Reddit has blocked all my VPS IPs (from all over the world)

Eggyhead, 22 days ago

I’m using an Italian server with no issue, but at one point it stopped letting me log in with my username & password until I made a fresh account by signing in with a service. I should see if my old username and password are working again, but if I lose it I don’t really care. Reddit karma is kind of pointless.

chunkystyles, 22 days ago

Just stop using reddit. I though that’s why we moved here.

Shadow, 23 days ago

I know datacenters have an IP range, and they could ban all IPs from all datacenters. But why?

Because it’s 99% abusive traffic.

sxan, 22 days ago

It’s far more likely that it’s because VPNs make it much harder for Reddit to track you, and sell the data.

As proof, I offer: this behavior is the same for other companies who monotonize visitors, such as Instagram. 99% of the rest of the web does not block VPN traffic. Not Amazon. Not Bing. Not Lemmy; not Mastodon. Google has started to require CAPTCHA in an attempt to annoy people out of using VPNs, but they let you in eventually.

It’s purely profit-driven; it has nothing to do with abusive traffic.

Shadow, 22 days ago

As someone with experience hosting high traffic sites, it’s probably both. Roughly 40% of the traffic I see to lemmy.ca is bots.

They’re also trying to block any people scraping for AI. There’s going to be numerous reasons behind this.

I know Disney+ also blocks hosting provider space. I’ve had users complain since our office / VPN are routed through our DC.

sxan, 22 days ago

There’s going to be numerous reasons behind this.

Sure, conceded.

Do you require email-based registration? I know it’s easy to bypass, but you may as well block registrations from domains being used as throw-away email hosts as block VPNs; VPNs are more popular, and gaining in popularity, and are healthy for users in the fight against tracking.

bamboo, 23 days ago

Reddit wants data, as personal and uniquely identifiable as possible, as collecting and selling that data is a core component of their business. To a significantly lesser degree they also want to minimize spam. VPNs reduce the amount of uniquely identifiable data they can collect (really just an IP address they/their customers can use to match your Reddit data to data from other sources. VPNs also reduce the efficacy of using IP blocks to stop spammers, but I really don’t think Reddit cares too strongly here unless the spam interrupts normal usage, as spam that looks human-like can be sold as user data.

TheRealAryan, 23 days ago

They don’t need to block IPs to stop spammers. Many people don’t know this, and in fact, I did not know this until I got all my users banned and I had to make a new user: Early posts of all users are hidden. Like ALL users. Unless you post with a high-quality IP, not necessarily residential, just a high-quality IP.

I have taken to buying, yes, buying users. I did that 2 times, don’t do it anymore because Reddit’s not worth 8 bucks.

These users usually have one post that’s gotten a lot of updoots. Man, Reddit chuds are so predictable with their updooting, people make money from it!

They are also older, like 2 months. I needed to post on r/forhire, so I bought those users.

I think if someone needs to scrape, spam etc, he could just buy a user. They go as cheap as $3 afaik.