You are a bad user to them. You are not a high value user that is valuable, registering with your real, non throwaway email that consumes meme slop and stolen content without ad blockers.

As far as I can tell, the only reason old.reddit exists is to avoid the bad PR they’ll get from killing it. They seem to be trying to make things worse and worse, to lose the users through attrition, so the eventual shutdown is a non-event.

Also, maybe they learned something from Digg v4. That was a hard cut over, users hated it, but they had no way to revert and it killed the site. They’re probably trying to avoid that as well.

Short answer : Yes. Long Answer : Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssssss!

They have cut off 3rd party API's and now forcing accounts on old.reddit. It is only a matter of time until they make accounts mandatory to view in the same way every other social media service does.

They are the same as every other social media company but have had a much longer runway of good will that has carried them for a while. Alas, I think that runway is almost gone.