So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.
But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?
It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.
It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.
Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."
30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).
Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:
£
(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).