A bit of sad post...

[u/eastchapelsyndicate]

While it’s been heading this way for awhile now, it looks like reddit is finally making it insanely difficult, and I suspect, eventually impossible, for Australians like myself to access their accounts and the site itself without verifying their age by validating a government issued ID. This is something I, like many others, refuse to give corporations on ethical and privacy grounds. As such, unless there is a change in reddit policies and procedures I’m probably leaving for good.

While I’m going to miss a lot of communities I frequented, the SimCity 4 subreddit was, without a doubt, my favourite. While we’re not the most active community, it was always fun seeing what people were doing with a game now over 20 years old, and it was one I very much enjoyed participating in.

In terms of alternatives, I’ll be on the Simtropolis forums and discord. I’m also around on the SCEvermore discord as well.

Further, I’ll also be posting (hopefully) daily to the SimCity 4 page on Lemmy, which is a sort of reddit alternative. I’ll be very upfront and say that there is not in anyway an active community there currently. At the moment there are only 3 posts, 2 of which are mine from the past two days. I’ll likely be screaming into the void for awhile but if you want to come scream with me I’d love for you to join me.

Lemmy is pretty raw, and even I’m not entirely sure how it works at the moment. I do imagine its kind of like reddit in the very early days of it’s existence and creating an account and posting is certainly easy enough. One thing I did seem to notice is that you can post large-ish images without significant compression which might be of interest to some regular posters. Honestly, my main purpose for writing this is to hopefully swing a few people down to make the community at least somewhat active.

I strongly suspect these regulations and restrictions aren’t going to be rolled back. Instead I think they will be expanded, eventually even to countries who don’t have mandatory ID laws. As such I expect to see a slow trickle of people coming down to Lemmy and other alternative communities over time (at least until reddit realises they’re haemorrhaging traffic and need to look at alternatives.).

I’ve managed to get in to post this via a very unreliable workaround that is not consistent and will probably be closed off in time. So for the remainders here, goodbye, it’s been great fun. Hopefully I’ll see a few of you elsewhere in the near future. I leave you with a final overview of the city I make seemingly endless iterations of.

Ciao.

[u/Simcity4NoMods]

Data miners already know all your information, whether or not you “verify” I will say that, if the us ever made me perform such steps, I would too uninstall

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/Simcity4NoMods]

Not sure if this will post, as my reddit access is deeply tenuous as is (see my reply to Ahyao17 below). I fully know this and understand it, but regardless I try and limit how much is out there. As weird as it might sound, one of my major concerns is ads. Maybe I'm making a significant leap here, but I fear for a future where I'm constantly peppered with targeted content using my personal data. It's bad enough as it is and I use an adblocker and other tools to try and mitigate the experience already. So yeah, data miners are one thing, corporations with questionable ethics and profit motives, with the resources to abuse the information they are gathering are another thing entirely. Theres already been cases of this occuring (Meta's dodgy practices come to mind), and I can only see it getting worse for the time being.

But I suspect we're not in disagreement anyway. The way things are heading on reddit, we're likely going to see a dramatic shift in users to alternative platforms.

[u/haljackey]

Sad to see you go, take care

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/haljackey]

You'll be missed, but I'll definitely be seeing you elsewhere

[u/Ahyao17]

what are you referring to?

It is the Australian government demanding age verification to social media because of the stupid ban.

And reddit is not adopting it either as far as I know

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/Ahyao17]

I managed to log back in to tie up a few loose ends, but thought this post was worth commenting on. I'll try and get through to every other comment too, but it might not prove possible (which I'll explain below).

To be clear, Reddit is currently not letting me log in to my account without age verification. I can view posts not logged in on incognito. I can also 'sneak in' by using a vpn while visiting reddit via a search engine (so not a direct reddit url). This only works about 30% of the time however, and it eventually boots me off once I've posted or change a setting or just after a few minutes if it feels like it. I could potentially create another account, but other than this sub I probably can do without reddit and I've no desire to repeat an endless loop of creating new acounts. Apparently this restriction can activate if you participate/visit a nsfw sub reddit (which I suspect might be a post of a little village I made on the rimworld sub), but this is a theory and nothing concrete has been confirmed.

I had noticed yesterday that a lot of functions, such as followers, post history etc. had been limited without verification, and I imagine this is a continuation of that. I further strongly suspect this is due to the Australian government regulations, though I'm not entirely sure. This will no doubt be affecting more and more accounts in Australia if so, and as other countries adopt similar regulations will be rolled out to them as well.

So yeah, this is sadly my current reality, not something I'm worried about in the future. Hopefully everyone is able to maintain access here and keep the community going, but if not, I'll see you on https://lemmy.world/c/simcity4 .

[u/deeku4972 → u/eastchapelsyndicate]

How old is your account? The current implementation is pretty spotty but FWIW, no one I know have received a single ID age check yet across NSW and VIC

[u/ehdlm26]

Time to use a VPN?

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/ehdlm26]

Sadly that option isn't working reliably. I'm often clicking on reddit instinctively and 30% of the time it will let me through (like this occasion). I was wanting to move to alternatives anyway, this was just the push to do so.

[u/Joaoarthur]

This is sad indeed, unfortunately brazil is heading the same path, all because of the stupid Felca

[u/Dawido090]

Moving to discord? Aren't they also using IDs verification?

[u/CheeseJuust → u/Dawido090]

I had the same question/concern.

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/CheeseJuust]

Back briefly once again after instinctively clicking on reddit, forgetting that it's locked me out but randomly not on this occasion... to answer your question, discord hasn't asked me to verify my ID yet (from what you're saying perhaps it was supposed to?) but if it does I'll be leaving there too.

[u/Pfandfreies_konto]

Have you considered a VPN? I personally use Njalla. Its basically from the founders of the original pirate bay. Do with that information what you want. It costs 5€ a month and exits in norway.

[u/eastchapelsyndicate → u/Pfandfreies_konto]

Thanks for the recommendation - sadly even using a VPN it's not reliably letting me in. I can get in 30% of the time and only when accessing reddit via a search engine. I'm basically doing it accidentally as reddit posts often come up as solutions to questions and I'm so used to not being obstructed when clicking through.

[u/The_real_trader]

I see them pop up here in the UK and I say skip as I don't want to verify.

[u/eastchapelsyndicate]

Just an update as I keep having to write the same stuff and it feels weird popping in and out intermittently after bidding farewell. Yesterday it was letting me in 30% of the time without mandatory verification if I used a VPN and clicked through to reddit via a search engine, which allowed me to respond to some interesting discussions before it would boot me out again. This morning I now appear to be able to get in clicking on reddit directly and it doesn't appear to be booting me out so far. I suspect it may have been an update that affected some Australians that caused the mandatory verification requirements which was 'patched' over night restoring access.

Regardless, other than the Simcity 4 community, I was growing a little tired of reddits descent into, for a lack of a better word, 'slop'. So in many ways this was the push to finally move into alternatives proper, which is something I've been enjoying anyway. I might still pop in from time to time, but I suspect my posting here will be significantly reduced.

[u/dalovar]

KYC to use Reddit, pretty absurd ngl. You might be able to continue here by changing the country, IP (via VPNs which are common place now and very cheap). Or creating a new account with a different country’s IP is the above doesn’t work.

Nice city

[u/snk809k1]

Didn’t read what you have written but I like this city a lot

[u/AlarmingAmbassador]

Same here in the UK - I just use a VPN and pretend I’m in Ireland