Tell HN: Reddit accounts cancellation/suspension caused by VPN usage
If the Redit bozos do not comprehend the need for VPN, if *content* provided is of not harmful in any way, then I sure wish them good luck in keeping this service going ...
Edit: PIA as VPN, with three major exit points, used interchangeably: France (local when there, public place), UK (local when there, public place) and US (employer specific requirement). Original account was 10K+ submissions and almost same for comments, with never close to questionable content - got suspended during my travel, with no apparent (at time) cause. Two older/test accounts I dug up in the immediate aftermath of first closed, with no submissions, got also suspended within the span of a few days of use (reading/access only). One "control" test account got banned today, after having been opened yesterday - this purposely used while "flipping" between VPN exit points. HTH
253 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 70.5 ms ] threadOver time, these positions will become increasingly untenable. If everyone uses a VPN or lives behind CGNAT then these kack-handed approaches to "security" won't be seen as being plausible – the more real users they block or inconvenience the greater the harm to their product and I am sure this is going to go up over time. It's not like a real attacker can vary their ipv4 addresses willy-nilly at any rate...
The charitable interpretation is that Reddit got a lot of abuse from individual IPs, the IP didn't seem to be shared to them, and they just blacklisted it. I assume they don't generally blacklist IPs from abusive users, since otherwise university campusses would quickly have problems :-).
They likely buy databases of IP addresses which have likelihood of fraud attached to them from third parties like Neustar or Geocomply or Digital Envoy.
Being a VPN address is a great way to get a giant red flag on those databases (correctly).
[0] ( https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/reddit-300-million/ ) Indeed it was,once again, Tencent, the company famous for destroying MMOs, infiltrate the western gaming markets and pollute it with micro-transactions, cosmetics, etc.We're on the edge of touching politics and geostrategy here and I don't want certain people to jump telling me i'm a conspiracy nutjob.At this point the record is there, go look at it.
I'd honestly always assumed /r/pyonyang was very clever anti-NK propaganda. The role it occupies as Reddit in-joke aligns with western agendas.
/r/nknews skews closer to actual North Korean propaganda, but I think (or maybe just hope) the general vibe there is the readership understands that ANYTHING you read online about North Korea is potentially propagandized in one way or the other.
It reminds me of an American study someone once commented here on HN where they looked into this and whilst they found Russian "shilling" substantial they there were surprised to find actually more anti china bots (mainly posting in simple chinese) across platforms like twitter than pro china ones. Pro-china propaganda efforts were found and measured but were largely amateurish, quickly banned and ineffective.
now they have in sight the IPO so they are doing great cleaning, even of the past, they are rewriting it to be more attractive to sponsors and investors; a monstrous number of posts and subs are deleted every hour every day with the excuse that they apply [new] rules not specified anywhere and even often contrary to the well-established customs
they have gone from total administrative absenteeism to be a Kafkaesque nightmare, primarily for moderators (volunteers)
as a European I did not understand the concept of the word "cancel culture" but now that I'm seeing it with my own eyes I hope reddit fail very soon because now has become a spite to everything that Aaron wanted
so no, they have not become chinese/russian/"destiny manifest" propaganda machines, they are just a horrible horrible horrible place (with 10mb of javascript per connection as cherry on top)
Many people ITT are saying that they're even worse than that right now. At least the Digg big redesign was halfway usable.
On the flip side, there's now a decent chance that the next "big" discussion platform might be a properly federated system, allowing for some longer-term resilience against this sort of deterioration. Much like E-mail/Usenet vs. centralized Compuserve or AOL.
I use ProtonVPN. It wasn't until Spotify stopped working sometime later (403 Forbidden for all HTTP requests) that I narrowed it down to using VPN.
Seems to be a growing thing. Thankfully, Spotify didn't do anything to my account, and it continued to work from regular IPs.
I also used a tunnel when Spotify was not available globally. It did not create any issues.
