Regarding the new user restrictions.

Hello everyone! You may have noticed that you now need to be a member of /c/Drugs for a certain amount of time before you can submit a post, or comment on a post, and I wanted to take a minute to address the reasoning behind this. <br><br>Here's the basic issue. On the internet, there are basically two ways to make money on a platform like ours. We can either have ads, or we can have paid content. One of the platforms that many of you are familiar with takes the paid content route, and we see all of the issues that that brings every day. Because we have ads to generate revenue, we don't need to try and squeeze money from the users, and we're able to create a space that is somewhat free from the paid content that is on other platforms. <br><br>Unfortunately, this means that we are left to deal with the scammers who just want to make a profit off of unsuspecting people online. Using this chamber, they can try to reach thousands of people with no up front cost, and they don't have to worry about having their account deleted. <br><br>Our best defense against this is you, the users. Every single day, there are hundreds of people using the report feature to let us know that someone who is making a post is probably scamming people. We do our best to keep up with these reports, but unfortunately there are just so many of them that sometimes we miss one, and someone falls into a trap. <br><br>The new time restriction is our best effort to keep those people from being able to make money off of our users. By preventing brand new accounts from being able to post or comment, we can cut off the main avenues that these scammers have to use to get in touch with our users, while still allowing our veteran users to have access to the full features of the sub. We also know that this won't stop all of the scammers, but we're hoping it will cut back on enough of them that we can all stay safer.<br><br>Thanks for reading! Feel free to DM the moderators with any questions.