tl;dr: Reddit now requires login to view old.reddit.com when logged out, citing "safety" and abusive scraping concerns. The author investigates and concludes this is really about preventing LLM-era scraping of Reddit's valuable user content, since Old Reddit serves clean HTML while New Reddit is a JS-heavy bloated mess that's harder to scrape. The author is frustrated less by the change itself than by Reddit's dishonest framing, and worries logged-out New Reddit access will be next.