Usenet didn't fight you if you wanted to scrape all of it. In fact, it encouraged that.
Usenet didn't require crappy "API tokens" in order to automate your interactions with it or bring your own user agent... in fact, you had to bring your own user agent; that was the only way to use it.
The only thing Reddit has in common with Usenet is good support for threaded discussions.
Reddit is not that bad with regards to scraping. You can append `.json` to any URL and it will return a JSON representation of this page: https://www.reddit.com/.json
As for API tokens, that's unfortunately just the current trend of basically every other site with user-generated content. It's unfair to single out Reddit in particular when nearly everyone else does this too.
Usenet didn't fight you if you wanted to scrape all of it. In fact, it encouraged that.
Usenet didn't require crappy "API tokens" in order to automate your interactions with it or bring your own user agent... in fact, you had to bring your own user agent; that was the only way to use it.
The only thing Reddit has in common with Usenet is good support for threaded discussions.