I wonder if they targeted users they couldn't tie back to real identities. I never used an account tied to a real identity or a real email address and all of my accounts were banned for pretty innocuous or specious reasons.

One was banned for advocating violence against women, because I called Kaitlyn Jenner an attention whore. One was banned for saying Luigi is a hero. Of course all attempts at appeals were ignored.

Be the change you want to see. Post interesting stuff you find to share with the fediverse. Comment when you have an opinion. It really helps.

It hasn't been fun for the past few years, it's been bots reposting other people's comments and an algorithm designed to get you angry and depressed enough to keep coming back for more.

It's much better here.

I can no longer create a new one without using an email tied to my identity

I haven't bothered to look into it, but historically, there were a lot of sites that let one create throwaway email addresses to avoid handing over email addresses and tying an online handle to personal information.

Sites that harvested this email data fought back by trying to blacklist those "throwaway email address" sites, but it's a game of whack-a-mole—like, those throwaway email address sites also set up and discard domains from a pool—so I imagine that it's likely possible to manage to find one that works, if you're determined to do so.

Note that throwaway sites do create security issues in that password recovery and similar often relies on a registered email address, so you're potentially entrusting some random throwaway email site with access to your account, since it can receive email from the site. I wouldn't use that for something important, but depending upon use, it could be useful.

Also, a number of sites—I don't know about what Reddit will be doing, but I think that Google requires this for account registration these days—require a phone number, and at least in the US, while you can get VoIP SIP service, don't need to tie that to a phone, I understand that there have been legal restrictions added on SMS service from this crowd in the past few years. I don't know if Google permits for validating a phone number via voice or requires demonstrating SMS capability.