Using a Public VPN is double edged sword. If you really need it its better to setup a wireguard tunnel to a own server as the the Public VPN IPs as monitored by the security companies and also get abused all the time.
the developers are now working on adding captcha at the application level and also signing the api endpoints.
You can.
I know because our information security office did it to all of our web endpoints. Which are mostly API endpoints. Without telling anyone involved with individual apps, before or even, until specific complaints got to them, after doing it.
I feel your pain. It's stuff like that that just makes you know, they not only have no idea what they're doing, the level of agency and access they have mean it's just a question of when they finally accidentally something big on fire one day - and whether you'll be able to make it out unscathed with eg just some lost sleep.
Would probably make a good story for http://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport, as you're probably already aware. If you feel like (and can stand) writing it (heh).
I've used a VPN constantly and I have a Reddit account in the 15-year club, it hasn't been an issue.
Just an idea regarding your latest test. The part of the main account sucks - I am with you on that.
https://join-lemmy.org/
It's an open source, lightweight, web UI for Reddit focused on privacy: https://teddit.net/.
Git repo available here: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit.
The only services I've seen involve a few people offering their servers as n-ary client exit nodes which obviously ends up with saturation problems like the tor network. Obviously the legal concerns are a big deal but if companies like Mullvad aren't liable for illegal web traffic, one might be able to get similar protections for people that install this VPN.
This isn’t to defend them - it seems very odd to immediately permanently suspend accounts like that!
Lots of people use vpns for work or privacy, I think that method would have a lot of false positives. In cases where trial account usage costs you very little or nothing I'd err on the side of not blocking users.
What makes you think that? This is you saying that that detection service is not very good, FWIW.
While certainly true, in my experience unknown VPN IP addresses can be even more problematic since for them, even providers willing to support the interests of VPN users just see lot's of suspicious usage from you IP address without any real explanation.
> This isn’t to defend them - it seems very odd to immediately permanently suspend accounts like that!
Normally I would agree, but since the account is not only just a few days old but also didn't post or create comments, I think that immediately banning it makes sense.
For a new account which didn't create any content yet the user isn't loosing anything important if the account is deleted and since the user is unlikely to have any real attachment to the account yet, they are more likely to just create a new account than to deal with any warning/suspension/whatever procedures.
IMHO you shouldn't expect your account to stick around until you have at least some non trivial content in the account.
Of course the main account is a different story.
I also find blanket proxy bans reasonable: it’s akin to refusing service to those who wear a balaclava to a store.
A better analogy is sending mail with either proxy return addresses or none at all. Both are socially acceptable in most circumstances.
An actual admin shadowban does happen and they are employed, but I don't think they're particularly hidden. As a mod I see "User is shadowbanned" when they message us if they've been shadowbanned from Reddit by the admins.
Jack Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter, not Reddit.
Edit: Fair, I stand corrected. Leaving comment as-is.
* Communicate with reddit admins via /r/reddit.com modmail
* Appeal your suspension via https://www.reddit.com/appeals
with a permanently suspended account. See https://reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734911-My-acc...
I appealed the suspension, which sounded hopeless, but about 10 days later my account was restored.
To get around this and the other Captcha-related annoyances, PIA now offers dedicated IP as a $40-per-year add on:
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-features/dedicated...
My Reddit account was banned because I was posting from Tor. I've registered successfully via Tor and was able to use it without any problems for 6 months or so. One day, I was suddenly shadowbanned. I guess it was because the exit node I happened to be using that day was on a "kill on sight" spam blocklist.
I always posted in good faith and never got into any flamewar, a few links I shared were well-received by the subs.
Recently it almost happened again with my current account, but this time I was not global shadowbanned and it seemed to be just a local spam filter (many subreddits have their own anti-spam policies and auto-moderation queues). I sent a message to the Subreddit admin and I was able to post again. But after this incident I've completely stopped accessing my Reddit account via Tor.
