Comment by jorvi
5 hours ago
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.
> It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two.
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
it's already like that