“boat-botany”:

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.

“New” Reddit is a janky, slow, bloated mess of a website that mostly displays text, images, and videos. “Old” Reddit is ugly but functional. The site admins are not promising the superior version will be available forever, and they are specifically calling attention to its lack of a “modern security tech stack”. I do not think “old” Reddit is long for this world — especially since Reddit is aggressively promoting its mobile app.