New reddit is more annoying (to me as human, but also to scrapers) in two very important ways:

- old reddit shows more or less the raw comment tree, sorted, like HN. New reddit does aggressive folding. You get a couple comments for each branch and have to click "show more" to see more

- new reddit forces you to log in to view anything tagged NSFW, including entire subreddits. Old reddit does not enforce this, along with not enforcing some other restrictions reddit has introduced over time

Of course none of this stops a scraper. And there is still the API. But these things make it easier to detect scrapers because they have to make a lot more requests and have to handle user sessions that make them easier to track