Reddit account for 13+ years. Constantly prompted to provide email. Have no desire to have any personal information in it whatsoever, so never provided any. However, it is the only account I’ve ever used for extensive long term discussion and community involvement. Thousands of comments in discussions with other folks on topics I’m interested in. Logged in from many different locations and platforms over the years. Opted to never enter an email. Have never forgotten password, never needed to reset password. Didn’t care about recovery. If the account is lost, so be it. Logged in recently to a banner saying my account has been “suspended for suspicious activity security reasons” and the above message. The only way to recover the account is to “reset the password by entering an email”. Created a random anonymous email online, entered it as a fresh new email never provided before, reset link shows up in email, reset password, back in the account.
If I had to make a cynical skeptical guess - looks like an obvious stunt in advance of the IPO to grab a bunch of emails for accounts that didn’t have emails in order to drive up account metrics used for valuation. Side note, I did receive the IPO invitation.
I spend more time on Lemmy now because the phone apps are awesome. I only hang on to Reddit because there are some communities that exist there that don’t have Lemmy equivalents. But I have been thinking about running one of those account comment / post scramblers and then deleting. This is bringing me closer to that decision.
be aware that if delete (and overwrite) your comments, that someone can accuse you of saying anything. I had a script that did it automatically. Someone didn’t like what I said, by the time it came to them to look at it , the comment was deleted — just what someone would do with a “uncivil” comment. So, be aware of that. The script I was using edited with random overwrite and then deleted, from the newest comment backward in time until a certain date. I’m not a jscript ninja, but it was open source and within a day I think a reasonable person with any coding experience would be able to moderate the script to their liking. I wasn’t aware of how nasty these people are. Very very sensitive.
Huh whats the issue people saying u said something fucked and u couldnt prove otherwise cos it was deleted. Bro who cares what random fuckers on the internet say?