Yesterday I started getting these annoying pop ups on Reddit. “You’re doing that too often, please wait X minutes”. This most often happens with new accounts that are low in Karma. It’s a sort of trust trap that prevents spam. My account is almost 10 years old. I have almost 500 thousand Karma. I don’t meet any of the new account nonsense. This block, is very suspicious.
I’ve seen it before though. It seems individual subs can enable something like this for accounts that post infrequently to that particular sub. But this block seemed to span across many subs, so it was clearly site wide. I assumed at first Reddit was blocking 3rd party apps in an effort to push people to use the shitty official app. So I installed the official app. And good fucking God does it suck. The problem persisted though, so I uninstalled the app. I also tried just using the web interface in Firefox mobile. No go.
So I decided to try on another account. Not only did this still happen on the other account, but the block from the first account, applied to other accounts. So clearly the block is IP based.
Now, on mobile, when not on my home network, I use a VPN basically full time. Why would fill a blog post on it’s own but all we need for this is to know that I use it all the time, I’ve done this for something like 5 years. It’s not a cheap freebie VPN, I use a paid service that’s trustworthy (I am the customer, not some other advertisers). I also use Reddit basically daily, a lot.
I disabled the VPN for a bit, the problem went away.
I re-enabled the VPN, the problem came back.
I did some searching on Reddit and Twitter and found a lot of other people having similar issues. Reddit is rate-limiting VPN users. It’s super annoying and super bull shit. There are plenty of valid reasons to use a VPN, like I said, that’s a whole different blog post. Blanked throttling VPN users is not a good solution. I would dump using Reddit before dumping using my VPN.
Hopefully it’s just a temporary glitch that gets fixed, but for now it’s incredibly annoying.