First time I’ve seen this sitting behind my shitty VPN. If the frontpage /r/normaldayinrussia posts didn’t make you raise an eyebrow knowing their denying access to people for running a VPN should at least make you second guess.
Get out now, save yourself.
Does anyone know the background of this? I also experienced this, apparently due to my VPN. But I don’t understand how or why-- It doesn’t look like they mention that VPN use is against policy, and tbh I’m not really sure how they know I’m on a VPN anyway?
They basically want to avoid people creating accounts from behind VPN addresses that can’t be adequately policed for stuff like ban evasion.
They want your legit address so they can just ban your account and if needed your IP without having to hassle some VPN worker through whatever specific policy they have on cooperating with rule enforcement
The majority of people have dynamic IP addresses so that’s about as useful as a pile of shit and once again just limits legitimate access.
I imagine the idea of it is trying to prevent scraping of the content. It seems like it started a couple months after the 3rd party app debacle. By blocking IPs associated with cloud providers they hope to make it harder to scrape their content like openai did when training chatgpt.
They match your VPN IP to a list of known VPN IP ranges and block it based on that. Theoretically if you connected through, say, a university network via VPN it probably wouldn’t.
While I’m 100% here for the shitting on reddit, I think it’s probably also an attempt to manage the karmafarming bots and onlyfan bots and . . . y’know, all the other bots. Because if you’ve re-worked the fake internet point system to be remunerated for actual cash you can’t afford to pay bots. So - money is why. Also making bad corporate decisions is very on-brand.
Also, fwiw, Tumblr’s kind of neat. A mix of the “reddit” and “tweet” thing with some interesting posts. They’re corporate but havent’ screwed it up so horribly yet that everyone fled in horror.