So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

Reddit has required login to access old.reddit.com, citing security concerns. The author argues this is misleading PR framing — the real reason is to make scraping harder by forcing users through a heavier JavaScript-dependent frontend. Old Reddit serves plain HTML efficiently, while New Reddit loads 5x more data and tracks user behavior via heartbeat events. The author contends that calling plain HTML 'unsafe' is disingenuous, and that Reddit's actual goal is protecting its LLM-training data from scrapers, at the expense of power users who prefer the leaner old interface.