The old UI is worth signing up for using a completely anonymous throwaway email address. You just need to verify it once, and then you never need access to the email address ever again. I don't know why people seem to find that so difficult, but they do. It's the same reason why reddit bans are a complete joke.

> It's in part due to scrapers and AI.

It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.

How ironic. The reason you can't read the comment:

"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."

Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!

don't blame Ai for reddit's predatory practices

The issue here is that they've changed Old Reddit to require a login going forward.

Doesn't work either, still asks to sign in.