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Having worked internally at bigcorp with the team that handles this, they are incompetent and inhuman. Their only care is keeping the spam rate "acceptable" while also keeping the rate of false bans "acceptable" too. They will leave useless rules in place while refusing to add new rules as long as their metrics are good. Of course there is no feedback loop so they never know what the actual rate of false bans is. Thankfully bigcorp only bans when you try to do something spammy, unlike google and discord, which ban you on login, which seems retarded in my imo. (The trick being if you never log in, you never get the discord verificationwall, so back up your cookies and auth tokens and never log into discord again since they don't ever log you off)
The problem you're facing is due to two things, new account spam, and account takeover.
Spammers use new accounts because it's the most obvious route, so this is the first thing they need to address. That's why you get screwed when signing up with a vpn. (though residential proxies exist, at not much higher cost then vpn, so this is likely a dumb rule anyways.)
Once spammers have their main route blocked, some will try to take over aged accounts. Of course all of the spam rules for 1. don't work anymore on aged accounts, so the anti spam teams have to make a whole new set of rules, with much less data to boot. You can blame the suckers who got hacked for subjecting you to this struggle. But on google you can mostly avoid this by pre-emptively setting up 2fa with totp, y2f or sms burner on your aged accounts to prevent them from being banned.
Since all of these services are past their hyper growth phase and have a moat, they don't care about impeding your signup, because as you've seen, you'll sign up anyways no matter how much bullshit they put you through. So if you have an aged account, you should take steps to protect it, because getting another one is going to be difficult. And if a new service is on the rise, you should start aging a personal account just in case, even if you don't want to use it right now.
Appendix
Elon vindicated? I'm guessing this is coming soon to Reddit as well, given the number of subs that died after the mods posted a discord in the sidebar.
You might want to just pay for data on that phone. Most phone providers use NAT so you'll have a shared ip with others, giving you an intermediate level of anonymity between vpn and a residential line. This also means an intermediate level of scrutiny when signing up for services online.
Matrix is shit garbage. I could destroy Matrix overnight with an attack over federation, but no attackers have ever tried because Matrix's defenses are so weak that spammers (and worse) don't bother - they just sign up for infinite regular accounts.
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