[–] 1 point 10 hours ago

Maybe they will start profiling cell service IPs, but so far I've been in the clear with them. I think spam / proxy IP database lookups is weighing heavily in reddit's profiling. Using Claude I cam up with a reasonably seamless way to have Firefox and Brave on my home PC use my phone's data connection instead of my cable IP, which is very very static and long blacklisted.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    Yeah a lot of people seem to think that if you get banned from reddit, you must have been a Trump or Nazi apologist, but it all snowballs from one mod capriciously banning you from a subreddit, and then your alts all being burned for ban evasion.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    They treat anybody with an account that's less than 30 days old as if they're animals to be abused for sport. Someone should file a class action lawsuit over Shadow banning. You could post 50 messages before you start to even realize that nobody is seeing them.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (2 children)

    I tried anti finger printing, which is like the same as using the device, and that works fine. I think what was the setting me back was not using a clean IP, and not using a mainstream email provider.

    I found out that if you use the cell phone IP with anti-fingerprinting like the brave browser, and he's a fresh email account through Gmail or Hotmail, youre pretty much in the clear from the get-go.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (10 children)

    The irony is that me, a real person, gets banned and banned some more, for saying something pro-Republican back in 2012, while these bot accounts spray slop all over the site with immunity.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago*

    The article I posted actually documents how corrupt Reddit is. For example, the two founders faked profiles and postings on a massive scale to make the site seem viable when it first started.

    That's pretty standard for an internet startup for that time. That's a "we'll worry about the consequences later" SOP that has only become stronger in the current climate.

    It’s a site with no integrity and social vison

    They still allow some disgusting shit in the name of free speech, on the adult content side of things. As a public company, a lot of that is likely to be done away with in the coming few years.

    Why should the Japanese or Koreans use American sites? They can create their own and generate wealth for their own economy. Google and Zuckerberg and the rest do not care about Japan or Thailand or China…

    No idea, but the nature of reddit makes it hard to monetize. I don't think there's a financial case for all those countries to have their own link aggregation type social media sites.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

    The good news is that reddit's growth in the US has slowed, while growth globally has climbed. That's good because US traffic is the most valuable, while overseas traffic, is often effectively worthless, like you can't sell anything to a lot of global traffic. This means reddits operating costs are increasing due to that higher overall site usage, while the rates of monetizable English speaking users is going flat.

    I've seen some mention that reddit is embracing non English speaking users to acquire more users and content, but I can tell you as an Internet marketer, this move in general, among all who do it, is like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip, both because they're not valuable to advertisers, and users in places like Japan, Thailand, East Europe have already established usage patterns with LINE, Facebook, WhatsApp, Wykop, etc. The same network effect that keeps people like us stuck to reddit, keeps what little valuable international traffic there is, stuck to whatever they were already using.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    I'm only on reddit for three or four subreddits. I was banned from two of them for moderate political views. Not surprisingly, my new account has not been banned by the subreddits I like, but other subreddits have banned my account using something I just learned existed called "/u/bot-bouncer" which is apparently a non-reddit service that somehow decides if a new account is a bot or not based on account age and post history analysis alone. Absolutely crazy. This of course increases the ban evasion threat considerably.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    I'm surprised that reddit has leaned so hard into the act of perma-bans and site-wide bans. These are high intent users. Only a finite proportion of the internet wants to use reddit over say, TikTok, Instagram, Discord, etc. These bans are costing them a resource that is unlikely to renew itself, as users go elsewhere and do different things with their lives.

    If all bans were capped at thirty days, that would still suck sometimes, but accounts I've had since the late 2000's could be revived. I had one account with 100k karma before it got burned down for my political views + ban evasion. Subreddit mods could even have a bot that re-bans users after 30 days, that's still preferable to reddit itself causing a mass extinction of old accounts that were valuable to the people who created them.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 days ago* (7 children)

    Of course that appeal got rejected because I didn’t explain the context above.

    The repeal was rejected because they're never not rejected.

    I posted info on effective ban evasion https://lemmy.world/post/52856407 , so far so good. IP address is by far the highest hurdle to clear these days, because of the crackdown on spammers. The universal weak spot with IPs is cell phones. It's too complicated to lock phone numbers to IPs since cell phones constantly move around, but I'm sure they would love to do this and might some day find a way to make it happen. But until that happens, it's the only back door, outside of paying good money for clean domestic IPs in your own timezone.

