> The vast majority of social media networks will ban - or more generally and insiously - shadow ban accounts/IPs that use known proxy IPs. This means that they are gating access to their platforms behind residential IPs (on top of their other various blackboxes and heuristics like fingerprinting)

Social media will ban proxy IPs, yet gleefully force you to provide your ID if you happen to connect from the wrong patch of land. I find it difficult not to support any and all attempts to bypass such measures.

The fact is that there's now a perfectly legitimate use for residential proxies, and the demand is just going to keep growing as more websites decide to "protect their content", and more governments decide to pass tyrannical laws that force people to mask their IPs. And with demand, comes supply, so don't expect them to go away any time soon.

This really just sounds like a rehash of the argument against encryption. "Bad people use it, so it should go away" - never mind that there are completely legitimate uses for it. Never mind that using a residential proxy might be the only way to get any privacy at all in a future where everyone blocks VPNs and Tor, a future where you may not even be able to post online without an ID depending you where you live, a future which we're swiftly approaching.

It's already here, in fact. Imgur blocks UK users, but it also blocks VPNs and Tor. The only way somebody living in the UK can access Imgur is through a residential proxy.

> The only way somebody living in the UK can access Imgur is through a residential proxy.

And very little of value was lost.

> This really just sounds like a rehash of the argument against encryption. "Bad people use it, so it should go away" - never mind that there are completely legitimate uses for it.

Except that almost everything that uses encryption has some legitimate use. There are pretty much no legitimate uses for residential proxies, and their use in flooding the Internet with crap greatly outweighs that.

If I plumbed a 30cm sewage line straight into your living room would you be happy with it? Okay, well, tell you what, let's make it totally legit - I'll drop a tasty ripe strawberry into the stream of effluent every so often, how about that?