> The internet can't function if people are allowed to be anonymous.

You must have missed the first 20 or so years of its existence, if that's your position.

Okay let's go back to before I was born when people still used IRC and let's say you hated someone else's IRC server. You can just use a program to flood their server with garbage messages. In order to try and stop this spam they first try and deanonymize where this traffic is coming from. This can be done by looking at the IP that these bots are coming from. Now they can gline you and the flood ends. Now let's say the internet didn't leak your IP deanonymizing you. What are they to do? They essentially are forced to lock down the server and whitelist it. They can not allow anonymous users to join or else risk just being flooded.

Stopping abuse has always been a game of trying to deanonymize users in order to try and ban the harmful ones.

It was much smaller, and spam messages where everywhere.

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.

> 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.

This is not quite up there with "won't someone think about the children!!!!", but still, it's sad.

Fortunately, almost all of the websites I visit with my anonymized browser aren't places that I wish to attempt to post a message. Unfortunately, I can easily run into defenses of an entire site when the problem is spam sending.

To kinda tweak this since people do tend to like their anonymity, "Do you have to be anonymous to all parties, all the time?"

Parent poster trusts his bank, and his bank would trust his once it knows he's not an fraudster, so maybe it's in everyone's interest to just allow the javascript for that one site.