    Reddit is fighting ban evaders with the same fire they used to go after bot networks, and probably losing a lot of valid, well meaning users in the process.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 days ago (1 child)

    Alright I won't bullshit you. It's only the city subreddits I have issues with, and the lemmy versions have line one post per day. It's dead, and probably will never be alive.

    I also belong to some, lets call them "support groups", and currently such groups don't exist on lemmy. I could start one, but again, I really don't expect that anyone would show up. Most people don't get banned by reddit enough to jump ship.

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  • Reddit ban evasion (lemmy.world)
    submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by to c/reddit@lemmy.world
     

    Here's the latest with what I've come up with to do it. It's not easy, because reddit has created defenses primarily to stop bot networks, who have far more resources than an actual redditor.

    To that end, using VPNs or TOR is a no-go because there are databases that catalogue all these IPs and reddit makes use of those databases. You also don't want to access with a home WiFi cable type IP, as these tend to be static and reddit will have associated it with your banned account. This leaves one option: use a cell phone data connection. These IPs change often and reddit has little ability to flag cell data IPs without causing collateral damage.

    Reddit now requires and email address. For this it's tempting to use throw away email services, but reddit flags disposable email. It might be possible to get away with custom domains or, .edu addresses, but for ban evasion, the safe bet is to use one of these: gmail, hotmail, outlook, yahoo or icloud. These are the most common providers, thus reddit can't blindly discriminate here.

    When it comes to web browsers, people will say "reddit tracks your device", that's actually not true, it would be a breach of privacy for reddit to access any kind of hardware ID. But what they do is profile your client, like your screen size, time zone settings, detected browser plugins, etc. With this they create a probability that you are a match with your banned account. If you do nothing to hide your client details, the probability of a match will be high, and the subreddit moderators will be informed that your new account is likely affiliated with a banned account. To avoid this, you can either use the Brave browser, or Firefox with "privacy.resistFingerprinting" set to true.

    Some have said that reddit profiles things such as your subreddit subscriptions and usage patterns to detect if you have returned. This is rather unlikely, as the false positive rate would be very high with so many people having shared interests. But just to be safe, don't copy your subreddit subscriptions one for one, mix it up for at least the first month of the account's life.

    There are only certain flags reddit can use with a high degree of confidence: poor reputation IP address, poor reputation email provider, cookie/client data crumbs, and user agent profiling. If you have accounted for each of these clues, then there's little else that reddit can determine about you which is actionable.

    Here is a summary in steps:

    1. Install the Brave browser on your phone. If already installed, delete all cookies and data.

    2. Google "what is my IP", find your IP and write it down.

    3. Put your phone into "airplane mode", wait.

    4. Exit "airplane mode" and check your IP, if it's unchanged, repeat step 3 until you have a new IP.

    5. Create a new hotmail or yahoo email account.

    6. Go to reddit, create a new account with Brave, the new IP and the new email address.

    7. Build up karma to at least 100 by spamming clever comments to posts in r/askreddit/new

    Wait a few days before posting to any subreddit you were banned from. Try to wait up to a month before using the same IP address as you had with a banned account, such as your home cable connection. Looking at reddit with a banned IP is likely safe, but the act of posting comments from that IP will trigger flags. It's likely that a bad IP reputation falls off over time, as IPs get repurposed on a periodic basis, and errors would increase over time if they marked a given IP as untrustworthy forever.

    If you don't want to have to use reddit on a phone, you can buy a USB wireless network interface, then have that interface connect to your phone with the "mobile hotspot" feature, then install something like 3proxy.com, and configure Firefox to use 3proxy, so that reddit, as seen through proxied Firefox, will see your phone's IP address, not your home internet connection. If any of the proxy setup is unclear, just ask your favorite LLM for more details.

    It can be tedious to tether your phone to your computer, because you have to leave and take your phone with you. If you're a reddit power user, it might make sense to buy a burner phone with a data plan, and keep it with your PC, specifically to act as your reddit IP address.

    Personally, I just don't like typing on my phone, so I bought a USB keyboard with a phone holder, but I'm resigned to the fact that my hope cable IP is probably toxic for a month or so.

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