Seems like they're following Google's strategy. Presumably, ad profit from each individual user is low enough that it's cheaper to accept false positives in their anti-abuse mechanism than it is to provide a functioning appeal process. Maybe if the user manages to go viral on Twitter or HN with their story they could get it reversed. Going viral with stories of false-positive bans is the primary way to restore a Google account, it probably works for Reddit too. Normal people have to suck eggs.
At least losing a Reddit account is less life-disrupting for most people than losing their Google account.
Entirely possible that user will get their account back since they won the social media lottery, but for every viral story there are god knows how many people out there who lost all their email/photos/etc. because of some inscrutable machine's mistake.
Several months ago I followed a new cardistry (look it up) personality on Instagram. I scrolled through and "liked" one or two dozen of their performance clips, out of the hundreds that they've posted. My Instagram account was blocked, for "manipulation" or some verbiage like that. Basically, the algorithm thought that I was a bot hired to inflate that person's numbers.
The Instagram appeals process is to email them a selfie, holding a piece of paper with the current date and something else written on it. I did this, but never got any kind of response. My Instagram account that I had for 5-10 years is just gone.
Turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I created a new account attached to the same phone and email address (somehow THIS isn't detected as abuse?). But I just lost interest in the app, and life seems to be better now for having done so. If Reddit ever nukes me, then it would be the kick in the ass that I need to stop wasting time on that toxic site as well.
iI have another idea why Reddit does not like VPN. They cannot monetize your data as easily.
Do they also ask you to put a shoe on your head?
[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/
What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit."
Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.
But... all the people they claim to have on their "Safety Board" haven't worked for kik for years and all efforts to contact anyone on twitter or anywhere fail. Even DMCA takedowns of revenge porn were being ignored now. It seems to be a dead platform that nevertheless gets app updates uploaded so something is still going on somewhere by someone.
Basically the only option they were discussing was getting the app removed from Google and Apple stores and they compared the situation to Parler where the app was pulled for failing to moderate. And yet kik seems to get a pass somehow. It's a very disturbing and frustrating episode.
Of course, doing that would cut off a stream of easy pedophile convictions. The prosecutor’s office might like the status quo. It certainly helps increase their metrics.
the fbi's real world response would be "let us introduce you to some canadian officers, and we're going to help, but it's actually up to them"
still, as the former owner of an ISP, i've had to do this, and they're actually quite professional and reasonable about it
It's lazy, it's abusive, and it should be illegal.
Edit: to clarify, I'm totally fine with this tool being employed to combat spam(bots). Just not against normal posters/contributors.
Also "illegal" is a little over the top. Are we talking misdemeanor or felony, here?
Edit: I'd just like it to be not allowed by law to hopefully curtail its use. I don't really care about what the repercussions of doing it anyway might look like.
Shadowbanning seems mostly used to silence slightly different opinions, and that's what I have a problem with.
This is the original intent. As far as I understood shadowbanning was for nefarious actors such as spambots, manual spammers, etc so they'd keep going without automatically creating new accounts.
Think about fraternities. Think about ethnic centers.
People have an expectation that because it's immoral in the obvious case, it's illegal.
It's actually not. Nothing stops anyone from making a group for, say, Chinese American newspaper reporters, or Lebanese car mechanics.
What's actually illegal is turning people down for jobs or housing over race.
The law would only be interested if the website was the only way to get to protected topics like a job board
In case you're not familiar with the concept: it entails "muting" an account without ever notifying said account of that fact. They can still post, comment, vote, and everything else, but no one will see this content.
The amount of people getting caught up in the filter is likely quite small. Should they have a better system to get accounts re-activated? Probably - would make sense that they cast a wide net and then have a relatively easy way out for real individuals who can prove identify. Is that perfect? Heck no.
As I mentioned I'm fine with this tool being used against spam.
Although I'm not normally massively against using anecdotal data for hypothesis building, in this case, it seems as though without actual data, it'd be silly to comment further.
