TIL, Reddit blocks VPNs since last march.
TIL, Reddit blocks VPNs since last march.
Reddit has been blocking users who are using VPNs from its site unless they log into their Reddit accounts. Why is that? And what to do?
You cannot access reddit without either an account, or turning off your VPN. Effectively meaning that it’s difficult to access reddit privately, as they can either track you with IP or with account.
Even alternative frontends like RDX for reddit by @[email protected] don’t solve this issue.
I can’t believe more people haven’t left because of that.
Spez (Steve Huffman) moderated a subreddit called /r/jailbait and now he's adding paywalls to the site. He's a pedophile with an addiction to greed.
in fairness to spaz, even though he doesn't deserve it, that was at a time where you didn't need to approve being added to a sub's mod team. I believe he tried deleting himself from there, but they kept adding him, which prompted them to implement the approval system. I could be wrong, I don't know.
I saw spez at the mall one time when I was Christmas early shopping. I recognized him, but I'm not gonna treat a CEO like a celebrity, so I just mind my own business. a while later, I was waiting to get a ticket for the AMC there, Steve Huffman goes up to a kid who is holding popcorn and starts to eat some out of the bucket. The mom tells him to stop and pulls the kid back, but spez just smacks the popcorn out of the kids hands and screams at the mom in the face really loudly (not actual words, literally a scream). popcorn everywhere. the kid is now crying and the mom is at a loss of words and looks so stressed to be in that situation and is about to cry too. At this point, I need to do something. I go up to the situation and tell spez to back off immediately. as a response, he tries to kick me in the balls (missed and tripped a bit), then makes cringry hissing noises.
As much as I dislike the guy, I don't need fake stories for reasons to hate him. Thank goodness this sounds 100% on-brand for that absolute spaz, no proof needed!
Oh man, I forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me of another reason I hate that guy.
I know I'm a data point of one but this seems sporadically applied. Sometimes it works on a vpn without logging in. Sometimes it doesnt.
That's just not true, we go through a VPN at work and it works
It blocks popular VPN services. I doubt your work is a recognised VPN IP.
They are slowly killing public access.
They don't want you using reddit unless you are using with an account tied to real ID.
They want to pump up the number of new accounts and/or monthly active accounts by any means necessary now that the stock price depends on it.
I have a feeling they want to be like Facebook, with the aggressive personal info you have to give in order to login, they can lock the content behind the login feature like fb does
isnt thier Q4 earning, they are reporting, hence the massive bans as of late, gotta look up suck up to investors, who wants to purchase reddit. reddit is on its way to become a FB CLONE. anyone remember Y!Answers(i still think it was the og reddit before people moved there. Y'A was most useful for physics /math, and some science questions from textbooks if you need answers.
Some mullvad server aren't blocked.
Some Proton aren't either.
What is becoming increasing difficult is Youtube. finding a patched client and the right VPN server is no easy task.
As VPN usage becomes more mainstream I believe "premium" offers will start to appear, offering servers with fewer people, regularly renewed IPs, things like that, for a higher price.
I sometimes have to switch servers to comment on Lemmy
i think the ones that evade the bans, use proxy servers, which are harder to detect than a vpn.
I was about to say, old reddit in browser works fine, but I use Mullvad, so I never noticed. I'm increasingly spending more time here too.
The ones they know about.
In dark times of desperation, seeking help on the internet, I sometimes find myself tempted by the Reddit thread in the top of my search results.
But I know that if I click it, the only thing that will happen is the familiar cross-armed Snoo popping up and telling me, "You've been blocked by network security."
It's like a reality check for me: I don't want to use Reddit, and Reddit doesn't want me using it. So I'm going to need to either get better at searching for solutions, or try to solve problems in my own way.
In the end, introducing more barriers to entry has simply reinforced my decision not to go to Reddit. Their blocking of VPNs has conditioned me to ignore Reddit links in search results entirely, mentally filtering them out the same way I do with ads/sponsored content.
Nice work, Spez.
