It tells me I have to register to view posts! It has blocked all my VPS IPs. From random places:
- Turkey
- India
- Germany
- That Asian country that is very ‘western’, I have forgotten its name
So what’s the reason? Is this because of scraping? Seems random. If the IP is from India, we could say, well, they don’t want scammers. Turkey, not sure. But Germany?
I know datacenters have an IP range, and they could ban all IPs from all datacenters. But why?
And the issue is, when you register, and post, you suddenly find yourself shadow-banned! I did not even made a bad post or anything.
Where do I get a quality IP that Reddit has not blocked?
It’s far more likely that it’s because VPNs make it much harder for Reddit to track you, and sell the data.
As proof, I offer: this behavior is the same for other companies who monotonize visitors, such as Instagram. 99% of the rest of the web does not block VPN traffic. Not Amazon. Not Bing. Not Lemmy; not Mastodon. Google has started to require CAPTCHA in an attempt to annoy people out of using VPNs, but they let you in eventually.
It’s purely profit-driven; it has nothing to do with abusive traffic.
As someone with experience hosting high traffic sites, it’s probably both. Roughly 40% of the traffic I see to lemmy.ca is bots.
They’re also trying to block any people scraping for AI. There’s going to be numerous reasons behind this.
I know Disney+ also blocks hosting provider space. I’ve had users complain since our office / VPN are routed through our DC.
Sure, conceded.
Do you require email-based registration? I know it’s easy to bypass, but you may as well block registrations from domains being used as throw-away email hosts as block VPNs; VPNs are more popular, and gaining in popularity, and are healthy for users in the fight against tracking.