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I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

howonlee.github.io

271–280 of 448 posts

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I feel your pain as a daily user of the site myself. I hold no ill will against you for taking it out on me. When I left I specifically said that users can continue to blame me for all problems. :) I wasn't aware that some communities are now limited to the app only. I haven't run into any yet. But that sucks.

Try with every community, Reddit must really dislike mobile users. I do wonder if this scheme was introduced to monetize users, either way it sucks.

Ya because you can use an Adblock in iOS safari, but not inside the app ;)

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work for logged-out users. If I can just look at e.g. the Internet Archive's copy of reddit and see if my accounts are in there, it defeats the purpose. Neither reddit nor HN make any attempts to make it hard for sophisticated users to figure out they're shadowbanned.

Forcing you to query IA at least reduces the frequency of feedback, as they're taking snapshots instead of giving a live feed. You could also shadowban IA. You can also do things like guess based on IP address or browser fingerprinting, or require a login from various IP ranges. Of course your main point - that this is all terribly imperfect and won't stop a determined, sophisticated user, who has realized what's hap…

The feedback doesn't have to be very fast. If I'm botting correctly, my accounts will almost never be banned. Even once every 24 hours will be more than enough.

IA was just an example, and Tor would be easier. But anyway, I think it shows the flaw in doing so:

> You could also shadowban IA.

If the spammer manages to get all the IPs hellbanned just by looking at things, he gets more eyeballs on his spam.

My point is, you can't get much better than normal shadowbans, which are trivially detectable for moderately sophisticated users (just log out and try to check your profile) but not anyone else. "Hellbanning" is a stupid extension of this concept which only works in video games.

Also, shadowbanning is a spineless and deeply unethical move. If I get banned, I know what I did wrong and can reflect on that. If I get shadowbanned, I'm just screaming into the ether. That is not a Good Thing™, it is atrocious.

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#274
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using Chrome?

> Not using Chrome? A truly deplorable act... I also added about 30 seconds of latency to every page I visit, but for completely different reasons as op. Switching to Brave and blocking all cookies and JS by default made me have to manually enable it for nearly every site that I actually wanted to use. About a week later, Chrome was reinstalled. Maybe I'll try it again once I level up my willpower.

i find blacklisting sites that abuse JS works better for me than the whitelist approach

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#275
post #232
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this relevant to his comment? It seems like a non-sequitur.

Parent comment was a out implementing a dark nudge to encourage behavior. Next comment was from someone who worked for a company that does it. Next comment was about another poorly implemented dark pattern at same site. Comment is on point. Relevance identified.

I'm pretty sure it has at times even said browsing will be faster in the app than in mobile browser. It wouldn't be surprising if that Very dark pattern was applied as part of pushing the app.

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#276
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember being pretty upset when I found out Terry Davis of Temple OS was being shadowbanned. Maybe it was just temporary for a short period or a single comment, but I didn't like it. I found this (related?) poll https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7818823

Terry was permanently shadow-banned, the subject came up quite often. He suffered from schizophrenia and would make racist and paranoid comments about 80% of the time, but his remaining posts were often pretty technical / insightful. As the victim of an illness it seemed unkind that he was banned, but at the same time a lot of his output was obviously very offensive.

I only lurked on his comments, but I remember some to be very interesting and thought that his unique approach to OS design was food for thought

Somebody should make a shrine of his lucid and technical posts. And also a book.

Anybody know of such things?

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#277
post #147

A couple of years ago I was pretty addicted to Facebook and would compulsively open a new tab and start typing "f..." in the address bar. Even if I had another tab with Facebook open. I tried blocking it for lapses of time but it didn't reduce my addiction. What did work was logging out of Facebook. The annoyance of having to log in and stop my flow was enough for me to stop using Facebook. Now I use it less than onc…

It helps that Facebook is pretty annoying when logged out, not sure it would translate well to Reddit (or HN). Maybe I should insert adds, banners, etc, on purpose in my tabs?

It would not help much on HN for me but if I was forced to use new Reddit I would stop using it. AFAIK you can't opt out unless you are logged in.

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#278
"You get the web from 2 basic kinds of nightmare rectangle: laptops and desktops, where you control a material portion of the computing environment, or mobile and tablets, where you control less."

Gonna start using "nightmare rectangle" instead of "computer" from now on ...

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I feel your pain as a daily user of the site myself. I hold no ill will against you for taking it out on me. When I left I specifically said that users can continue to blame me for all problems. :) I wasn't aware that some communities are now limited to the app only. I haven't run into any yet. But that sucks.

Try with every community, Reddit must really dislike mobile users. I do wonder if this scheme was introduced to monetize users, either way it sucks.

They want to redirect users from a relatively open platform they can't control (e.g. adblockers, browser extensions) to one they can control but for some reason can't manage properly (mobile app).

Seriously, the number of times the Reddit app hasn't worked but Apollo has is kind of ridiculous.

Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit

#280
post #15

Low-latency isn't the only problem, I think. The small-enought latency seems to be worst: you click somehing and wait for the reward just few ms later. Incresing this wait to seconds prevents this effect.

Well I am on a not so fast connection a lot and what is even worse: click on something and get absolutely no clue the click event was registered. Click again to see if you did something wrong and, yes, youe action was registered 2 times causing all kinds of trouble. To all SPA developers around the word: show me if I interacted and show me if something is loading.

I ensure my loading graphic shows for a minimum of 333ms to make sure my users see that something was happening, just incase the operation completes too fast for the user to realize it happened.
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