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.
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.