got the notification to verify my age when trying to access NSFW posts or profiles already for a few weeks now, but as of today my whole account is blocked unless I verify. I guess that’s it then. Based in Austria btw, so there is no specific law in place that forces Reddit to implement this and I will definetly not give my personal information to Persona, a company that belongs to Peter Thiels Palantir group.
Redlib if you must keep using Reddit. If not, alternative forums, fediverse included, invite you.
I will not play games that require tpm and secure boot, and I will not use software that requires any sort of identity verification to use. the internet is simply a tool for entertainment for most of my uses, communication is optional.
jan 1 1964, or wherever my scrolling lands me.
It’s better here anyway. Spez has banned everyone and there’s only bots left.
ehhh. the nsfw community is a bit lacking. which, like it or not, drives user engagement and boosts content creation.
debatable that it’s better here, the ideal is to use nothing.
sure, it’s a lot less fashy on lemmy, but goddamn there are some shockingly dense motherfuckers on this website that are worse than redditors. the top comment on basically every article posted to lemmy is someone aggressively and angrily asking a deeply ignorant rhetorical question for attention, and it’s usually answered by the article. at least reddit sometimes has a decent comment at the top.
i swear half of lemmy is just people going “i literally don’t understand this simple thing and it’s also the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard” when in reality it’s just a bunch of people inside of a social bubble that don’t understand the actual world around them, like, at all. and i don’t mean just politically, i mean generally.
never going back to reddit but there are just so many shamefully stupid people on lemmy, it’s grating.
That’s what I do when I get a notice like this. Accept that I just move on.
Why are people still on reddit? Might as well go join Truth Social or X if you care that little about what you’re contributing to.
Not all communities have an equivalent here.
Use ublock origin element zapper tool
You need to create an alias and not forget it, so you can use a completely different “person” on these shitty sites. I’ve got a dozen email addresses with names, birthplaces, dates, etc. never know who I am.
Fingerprinting knows
Multiple vpns, paid and free, adblocking and blocking tracking at DNS level, ublock origin, different browsers and operating systems. Good luck. I probably look like some frankenstein user.
And even if you do fingerprint it, you’re fingerprinting a useless alias, so who cares.
IIRC they can fingerprint you based on your writing style and interests.
The more intricate your configuration, the easier you are to fingerprint. Because nobody else has your exact configuration. For it to not matter, you have to have a sufficiently complex unique fingerprint for every instance of being fingerprinted.
Cookies for the masses, fingerprints for everyone else. It is actually quite difficult to truly be anonymous on the internet today.
Well you do you, I’ll do me.
I wasn’t suggesting you do otherwise. Just trying to keep folks informed.
If you’re interested in fingerprinting, check out this site. It will tell you how sites see your exact configuration.
It’s always interesting to see what it takes for someone to leave reddit. It wasn’t all the bullshit before, but this is was over the line for this user. How much more can they keep getting away with before a tipping point? The standards people have today are so eroded.
Dude pull your head out of your ass. There are things on reddit that there are no replacements for. Lemmy doesn’t hold a candle to the user base of reddit. The standard is simply “is this useful to me” and it’s not hard to understand why people find value there.
Fucking holier than though dipshit.
And you wonder why things are the way they are…
You need to remember there’s addiction involved too. That will cause people to accept more awful than they normally would.
Proves that convenience is the stopper. Steam and netflix can attest. Make it hard, I’ll hit the high seas.
The last straw for me was getting rid of sorting by Hot on my main feed, effectively making it useless. I don’t want to sort by Best that shows posts from days ago, get that Facebook shit out of here. Also there was a new tab that interspersed “recommended posts” in your main feed. It’s an option now but I doubt it would be in the future. The point of having a curated feed is to see shit you’re subscribed to, not whatever engagement slop is on r/popular.
For me it was new reddit, saw what was coming and spent a lot less time there (yes I used old mode still), then the API changes and mass banning of subreddits sealed the deal. Never returned.
