cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1231775/reddit-will-require-you-to-log-in-to-use-old-reddit-com
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Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety.
A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed.
Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.
I use a browser extension that sends me to a reddit frontend on the off chance I come across a post while searching. It works pretty well
Libredirect + the fastest instance
From the admin side, I do understand what they are saying but I think there’s a better solution to it. We run the old frontend on our instance, and it gets hammered with bots and scrapers. So if we assume that old.reddit works the same way, then it would be attractive to scrapers. But instead of locking it down, I think they could set up something like Anubis or put it behind some other anti-bot measure.