If I were to make a new account, I'm wondering if I would run into the same issues. Surely it can't be that difficult for new users to join reddit?

There's a separate, larger discussion about aspects of the modern internet that people are going to have to get used to, in that "determining whether someone is a real person or not" will be necessary for a lot of services to stay alive. I don't believe the conspiracies that attempts to do this are all for mass surveillance. Mostly, a place for people to talk can only live if people trust that they're talking to other people. Right now, we're seeing some botched or overzealous implementations of this, which might describe what OP ran into.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0

> (11:55) ...of our 500 native bees... the most... found... in a restoration... is under a hundred. So, more than 80% of our bees are confined to remnants. And... a garden... [only] 16 different species of bees... in the best prairie garden... If you look in our book under [a specific plant species], we have... well over a hundred insects listed for that plant... but only in remnants... You could plant [species] in your garden, you get the same old 15 bees... they're not as agile as we think.

> (21:00) (Comparing his 'restored' prairie to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) This isn't a remnant, never will be. Once a prairie is gone, it's gone.

> (34:15) (Again comparing his 'restored' prairie compared to 'old-growth' remnant prairie) It'll never have the insects that a remnant does, not even close. The insects require a whole lot more things, so if we don't save the remnants, the home of all of our remnant biodiversity... what was it, the guy going on telling everybody 'if you plant nature in your yard, it'll come back'... it's assuming that the insects are just going to come there. It doesn't happen. You have to save the remnants... Our generation needs to deploy great armies to identifying and preserving what little remnants we have left. Otherwise, there'll be no germ material out of which to build a tomorrow. It'll all be gone.

> (49:40) Our culture is so out of phase with reality... we just don't have any sense of the cascade of consequences that flow from... things that we think are just fine.

> (52:55) The average person today in Illinois can get born, can live, and die, and not see anything that was not made by man.