Apparently it was because I had two accounts made from the same IP. On on my laptop and one from my mobile phone.
I noticed because your comment showed dead.
I really dislike "it should be illegal" for things like this. It's itself a lazy solution against a hard problem. It seems to often be used as shorthand for "I don't like this and I want it to stop". But making things illegal isn't a magic "make it stop" button. (Hello, War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, etc).
If you want to involve the Government in solving your problem, you now must also account for:
* What is the exact text of a law against this that could actually make it through any particular Congressional body?
* How will possible violations of this law be reported and investigated?
* How will that law be misused by malicious prosecutors and investigators to hassle and punish anybody they don't like?
* How will all of the actors involved actually change their behavior in ways that you didn't expect in order to avoid being targeted for either well-intentioned or malicious prosecution for possible violation of these new laws?
Example: Say I run a pseudonymous social media site resembling Reddit, and shadowbanning is the only thing keeping it from being a hopeless pit of spam right now. If I can't shadowban anymore, maybe my only solution is to require hard proof of identity for all users at least as strict as the KYC your banks use. Now everything you ever post is hard-linked to your identity. Even if not publicly shown normally, it's vulnerable to hacks, malicious employees, or Government requests. That would obviously benefit the Government, so there's a little incentive for them to implement and enforce any such law in such a way that sites are effectively forced to do this. Whoops, we just made the problem worse.
(Reddit allows the creation of multiple usernames using the same email address,) were your two different accounts that were (1) permanently banned and (2) temporarily banned using the same email address?
Interesting, didn't know that. But the E-mail addresses are different.
My previous account was initially shadowbanned without notice (all posts auto-filtered, and if I remember it correctly, it was a global shadowban on all subreddits) so I had stopping using that account. Weeks later I checked again and it became permanently banned explicitly. The system said,
> Your account has been permanently suspended for breaking the rules. This account has been permanently closed. To continue using Reddit, please log out and create a new account (the username [REDACTED] cannot be reused). This is an automated message; responses will not be received by Reddit admins.
My current account in question was temporarily shadowbanned. I was able to post in a subreddit without problems, and one day I was suddenly shadowbanned. But it was not a global one because I was able to post in another subreddit, so I suspect it was just an Auto-Moderation filter. After I sent a message to the mod of that subreddit (not Reddit admins) and stopped logging in via Tor, the account went back to normal again. But I never actually received a reply from the mod, I'm not sure how exactly I got unbanned - automatically due to a "good" IP, or manually by a mod.
FWIW I had that happen to me a year or two ago and was able to get the ban overturned.
Say you do notice, you just start a new account for free. Bonus points for moving identities and breaking existing tracking history.
Getting banned can be a win/win
Not sure it would even matter. I once submitted a breaking news story to /r/news and it was autodeleted by their bot. I messaged a mod asking why it was deleted since it was in fact news and was not a duplicate and their response was to tell me I'm stupid and to permaban me from the sub.
My submission was deleted, my account was banned from the sub.
Hence why Reddit will only and ever remain a tool for consumer to consumer communication, and why a business would be stupid to use it as a primary marketing channel.
I now only use it as an app on my phone which has ruined a lot of the conversation because it's far more cumbersome to type on mobile, as well as stuff like switching between browser/reddit to copy a link or quote something on the web is a pain on mobile.
I'm surprised there isn't a growing competitor to reddit at this point (that I know of)
Can you elaborate on that? From what I've noticed old.reddit.com has essentially not changed over the past years.
It's insulting how deliberate this is. I just tried using the redesign for ~5 minutes to see if it was as bad as I remembered, and the amount of dead space on my screen is striking. I have a normal 16:9 monitor and roughly 2/3rds of the front page is just totally blank, meanwhile you have post titles taking up 3-4 lines of the tiny column they're forced into.
On Firefox, use Old Reddit Redirect: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
And you would never be discovered... Just blame it on reddit!