Reddit account for 13+ years. Constantly prompted to provide email. Have no desire to have any personal information in it whatsoever, so never provided any. However, it is the only account I’ve ever used for extensive long term discussion and community involvement. Thousands of comments in discussions with other folks on topics I’m interested in. Logged in from many different locations and platforms over the years. Opted to never enter an email. Have never forgotten password, never needed to reset password. Didn’t care about recovery. If the account is lost, so be it. Logged in recently to a banner saying my account has been “suspended for suspicious activity security reasons” and the above message. The only way to recover the account is to “reset the password by entering an email”. Created a random anonymous email online, entered it as a fresh new email never provided before, reset link shows up in email, reset password, back in the account.
If I had to make a cynical skeptical guess - looks like an obvious stunt in advance of the IPO to grab a bunch of emails for accounts that didn’t have emails in order to drive up account metrics used for valuation. Side note, I did receive the IPO invitation.
I spend more time on Lemmy now because the phone apps are awesome. I only hang on to Reddit because there are some communities that exist there that don’t have Lemmy equivalents. But I have been thinking about running one of those account comment / post scramblers and then deleting. This is bringing me closer to that decision.
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How would this provide any measure of security if your account had been hacked? So the hackers just need to provide literally any email address? That doesn’t pose much of a barrier.
“Hmmm. Yesss. Counterpoint: Shut up and give us more data to sell.”
I think newer accounts can only be created, when providing an email address. There may be some old accounts that don’t have an email address associated. So, in most cases, you’d just be able to restore the account if you have access to both the account password and the email address. This breaks apart, if there’s no email address associated so I think they provided this way of recovery although it doesn’t improve security since it only applies to very few accounts?
“That’s a nice account you got there. Be a shame if someone were to lock it unless you give us some personal data.”
This happened to me several years ago on a similarly old account. I don’t think it was actually compromised, and I had no way to recover it as I had never set an email.
Same exact situation. This is what I thought was meant by “Reddit Email Grab” they were deliberately culling non-emailed accounts.
I’m not surprised, I started receiving bans as soon as there were rumors of an IPO. Everything about the site experience has degraded since then. I still check it from a few teddit/libreddit instances, but otherwise never giving reddit a single monetizable gesture ever again.
Based.
