Everything about the internet for the last 10 years seems to have exclusively boiled down to building tools to control and ban people.
Reddit used to just, at worst, ban you from a single community. Then the power moderators began expanding bans to their entire 'network'. Automoderator tools to ban people for having accounts that are 'too new'. "You are doing that too much, try again in 9 minutes". Messaging the moderators used to get you a 72 hour mute, now it's 28 days. And now every time you get banned from a community, you almost always get a site-wide ban at the same time, when 10 years ago, the admins never did anything, and the admin team was actually relatively small and 'known'.
We used to have mIRC for chat, running independent chat servers unrelated to each other. Then Discord centralized it, and then added phone number verifications. I've seen channels where they literally require you to link you Google and Steam accounts to 'verify'. There's times where Discord would ban an entire server and literally ban everybody who ever used it, because I got caught up in one that I think I was just a member of and never even chatted in.
Can't use Twitter or anything without a phone number, so they can more permanently ban you. Photo identification, face ID.
You used to actually have to get banned by a real community manager or something. Now everything is about "safety teams" who have no names, no identities, and you can only issue appeals to an empty void that likely never gets answered. The identities of all employees on these "safety teams" is always 100% anonymous and unknown. Reddit even has many subs where all bans are issued by a 'moderator account' so you can never know who did it or why.
Now they're rolling out AI tools to monitor everything in real time and "interpret" TOS violations to automatically issue unappealable bans.
This change is 100% so they can ban your entire PSN account for 'TOS violations', since they can't ban your entire Steam account.
I signed up just fine. Disposable email address was all I needed.
I get your point otherwise, though.
If you try to post, especially if you use a VPN, it instantly locks your account until you supply a phone number. You only have to supply it a single time so it can be from a disposable service.
Really?
I have exactly one tweet on my account, posted to reasonably prove I'm not an AI.
It sent just fine. No lockouts.
That being said, I was locked out of two prior accounts years ago pre-Elon for "bot-like activity" because why would I change the answer if there was no change to the question?
I have a sample size of two so I can't say for sure, but it was the instant I clicked the tweet button both times on completely normal posts. One of the accounts was put in maximum shadowban hell where no replies or direct posts could be seen by anybody even with direct links for two weeks too.
have several Twitter accounts created in 2023, all set up using Proton VPN without the need for a phone number. I even used non Proton email addresses without any issues.
The only thing to remember is not to use disposable emails as some may require a verification code if logging in from a different VPN server or country.
Same but I wanted to sign up for premium just to support what Elon is doing (despite him being far from ideal) but I can't without giving a phone number.
Okay, getting the blue check requires it? That's a valid criticism, yeah.
The sad thing is, this is still way, way, WAY better than the previous ownership.