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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".

Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.

It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.

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Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.

> It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two.

Hasn't it been like that for already many years?

arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.

100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.

...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?

Free speech doesn't die with this. Host your own site.

The year is 2041. Google announces that only a negligible fraction of users acceses websites outside of the clean pool. These users are at risk, they claim, due to "all the bad stuff on the free web". They refuse to clarify if this refers to malware or to content not aligned with The Party doctrine. However, they draw the consequence that "free web" sites will no longer be supported by Chrome, to protect the users. Less than an hour later, Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox that also disables access to websites that were not whitelistet by The Party, using the same reasoning.

Press fork.

For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )

There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN

What's so clean about YouTube, Discord, X etc? It's full of low quality content, scams, malware, influencers, advertisers and other scum and villainy.

I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's definitely "heavily censored" and "free".

There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.

You can say Roblox directly you know, Death Eaters aren’t coming after you for saying the name.

Mullvad Frankfurt 102 seems to always be OK in this regard.

it's already like that

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