Chozo

Yep. Just normal, AliBaba sunglasses.

It’s not a meme, this is a historical photo from 1806 showing a very depressed man and shame on you for making a joke of it!

That’s because Reddit bans VPN IP addresses. You still have an IP address when using a VPN, and VPN IPs aren’t exactly secret information. Reddit blocks all the VPNs they know of with an ever-updating blacklist.

VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit

While this is a popular selling point that VPN providers like to advertise, it’s pretty misleading in terms of what this actually means with regards to tracking. Realistically, this does almost nothing to prevent sites from tracking you. They don’t see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and see you on your VPN as “Hans Schneider”, instead they see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and on your VPN as “still John Smith, but either traveling in Germany or using a European VPN”.

Advertisers have tens of thousands of individual data points on nearly every single person who uses the internet at all for any purpose. All a VPN does is obfuscate ONE data point. That’s less than 1% effectiveness at hiding your identity from advertisers. A VPN does basically nothing against all the other fingerprinting methods advertisers have.

Think of using a VPN like speaking into a walkie-talkie: your voice comes out at a different location, but if the person on the other end already knows what your voice sounds like, then they still know who you are, just not necessarily where you are. Unless you’re taking other efforts to mask your voice, the walkie-talkie isn’t protecting your identity in any way. Likewise with a VPN, if you go to the same sites from the same devices and log into the same accounts and otherwise engage in the same online behavior, the VPN is only hiding where you are, but it’s still trivially easy for an advertiser to determine who you are.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because VPN providers harp on this idea so hard in their advertisements that it tricks people into thinking VPNs are capable of things that they just simply are not.

The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:

Those aren’t paywalls.

meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked

That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.

Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.

Don’t you kinda need internet for an email app?