3 minutesBecause site’s default privacy settings expose a lot of your data.
Even if you’re using an anonymous user name on Reddit, the site’s default privacy settings expose a lot of your data. Although achieving complete anonymity is impossible, you can stop Reddit from logging each link you click and using your preferences for advertising. These are the top privacy settings that everyone should enable on Reddit right away.
If you’ve been using Reddit for a while, you’ll know that your entire post and comment history is visible to the public. This can allow people to figure out your identity and reveal sensitive information about you quite easily. To avoid this, lots of people delete their accounts frequently and create new ones.
Even if you aren’t ready to delete your primary account, you can periodically create throwaway Reddit accounts without using an email address to retain your anonymity.
While other social media platforms have slowly moved away from revealing your online status, Reddit went in the opposite direction in 2021. The company introduced a feature that reveals if you’re online on Reddit, and it’s enabled by default. That’s the first thing you should change—there’s no need for others to know if you’re online on Reddit.
To hide your online status, log in to Reddit and click your username in the top-right corner of the page. Under Online Status, click On. This will change your Reddit online status to Off. You can verify this by clicking your username again. Your Reddit online status will be hidden on all platforms immediately.
Reddit’s apps and websites do not offer the best Reddit experience. The company’s priority is to keep you on Reddit for longer, and as a result, you end up with plenty of annoyances on the site. Fortunately, there’s a thriving ecosystem of third-party Reddit apps and browser extensions that get rid of ads and other annoyances from Reddit.
Switching away from official Reddit apps means you’ll sometimes miss out on certain features, such as polls or chats, or you won’t always get the newest features immediately. However, it also allows you to control your Reddit experience through greater customizability and a better interface.
If you’re ready to switch, you can try Apollo on iOS, Boost on Android, and Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop. Alternatively, you can switch to Reddit’s old design that many Redditors prefer even now. You can switch to old Reddit by simply going old.reddit.com, but if you want old Reddit to stick, go to account settings and enable Opt out of the redesign.
Reddit makes a guess about your location based on your IP address and uses this to show more local content. If you want to avoid this, you can go to account settings and click the drop-down menu below Country and select any other location.
Your profile reveals a lot of information about you on Reddit. You can reduce some of this by making your profile private. Go to profile settings on Reddit and scroll to the Advanced section. Here you can disable these three options: Allow people to follow you (stops people from following your account), Content visibility (hides posts on your profile from appearing on public Reddit pages), and Active in communities visibility (hides which communities you’re active in).
Next, you should hide your Reddit profile from search engines like Google by going to privacy settings and disabling Show up in search results.
Reddit uses a lot of your data to serve targeted ads and recommendations. If you’re uncomfortable with Reddit’s tracking, disable it in privacy settings. Under the Privacy section, you can disable all of the options to reduce Reddit’s tracking.
Your home feed on Reddit is probably cluttered with recommendations you didn’t ask for. If you’d like to clean it up, go to feed settings on Reddit, and under Content Preferences, disable the Enable home feed recommendations option. This will remove Reddit’s recommended posts from your home feed.
Most of us are tired of spammy notifications and email alerts. Like every other site out there, Reddit sends you a whole bunch of these for no real reason. If you’re done with these alerts and emails, go to notification settings on Reddit and click Manage email; scroll to the bottom and enable Unsubscribe from all emails to end Reddit email spam.
Then you should also review if you really need so many notifications from Reddit. Go to notification settings once again and disable all the alerts you don’t need. We disabled everything except Mentions of u/username, but your preferences may vary.
Not everyone uses Reddit’s chat feature; if you don’t want to use Reddit’s instant messaging feature, you can stop people from pinging you on the site. To do so, go to Reddit’s messaging settings, click the drop-down menu next to Who can send you chat requests, and select Nobody. Finally, select the menu next to Who can send you private messages, and click Nobody.