Youtube and Reddit are the worst. I am pretty convinced the aggressive blocking is not because of abuse, but because VPNs actually have become a problem for tracking and data mining.
I have the suspicion the IP blocking is somewhat coordinated between Youtube and Reddit, to maximize annoyance and discourage VPN usage, since I frequently find exit server working for either one of them, but not both. Disrupting the ping pong of social media for VPN users, seems like an effective strategy to influence their behavior. And since they are natural monopolies respectively, they hardly risk alienating anyone doing so. Similar to how cookie banners are abused to modify people's sentiment on privacy regulations in favor of data mining. Even many tech people believe annoying cookie banners are the EU's fault, when common practice is either malicious compliance, unwarranted or straight illegal.
That said, it is actually fucking annoying. Then again, just a nuance in the greater enshittification and rapidly growing dissatisfaction with the web overall for me.
>Youtube and Reddit are the worst. I am pretty convinced the aggressive blocking is not because of abuse, but because VPNs actually have become a "problem" for tracking and data mining.
FTFY (added scare quotes)
I don't see blocking tracking and data mining as a problem at all, but rather a very good thing.
A lot of their endpoints are rented or hosted from ASes that are well known, e.g. M247 Ltd. If I wanted to vastly reduce annoying VPN traffic, I'd simply block these ASes as well. That's likely the cause of these.
There isn't a lot Mullvad can do about it. Not all providers of hosting are willing to tolerate VPN endpoints in the same way they don't like hosting tor exit nodes.
hCaptcha seems to be increasing in popularity, have tasks that actually stump current bots, and not discriminate by IP address.
reCAPTCHA is the GoDaddy of CAPTCHA services. It doesn't achieve its purpose and the CAPTCHA task is often just a time waster. It's already decided whether you're a bot or not - which is not based on your mouse movements, but rather your IP address reputation and whether you're signed into Google. It only still exists because of brand inertia. I'd like to see a Google executive put before Congress and forced to complete a reCAPTCHA over Tor.
