Hacker News Reader

Same happened to me. However, I did do a support request which 2 days later agreed to let me in without a phone number. 2 days.

I think we can file this under 'dark patterns' and finally realise Twitter is attempting to be as abusive as Facebook.

I haven't worked there in a while, but you would not believe the volume of fake account creation they get. Spammers. Fraudsters. Jerks creating a second (or 20th) account to bypass restrictions. And more recently, state actors trying to manipulate things. So I am inclined to cut them some slack on the, "Please prove you're a real user" stuff.

A week or two ago anything I did with my hacker news account took me to google to solve a recaptcha. (I had blocked google when accessing this site, thanks umatrix)

Or I could email them to unblock it (my account has no email address associated with it)

Depending on what you mean by "a week or two ago", this was probably because of a botnet attack HN was under in mid-September, when we resorted to turning on recaptcha for logins for a while. We know why people hate this and want to avoid it in the future, but defending HN against attack took priority.