got the notification to verify my age when trying to access NSFW posts or profiles already for a few weeks now, but as of today my whole account is blocked unless I verify. I guess that’s it then. Based in Austria btw, so there is no specific law in place that forces Reddit to implement this and I will definetly not give my personal information to Persona, a company that belongs to Peter Thiels Palantir group.


I was being snarky. I have no idea how the bot accounts on Reddit are organized or managed, I’m just some dude.
the individual users who spam, would have a bunch of device they operate with multiple(dozens) of accounts each using services to host multiple browser instances at once, to seperate accounts from each other, so they dont get immediately connected by reddits filters. also multiple IP from different sources at once, and yes they spend money to do this, and this seperate the propaganda bots/spammers you hear done by countries.
I was being snarky as well, and not towards you.
In some circumstances I would actually stand behind user verification on Reddit/Reddit-like forum.
If that meant:
no bots, if you can really be sure that a user is a real person,
real freedom of speech, with real consequences for real people that abuse it (perma ban doesn’t mean much if you can just create a new account).
no flood of low quality AI content.
elimination of troll farms and institutional propaganda accounts…
But knowing current corporations, I am sure, the control applies only to us insignificant people, organized farms will keep on flooding, maybe some of them will have to pay to Reddit (those who didn’t already).
I don’t really have that much of a problem with the age verification as it is - my problem is that the only means to do so is giving my personal information to Persona, a very shady company with a not so good data protection record (they are part of Peter Thiels Palantir group, I guess that says it all).