Reddit blocks plain HTML, web balkanization accelerates
Reddit has started serving a wall to users accessing plain HTML, breaking non-JavaScript browsers, scrapers, and accessibility tools. The thread traced this directly to Reddit's licensing deals with OpenAI and Google: if you've sold your data to two AI companies, you have every incentive to block everyone else from getting it for free.
Commenters connected this to Reddit's 2015 VC inflection point, arguing the current monetization squeeze was baked in the moment they took growth capital. The broader read: platforms that have licensed their content to AI companies are now weaponizing web standards to enforce that moat, and plain HTML is the first casualty.
There's a counterpoint that users who want the old interface are often just resistant to change, but the accessibility angle is harder to dismiss. Blocking HTML-only access breaks screen readers and low-bandwidth users, not just scrapers.
So what?
If you're building anything that reads from Reddit, expect the scraping window to close permanently. More broadly, every major content platform is moving toward gated, licensed data distribution. If your product depends on open web crawling, your threat model just got more serious.