BONUS: I just came across a Google support page where someone asks, "How do I Block Reddit and Quora results from all searches permanently". The top answer is hilarious and sad.
This, and the response that demands you use the app to see the content, or of it’s marked NSFW for any reason, you cannot view it unless you login.
Really irritating to use reddit anymore.
Old.reddit.com still lets you bypass that.
Can't you ban the entire domain from the network at the router level? I think it would be very fitting to block them on your network in retaliation to them blocking you on theirs.
Try using Kagi search. It’s a subscription based search engine, but it’s much more customizable and doesn’t serve ads or push shopping pages at you as solutions. You can save a filter on there to exclude results from
Reddit and Quora if you don’t want to see them in your searches, but you can also specifically mention websites to whitelist if you find they give you good results for certain types of searches.
I still use Google occasionally because the one thing Google is great at is recommending products to purchase.
...or you could use one of these search engines that are not for profit.
https://www.goodnet.org/articles/7-search-engines-that-give-to-charities
People keep acting like Kagi, desite being part of the capitalist system and even celebrating how profitable they are, are the good guys. And I am tired of seeing people giving them free advertising on Lemmy.
Here's Kagi using some terrible marketing copy right out of freshman year business school to talk about how them making profits by people paying them to do what can be done for free benefits everyone:
We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
they are probably banning datacenter ip addresses to prevent AI companies from skraping. They want to sell the data for money 🤷♂️
people are also use proxies, and some use datacenters for that and reddit found that out too. i think people using mobile proxies which are better.
I created a Reddit account a few days ago (for testing purposes) using MullvadVPN and after many captachas I managed to finalize but the account is shadowbanned. I can access the subreddits but my comments don't show up for anyone
By the way, fuck Reddit!!!
they automatically shadowban vpn users, i was on another forum that they already had been banning vpn accounts(instant ban) for a while they all switched to using proxies, anti-detection browsers, ISP changes to evade the bans. anyone who have been using it recently will get shadowbanned instantly or eventually, hence the use of different proxies instead. even that is not fool-proof , and people are actually paying to do this(for thier OF accounts)
a way to check if your acc is shadowbanned is logout and incognito and try to look up your user profile(or any other redditors profile, if says missing or suspended, you know), it also can tell if a user has deactivated thier acc.
additionally reddit is currently going through a large purge of accounts as of recently, someone mentioned in another forum that there have been an unusual amount of account bans recently(like 3 in the last 3 months). i lost a couple of accs as a normal users, one of my acc got temp suspeneded, suddenly all my other accounts were immediately permabanned.(apparently some mods are extremely anal about reporting other people). theres other instances of other peoples acc were banned for no reason at all, appealing just gets a rejection notice(reddit admins arnt even bothering to look at it, they know)
I think they're either using google data to link email accounts to phone numbers or using an NLP model to identify users by how they write in the vans.
I hot banned on accounts tied to email addresses I haven't used in years, logged in from a vpn. Like. 5 email addresses. Many accounts on the email addresses hadn't been used in years. The only things linking them were a phone number I used for 2fa on google.
I was using a VPN to access F*eddit, after 1 or 2 days i got a permanent red bar on top saying that my account was banned, needless to say reddit is no more my preferred media provider.
This also happened to me, i wondered why i got banned
In my case, anytime I used a VPN, my feed wont update.
I can say got suspended for using VPN, they say there's an issue with the security of my account & promoted me to change the password. I never posted any comments only did upvote & downvote. Still got suspended for no reason!!
interesting, through the ban wave last tuesday only one of my accts wasnt pera ban, but it required me to change my password out of the blue, and it also receive the "perma ban message, but i couldnt find it anywhere( the appeals page doesnt let you contact them if you have no ban in place). im almost certain my account was flagged, additionally i checked today searching my acc incognito, it has a restricted box next to the name? havnt tried to comment with it yet.
If you want to use reddit, just find a redlib instance.
