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Wtf are they doing?
They are trying to force researchers and other data grabbers onto the API. If people can scrape the website Reddit can't charge them
Considering it took this long for them to figure out "empty user agent means it is a bot" and "well-known vpn may be used by bots", and old.reddit still apparently bypassing this, I'm going to guess they are not going to have much success.
I imagine old.reddit is going to be killed off soon.
Can't you just spoof a user agent anyway?
You can, but some people don't if they don't think they're doing anything wrong
if they are blocking proxy and VPN connections, when they detect an unusual amount of requests from your IP they'll ban it and you won't be able to circumvent it changing your user agent.