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Comment by lghh | Hacker News Reader

Reddit doesn't require an email. They use dark patterns to make it look like you do, but anywhere it asks for an email in signup can be left blank.

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Doesn’t work for me. The Continue button is only enabled once you enter an email address. Furthermore, activating 2FA requires a verified email address.

Edit: It works when using the right URL, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742134 below.

It only works on the desktop site. Did you try on mobile?

It works when manually going to https://www.reddit.com/account/register/ (both on mobile and desktop), but it doesn’t work when following the Log In / Sign Up links from the Reddit page, which have additional URL parameters attached. Maybe this is also an A/B testing situation, as the additional parameters have “experimental” in their name.

I might be thinking of old.reddit.com. I know that the mobile version requires an email there but the desktop version asks for it, but if you click continue, it doesn't check if you've entered one.

That experimental part is interesting.

I think the mods can see if your account has a verified email attached to it though? At least it seems like subs can choose to not let unverified accounts post.

Yea, you cannot post in /r/news for instance without a verified e-mail. Automod will remove your posts/comments.

I don't know what they think they are accomplishing since burner e-mails are trivial, but perhaps it gives a semblance of doing something.

Anyone can see if an account is email verified. It shows up as a "trophy" in the account info page.

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