Reddit called old.reddit.com a safety risk. A developer's browser logs told a different story (cole-k.com)
Reddit now requires login to view old.reddit.com, framing it as a safety measure against scraping. A developer's own request logs show the new interface is heavier, slower to build, and phones home constantly.
The real motive surfaced fast: Reddit has licensing deals with OpenAI and Google, and blocking the lightweight old interface makes it harder for rival AI companies to scrape training data for free.
The article's own author showed up in the thread: nuke old Reddit outright if you mean it, he wrote — don't hide an economic decision behind a security excuse.
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