I thought blue checkmarks were for verified people, is it actually a subscription now?

That is true, two things can be true at once. I sometimes fail to realize that.

The website includes a quote from a Reddit employee:

Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and Redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in.

I didn’t realize casually browsing a website is “abusive scraping”. Isn’t that the equivalent of claiming that reading a news article online is “abusive scraping”?