Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn't doing anything wrong. Let's hope this isn't some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans
I saw a post a few days ago where one Lemmy user threatened to triangulate another user via IP, and then hurt them, because they said Linux doesn't work out of the box as well as windows in their experience.
This was on a main instance. The person didn't get in any trouble.
Yeah, Lemmy is full of shit heads and mods/admins rarely care. You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc. Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.
I like the sentiment, but it is so incredibly naive to think that there aren't crawlers scraping every ounce of data from Lemmy as possible. While Lemmy itself may not be collecting user data (depending on who is hosting your home instances of choice), other data that is valuable can still be collected, particularly for LLM AI.
If you can access it, the data scrapers have already crawled it.
Especially considering the post from a little while ago showing that admins of Lemmy instances can see what individual users are upvoting and downvoting. There's nothing to stop a bad actor from setting up an instance and just harvesting data.
It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.
During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:
Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem.
Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don't fret! We've reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren't already.
I hate using it, but there are some things I just can't find info on anywhere else. Reddit is always a last resort, but it frequently turns out to be the only resource.
Yup, sadly I need to use it for certain things. I have asked for my ban to be reversed from some salty mod, but they will not reply. Hello Opera and VPN and I can go comment and not care.
Wish they would at least be honest in their messaging, the whole “quirky” official reddit branding doesn’t really work anymore now that they’ve gone full corporate mode
It also tells the website the OS you're running, as well as the browser, and various version numbers of stuff.
One interesting experiment is to use a user agent changer to view a website, and watch how the website changes every time you load a new user agent.
Google will remove search options if you're using Firefox (mobile?), for example. But if you change your user agent to say you have Chrome, even if you are actually using Firefox, those options magically come back and work. It's almost as if that's anti-competitive behavior or something...
It's also how a lot of websites know whether or not to give you Windows executables or Mac executables, or Linux executables, etc.
Couldn't find any explanation on Google so I tried emailing them about this. I got back this lovely gem:
Reddit Support (Reddit Support)
Nov 14, 2023, 15:29 PST
Hi there!
Thanks for contacting us! At this time, we are not currently accepting inquiries via email. If you need support with our API or have questions, please submit your request here.
It was still working for you until now? I uninstalled it several weeks ago because I couldn't get anything. Kinda makes me want to reinstall it and try again.
Happened to me yesterday (Windows 11, Chrome latest version.) A simple wipe of my browser files fixed it.
I don't even know how to use an API, let alone write code more complex than a For or Do Until loop in VBA, which I literally learned on the job to automate a finance task I was picking up.
Either Spez is turning paranoid that everyone and their mother is leeching off his data, or this was a critical bug.
Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Why hope that? That's exactly what it is. If anything we should encourage shit like that so the site can crash and burn even more. They deserve nothing. It's too bad many of the subreddit blackouts only lasted 48 hours, and even worse people gave up and went back to reddit.
Let's hope they do something really crazy and start requiring ID for all users so more people will get fed up and leave.
I'm sure this is exactly it, they want to stop any / all non official API access to prevent bots and scraping, I'm certain, it matches with their recent behaviors.
Still ongoing on multiple IP's and different browsers.
Plain Edge and their app works - so it seems that Chrome/Brave and FF are not welcome, which smells like a privacy issue.
Well reddit - that was the last straw.
It's fucked for me too. As much spicy intrigue is generated by thinking this is nefarious, I think some dumb shit just fucked something up and broke the site
They don't even get the most obvious alts. I used to mod defaults back in the early 2010s on reddit and there were some notorious spammers and trolls, here's a few notable examples.
One guy in particular chalked up at least 100 alts, there was a whole private subreddit create just to keep track of this person. They talked in a very idiosyncratic way and had a few harassment targets, they'd often go to trans subreddits and find someone to send horrible messages to. Typically when they found a target, they'd create a username for them, like if they found a person who picked the trans name "Jennifer" for instance they'd make a user account "NeverJennifer" then start to send suicide messages, then they'd create alts as they got blocked/suspended etc.
There's a spammer on reddit called Oliver Gaspirtz/Oliver Markus Malloy/Introvert Comics who used to run a bunch of subs between 30-40 alt accounts, mostly to sell their own content and books, and market themselves as a sort of online guru/politics understander type. They had a persona to sell redpill stuff, another for pro-cop propaganda, another for agreeable liberal takes. They'd have accounts with bios like "I'm a trans woman!" or "I love Ukraine!" for whatever the hot topic at the moment was they wanted to speak on behalf of. Recently they had all their main accounts and subs deleted apparently after harassing co-moderators of other subs. They still run a smaller network of subs though, mostly for self-promotion.
reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem.
Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternative User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
You can read Reddit's Terms of Service here.
if you think that we've incorrectly blocked you or you would like to discuss easier ways to get the data you want, please contact us at this email address.