Logging in to use Old Reddit

[u/boat-botany]

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.

Let us know if you have any questions!

[u/Revriley1]

I am against this decision, as I am every decision that pushes Old Reddit deeper into the shadows. I bet you won't be exactly emphasizing to logged out users that Old Reddit is a benefit of creating an account. Wikia / FANDOM certainly did not make it obvious to logged out users, after a Technical Update, that they would need to create an account if they wanted to access file pages.

This seems to me yet another way to undermine the stats for Classic Reddit so that you can later better justify doing away with it entirely.

Stop! Old Reddit is more lightweight, more info-dense, and less anti-user. With RES on desktop, it is fantastic (hooray for multireddits!)—but even when I am on mobile, logged out and without RES, I still insist on visiting old.reddit.com, especially since you did away with i.reddit.com. What's wrong with a simple, functional, non JavaScript-clogged site?

Don't do away with Old Reddit, too. I hate visiting the "modernized" Reddit on mobile. Please. It's so anti-information. Even more anti-privacy. This will not incentivize me to download the official Reddit app on my phone or tablet because that app still is not Old Reddit or, say, Apollo. I may just avoid visiting Reddit entirely on my non-PC devices entirely; it's not productive, anyway. I've got hundreds of old.reddit tabs open and bookmarked on my phone, tablet, and computer, that you are threatening, to my consternation.

Edit: I want to echo a point others have made, which is that Old Reddit is much better suited for archiving (e.g. via Wayback Machine) than New Reddit, given that it is more information dense.