Comment by TZubiri
4 hours ago
Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major client revision, they can put security measures in the new version that are not present in the older one, this happens in many many industries.
To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request.
Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck.
You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too.
While most of the rant was indeed about their posturing (which I personally would not call "politics" but we need not debate semantics here if I understood you well enough), even putting that aside I wasn't able to find strong evidence of the "security measures" you speak of.
If you're more familiar with the mechanisms by which New Reddit defends itself against scraping, I'm happy to issue a correction --- especially so if it can be explained why Old Reddit cannot offer such a defense.
> Besides scraping, this probably has implications for posting as well. Do you like reading comments from humans and not from other bots? Well, in that case a system that uses plain html will be easier to automate with bots than a javascript clusterfuck.
Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice.
> You can't have the cake of web 1.0 and the eat-it of a botless experience too.
Alas.
It's not necessary to analyze the specifics of reddit's architecture.
This is a common pattern across many services that can be accessed by more than 1 client, whether it me on the same platform/device/OS or different.
For example an SaaS provider might offer support for Windows Vista, and when Windos 8 releases, they still support Windows Vista, and when Windows 10 releases, they are now supporting 3 versions. They may decide to stop supporting Windows Vista at some point, that's completely normal for many reasons and security is one of them, on two counts, one that they would need to backport security features which is added work, and second that the old version API (Windows Vista in this example, Plain HTML in the other) doesn't support some security features or guarantees.
An even bigger version jump than a major revision would be a different platform, Android for example is a competing Operating System with much stronger security guarantees, so it may happen, and has happened in the past, that a provider will stop supporting Windows applications and only support Android/IOS applications, (consider banking applications, which may only support access from phones due to its security and antitampering features).
So yeah, getting familiar with Software lifecycle practices in general would help explain this, rather than rabbit holeing on reddit specifically.
>Commenting has --- as far as I remember --- required an account on Reddit, and Old Reddit is still accessible behind a login. So in the future when they do sunset Old Reddit, they can use this argument. I will still not really buy that they simply had to remove Old Reddit because of it, but whatever, I kind of doubt I'll even see the notice.
Can happen, what I've also seen happen is that account creation and account management is handled by the new client, so if you create your account on the new client, they push most gatekeeping mechanisms onto that part and they allow you to use the old version for a little bit longer before sunsetting it completely as suggested.