Honestly, a VPN is a good investment in your online safety anyway and would bypass this age verification bullshit. We have it in Australia too. Philippines don’t.
Reddit blocks a shit ton of vpns
I’ve used mullvad and airvpn recently and both worked fine for me
I tried signing up with a throwaway protonmail via mullvad browser and VPN and was shadownbanned from day 1.
Maybe they have different rules for new accounts or something then. That said, I would expect a one day old account to require approval (which would appear to be shadowbanned from the user perspective), it’s a very common automod filter.
I didn’t think there was anyone left on Reddit but bots
There’s real people on there but they’re extremely difficult to differentiate between the bots. Everybody on there sounds the same.
I assume they only require people to verify, and they let the bots roam freely without any supervision or am I wrong and it will remove bots from Reddit?
no you’re correct. reddit corp does NOT want to do anything about its bot infestation. even the apipocalypse carved out exceptions for the botnets that make their entire platform function.
bot content spew keeps doomscrollers doomscrolling and pumps up the metrics that they’re intentionally manipulating to appear like organic traffic. having their cake and eating it too, even to the very end of everything the platform used to stand for
I’m convinced this is true. Ever since the big redesign in 2018 (holy shit was it really eight years ago?) that kind of homogenized the whole platform, it became clear that the people reddit was trying to attract was not the communities but the mindless scrollers.
But the paradox was that some person had to want to post the content and make it feel alive, but that person is not needed anymore.
Facebook is entirely slop, scams, and bottom of the barrel memes but they make billions from attracting the dumbest users who will click on ads and that’s where reddit wants to be.
same reason mr musk cried about bots on twitter constantly and promised to wipe them out only to make it more artificial and manipulated than it ever has been (i’m told)
I was being snarky. I have no idea how the bot accounts on Reddit are organized or managed, I’m just some dude.
I was being snarky as well, and not towards you.
In some circumstances I would actually stand behind user verification on Reddit/Reddit-like forum.
If that meant:
no bots, if you can really be sure that a user is a real person,
real freedom of speech, with real consequences for real people that abuse it (perma ban doesn’t mean much if you can just create a new account).
no flood of low quality AI content.
elimination of troll farms and institutional propaganda accounts…
But knowing current corporations, I am sure, the control applies only to us insignificant people, organized farms will keep on flooding, maybe some of them will have to pay to Reddit (those who didn’t already).
I don’t really have that much of a problem with the age verification as it is - my problem is that the only means to do so is giving my personal information to Persona, a very shady company with a not so good data protection record (they are part of Peter Thiels Palantir group, I guess that says it all).
I miss some of the people on Reddit, but I don’t miss Reddit.
In time, they’ll appear here (or in similar places).
I’m never going back.
I know a handful of people that tried Lemmy at my insistence but found the overall culture even more insufferable than reddit and honestly I don’t even blame them. I fear that a lot of folks here are so desperate to “beat reddit” that they are willing to tolerate the most repulsive behaviors and it’s only going to push the mature people away.
I hope I’m wrong, but for someone who doesn’t care about decentralization, being “not reddit” is really all I can see that we have going for us.
define mature.
do you just mean people you agree with?
what do you regard as ‘repulsive’ behaviour?
when I was on reddit there were active sexual predators exploiting people on some subs and some of them were mods. nobody thought that was repulsive.
Hah well… for starters I would say emotionally mature people don’t tend to make demands of the people they’re replying to.
The bad ones can be banned 🤷♀️
Totally but in practice they’re not, and that’s the issue, imo. We’re halfway to being Voat with a trans-flag colored paint job
Miss you too, bud
And that’s the end of using reddit, right?
Use a VPN exit point in Singapore
The verification flag might be tied to the account if there’s no specific local law. If that is the case wherever they pop out reddit will try id them.
Australia have a social media under 16 ban in place. It is due to that.
OP said Austria, so maybe not.
Oh, yea. My bad.
