Reddit will change Old Reddit to block AI scrapers

Reddit says it plans to make changes to old.reddit.com to protect against AI data scraping, putting the legacy interface's future in question. The company preserved the pre-2018 design after user protests and promised last year it would survive as long as people kept using it. The lighter, less JavaScript-dependent layout is exactly what makes it easy to scrape at scale, so the trait users value is the one Reddit now treats as a liability. Reddit has been fighting scraping on multiple fronts, including a DMCA case over Perplexity that a judge recently let proceed.

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