Reddit is shutting the door on casual access to its old-school interface, and AI scrapers are the reason.
The company already requires a login to use Old Reddit, the stripped-down interface many longtime users still prefer. Within the next few months, Reddit says it will also require that your account has actually used Old Reddit sometime in the past six months. Miss that window and you lose access to the classic layout. Reddit frames the cutoff as low-impact, claiming it covers 'the vast majority' of current Old Reddit users.
This is less about nostalgia and more about plumbing: Old Reddit's simpler, less dynamic markup makes it an easier target for bots than the modern site, so scrapers and AI-training crawlers have leaned on it to grab content cheaply. Locking it to logged-in, recently active accounts turns a wide-open side door into something closer to a members-only entrance.
It is also one more sign that the open, scrape-friendly web is shrinking - even Reddit's own throwback feature now comes with a login wall and an expiration date.