Reddit doesn’t seem to ban an IP specifically, but they have ways of figuring out if accounts are associated. For instance, I was permanently banned for suggesting arson as a way of dealing with nazis moving in down the street. (I guess Reddit thinks that this is “encouraging violence”, as if Nazis were human?). I always use a VPN. When I changed my location and logged in to an alternate account, that account got banned also. I made an account from a different computer a few days later, also with a VPN, and that account was banned as well; I had previously logged into my 1st account from that computer.
So I think that there’s some kind of digital fingerprinting going on. I should have fingerprinting blocked on my computer, but it’s still happening, somehow; there must be some kind of hardware configuration information that it’s able to scrape that gives it a high enough degree of certainty that I’m me… The only solution that I was able to come up with–I have not actually tried this–was replacing my computer entirely, and then creating a new account.
EDIT: I’m curious to see what would happen if I tried to log into my banned account from my wife’s laptop. She has a reddit account; would they see me using her laptop as proof that her real account is one of my alternate accounts? IDK.
One does not simply “block fingerprinting”.
Fingerprinting is incredibly complicated and very hard to avoid.
You need VPN, Browser with no extentions and fixed windowsize (tor or mullvad), frequent cookie deletion, even the installed fonts/language packs can give them identifiers…
I just checked their tool. With a brand-new private browsing window open, connected through a VPN, and a fair amount of blocking shit layered into my browser, it’s showing that I’m blocking ads and trackers, but that I still have a unique fingerprint. Even tools like canvas blocker aren’t preventing it. Running it through Tor, I have a non-unique fingerprint, but Reddit doesn’t play nicely with the Tor browser. Attempting to use different clean installs of browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, Chrome (incognito mode), etc.) all have me as unique. Fonts could def. do it; I have to have a ton installed on my workstation.
It’s complicated.
Reddit doesn’t seem to ban an IP specifically, but they have ways of figuring out if accounts are associated. For instance, I was permanently banned for suggesting arson as a way of dealing with nazis moving in down the street. (I guess Reddit thinks that this is “encouraging violence”, as if Nazis were human?). I always use a VPN. When I changed my location and logged in to an alternate account, that account got banned also. I made an account from a different computer a few days later, also with a VPN, and that account was banned as well; I had previously logged into my 1st account from that computer.
So I think that there’s some kind of digital fingerprinting going on. I should have fingerprinting blocked on my computer, but it’s still happening, somehow; there must be some kind of hardware configuration information that it’s able to scrape that gives it a high enough degree of certainty that I’m me… The only solution that I was able to come up with–I have not actually tried this–was replacing my computer entirely, and then creating a new account.
EDIT: I’m curious to see what would happen if I tried to log into my banned account from my wife’s laptop. She has a reddit account; would they see me using her laptop as proof that her real account is one of my alternate accounts? IDK.
One does not simply “block fingerprinting”. Fingerprinting is incredibly complicated and very hard to avoid. You need VPN, Browser with no extentions and fixed windowsize (tor or mullvad), frequent cookie deletion, even the installed fonts/language packs can give them identifiers…
EFF has a good test which tests your browser
If you have JavaScript enabled all this is useless. So add “disable JS” onto the list.
I just checked their tool. With a brand-new private browsing window open, connected through a VPN, and a fair amount of blocking shit layered into my browser, it’s showing that I’m blocking ads and trackers, but that I still have a unique fingerprint. Even tools like canvas blocker aren’t preventing it. Running it through Tor, I have a non-unique fingerprint, but Reddit doesn’t play nicely with the Tor browser. Attempting to use different clean installs of browsers (Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, Chrome (incognito mode), etc.) all have me as unique. Fonts could def. do it; I have to have a ton installed on my workstation.
Its not machine specific, they can see very little about your machine. It’s most likely your browser. The cookies can give you away.
I tried using different browsers and cleared my cache multiple times.
Now that I recall, I started an account using cellular and it was banned hours later, still on cellular.
My alts work just fine with a VPN after being banned.