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by leppr 1696 days ago
With many of these big anti-bot services like Google ReCaptcha, it's not even specialized anonymity tools that can cause shadow banning, just unusual user-agents.

All of these have independently caused me to get into endless ReCaptcha loops: firefox on android, smartphone with unusual screen resolution, clean browser profile with VPN.

It's so common that I now default to using duckduckgo, which never blocks me. I doubt DDG has a lower DDoS/Resources ratio than Google. Some companies are just lazier and less principled than others.

2 comments

> it's not even specialized anonymity tools that can cause shadow banning, just unusual user-agents.

"Unusual" = not Chrome and doesn't allow tracking scripts.

Switch to Safari with an ad blocker for a week, see how many more ReCaptcha prompts you get.

As a person who also uses mobile Firefox, I don't feel like I personally have issues with recaptcha.