With Reddit you can either read half the comments, the top three comments, or sometimes nothing, because "this community is available in the app" or "log in to read the rest of the discussion" or whatever other flavour of user hostile design the company put out this week.

For some obscure reason it's also terribly slow on my desktop even if I'm logged in. It's a terrible experience all around. And no, I don't want to manually change the URL or install some third party add-on to fix their intentionally broken website.

Change the "www" in URL to "old". The redesign is awful.

Depends on what side of the AB test you’re on. If you clear your cookies, you’ll find that the default web interface forces you to login after a random delay or after a few clicks.

The subreddits i use you can't. For example /r/programming

What? That's not my experience at all; from my desktop, tablet, and/or mobile phone browser I can access all subreddits I'm interested in without having to be logged in, including the one you mentioned, /r/programming but also all of these:

android, askhistorians, biochemistry, c_programming, chemistry, compsci, design, embedded, freebsd, golang, haskell, java, javascript, linguistics, linux, math, mechanical_gifs, openbsd, physics, python, raspberry_pi, rust, statistics, sysadmin, vim, web_design ... and many more.

so not sure what you're doing to not be able to access said subreddit while being logged out.

If you go to the subreddit directly without googling for it. https://imgur.com/a/5ecdV1q

If you change the url from www.reddit.com/r/whatever to i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com I think you can access everything.