That to me was an important feature of reddit :(
What I suspect is that they were getting flooded by bots…
You guessed it. Captcha and Email verification was enabled to stop the influx of bots.
Did it work?
It’s a never-ending battle but we try to keep on top of it
Did it at least help?
Yes it stopped the scripted signups. Are we out of the woods? Never
I hate how everyone wants email these days. I bloody hate email in principle. If websites at least had options for Discord or Matrix or Session verification.
Why not use a throw-away email address?
That’s extra work, throwaway services are often blocked, and it also defeats the purpose of having a backup contact in case of loss passwords etc.
But as I said, I hate email in general and wish there were at least other options to “verify my humanity” or for those other purposes email is used.