For accessing past threads I use LibRedirect and cycle between instances
A lot of them are getting blocked too, presumably by datacenter IPs. I suppose it's possible to run it off a residential IP.
You know you can use an extension that will redirect you to old.reddit.com which doesn't need an account? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/
No, that doesn't always work. They still block that sometimes.
Doesn't work, they serve you a blank webpage
Been getting that for months.
Work uses a VPN. So if there's a useful answer to a work question on some technical reddit, I don't see it. Way to remain a relevant resource for anything but fandom BS.
I wonder if you get banned if you use the TOR Reddit page
No. I'm using Tor for Reddit all the time since they banned VPN. Reddit even has their .onion site
Which VPN are you using? In most cases it works for me depending on the country I choose.
it does, reddit blocks vpn where reddit is not really censored by the government. i think thats why they may allow VPN some countries that may restrict its usage.
Happens on corporate VPN too. Morons are blocking themselves. Imagine a corpo user looking for Excel formulas for work and reddit it's like, 'fuck outta here'.
Admittedly, I only use exit nodes in my state, but they do block Mullvad and Air.
Yes they automatically ban vpn users most of the time, I think that's why the OF accounts use rotating proxies, mobile proxy servers, they couple it with anti detection browsers, they have to change ips, or reddit catches on. This is from another site, even they are getting caught still, due to redditsn recent ban wave, I also noticed many subs had increased their filtering of "spammy comments"
It's changed a few times. It's been blocked without login, then later, to a bunch of random interrupts and resets.
People have strange ideas about netsec, like lemmy.
I use it with NordVPN all the time
It seems to depend. If I have my location set to within the US, I can usually access the top level post without a problem, but I can't see any comments. If I set location to Europe---usually Switzerland, since they have good privacy laws--then I can't access the site at all. If I set it to old.reddit.com with location set to the US, I can see comments, except for anything that's been labelled as NSFW; those require me to log in.
Do they have an android app?
no, but the mobile version of the website is just fine. you can also install LibRedirect (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/libredirect/) on Firefox to automatically redirect reddit links to it.
Yeah it's annoying AF to get around it, I sadly gave up and logged in.
It's been that way for years.
Grabs calendar Well hey that's when my life fell apart after they killed my puppy. -probably unrelated.
Have you tried just using Lemmy instead?
What do you think I’m doing? My account doesn’t have thousands of lemmy submissions by accident!
Yup, donated $100 too because it's a great service.
Here I am thinking I was a controversial asshole.. nope, just a security nerd. I wonder if NordVPN's new nordwhisper protocol will circumvent some of this?
I've also wondered if they've collected hardware hashes of the actual computer beyond IPv4. Never heard of CaptchaV3.. I'll have to read up on that.
Reveddit seems to be a useful workaround but of course you'll see all the removed content as well
I just host a RedLib instance and browse every so often. Starting to use Lemmy more for actual interactions.
YouTube too
they have a tor hidden service, still seems to work.
every account I made on there got shadowbanned. I made them before they had email as a requirement
(me using a VPN and this frontend https://rdx.overdevs.com/subreddit.html?r=popular)
What's this about a block now?
Also if you block all cookies the website breaks too lol
It's not a straight up block, sometimes reddit disallows you from seeing threads when you're on a vpn, but it's not always consistent.
Yeah I've had to switch servers a lot to view helpful reddit posts I find online
Works fine for me but Mbin > reddit
Oh, I just reconnect to different Mullvad servers until it connects to one that isn't flagged by Reddit, on the rare occasion I need info from a Reddit post.
Unfortunately for Reddit, I am more stubborn than they are, and will quite happily spend 5 minutes doing that instead of registering an account/going without a VPN. And if they "fix" that, I'm quite certain I could find a workaround.
They seem to not only use IP based techniques - they block me if I use wireguard to my dedicated server (who's public IP range has been mine for longer than wireguard exists and almost as long as Reddit exists) while I can access it directly from that IP without issues. And if I dial back into my home network it's basically 50/50 if it works or not.