I wonder if this is the motivation behind removing the auth-gate on mobile. Previously, if I browsed the mobile site on my phone in a non-signed-in state (I deleted my account), I could view 5-8 top-level comments and that's it. Clicking "Show more comments" or trying to expand child comments would show a modal asking me to sign in or download the app.

That changed last week along with a complete rework of the mobile site. I'm betting that they saw a huge increase in unauthenticated mobile users with a far below-average time-on-site metric and decided to open it up.

Overall, I appreciate the change because I still lurk in many of the niche subs that I still haven't found a good replacement for. self-hosted, datahoarder, webdev, 3dprinting, et al. have analogs here, but the content isn't as deep.