Thanks for being so transparent about all this.

I think the verification period is, in practice, not something out of the ordinary. Two examples come to mind: 1. In many (most?) larger Facebook groups, you’re asked to answer questions and your application gets manually assessed by a moderator before being let in. Very similar to how it works here. 2. While you can get a new reddit account in seconds, you are blocked from many subreddits for 24> hours as an anti-spam/trolling measure and there are often karma thresholds for subreddits as well.

The first week or so with a new reddit account really sucks, but here I’m up and running without any artificial restrictions within hours of submitting my signup form.