Reddit requires login for old.reddit.com citing scraping concerns

Reddit's stated reason

Reddit claims that requiring a login for old.reddit.com is needed to stop abusive scraping and automated traffic. The company says the logged‑out experience of Old Reddit is a significant source of such abuse, while New Reddit remains accessible without login because it uses a modern security stack that Old Reddit lacks.

Technical comparison of old vs new Reddit

Old Reddit delivers mostly plain HTML; a typical page loads about 1 MB of data in roughly 2 seconds, with most of that being the HTML itself. Loading additional comments is lean and fast. New Reddit, by contrast, makes over 100 requests and transfers several megabytes, relying heavily on JavaScript to fetch content. The author notes that New Reddit initially loads only about 25 comments, versus 200 on Old Reddit, and that executing its JavaScript appears to be what hinders simple scrapers.

Community reactions

Many commenters view the login requirement as a pretext to retire Old Reddit.

"As somebody who did plenty of scraping for his own little projects, lets just say that reddit their security concerns are just PR for "we do not want to keep supporting old.reddit"." — @benjiro29

Others point out that scraping New Reddit is still possible with headless browsers and that the real bottleneck is IP rotation and evasion, not HTML vs JavaScript.

"You can simply spin up more instances and route over more proxies… The limiting factor for scraping a website is not html vs js … Its avoiding detection by running from different ips, faking browser information and masking your traffic." — @benjiro29

Some users note that the change breaks third‑party apps and that they will abandon Reddit altogether.

"I only used old.reddit, it's a sad day as I say goodbye to reddit because the new layout is terrible and since they killed open reddit clients there is no alternative." — @msny

A few see a possible connection to Reddit’s licensing deals with AI firms, suggesting the move aims to keep other AI companies from scraping the site.

"Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, so is likely trying to keep other AI companies out" — @khurs

Implications for users and scraping

For logged‑out users, accessing old.reddit.com now triggers a login prompt, effectively blocking casual, anonymous reading. Users who rely on the legacy interface for its simplicity and low bandwidth must either log in, switch to New Reddit, or leave the platform. From a scraping perspective, the change raises the cost of simple HTML scrapers but does not stop determined actors who can employ headless browsers, proxy rotation, and evasion techniques.

Conclusion

Reddit’s login wall on old.reddit.com is framed as a safety measure against scraping, but the community interprets it as a strategy to deprecate the legacy frontend and steer users toward the newer, more JavaScript‑heavy interface. The technical evidence shows Old Reddit is lighter and faster, while New Reddit relies on client‑side execution that complicates naive scraping but does not eliminate it.