What about making it so that the amount of latency added is dynamic? It could be set up so that frequency of visitation leads to greater and greater latency. Something like exponential growth of 1.5x every time the site is visited with an exponential decay function applied since the last time visited. This would encourage slowing down, and would most heavily penalize the most heavily used sites which seems coherent with the goal.
I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
311–320 of 448 posts
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#312Here in my country (a developing country in Africa) internet speed is so bad you don't have to add any latency filter - just thinking out loud.
I moved to a rural area in Europe with poor internet. Those GIFs take their time to load!
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#313This is an excellent mental trick and I would love to be able to configure gradually increasing latencies as I sit on the internet for an extended duration
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#314I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles. Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would…
This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong. Because of clustering, removing the most-connected nodes results in almost no change to the general connectivity of other nodes.
Nodes which are actually important are 'bridge' nodes that provide a means of moving between mostly-disconnected groups. I started wondering what these ideas looked like in an actual social graph, like society. What would 'bridge' nodes look like, and what would eliminating the connection to them look like and what effect would it have? I think a social bridge node would be something like a biker whose main social group is his motorcycle gang, but who also participates in his elderly aunts knitting circle once a month. He provides a means through which ideas and concepts and information can flow from biker gangs, and those connected to them, to a group of elderly ladies and those they are connected to. They are, almost by definition, tenuous links. Ones which, if someone had influence over the communication networks they were using, it might be very easy to disrupt. What consequences would there be to breaking those links on a large scale? In the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' situation, you can get the average number of links needed to get to Kevin Bacon up over a dozen by only removing a couple handfuls of bridge nodes.
I think doing such a thing on a real social graph could be very quiet, possibly undetectable (drop messages from rarely-connecting pairs of users... they rarely connect, so how many of them will go through the trouble to re-establish contact? Have bridge nodes have something go haywire and they have to be issued a new phone number, 'their facebook got hacked', etc). And the consequence would be to freeze most things in place, or at least radically slow down any kind of large-scale social change. Disruption of the status quo on the scale of regime change in a government, say, requires buy-in from large and very mostly-disconnected segments of the population. If only pockets of people are interested in change, it doesn't matter how intensely they want the change to happen, it only matters if they can join forces with very disparate compatriots. If you had high-level control of communication networks and a vested interest in guarding the status quo against large-scale social upheaval, you could probably do it very quietly and without really needing anything more than the metadata of connectivity. No need to find out what ideas are being spread, you could just make sure ALL ideas remain trapped in their own little bubbles or that their spread is greatly contained.
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds pretty terrible when you think about how arbitrarily websites can determine you're a "bad user", but then again I like the idea of doing this programmatically for sites I myself want to stop using. Either that or a plugin to encourage productivity. Don't block social media sites, just turn them all into slow ineffective shitty websites.
If you don't already, you should browse HN with ShowDead turned on. There are people who have been banned for years and blissfully post comments several times per week completely unaware that almost nobody is seeing their comments. Often, the comments they're posting into the black hole are indicative of why they were banned in the first place but if I see a comment that is dead and it does add to the conversation th…
I just checked, and I have ShowDead on, so I must have had it on for a rather long time since I don’t at all remember hearing about it or turning it on. I also don’t recall seeing a dead comment, or perhaps I don’t know how to identify them.
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#316I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles. Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would…
Another sinister way of doing this is having users solve captchas in order to comment and keeping a badness score of the troublemakers. Then pretend they failed the captchas at a rate proportionally to their score.
> pretend they failed the captchas
That explains a lot... I frequently have to solve 10+ captchas when I'm using Firefox, many of them rate-limited. It feels like a punishment for resising surveilance. These things should be illegal due to the accessibility problems they cause if not the fact they're a nuisance.
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC hellbanning is a variant of shadowbanning that prevents easy discovery of the banned status by putting all suspect accounts into the same "hell" invisible to normal users. This works well if you have a network of fake accounts from a single "persona" or ring of personas - by all their indications they can't see their own posts are being ignored. Notice: it's almost the exact response to the persona management so…
This also works incredibly well for cheaters in videogames. Give them their own queue with their own games with other cheaters to play against, and as long as nobody is cheating in a way that breaks the servers, they can play their own version of the game if they want without ruining the game for those who don't cheat.
This reminds me of someone telling me that they are using cheat sites for an online Scrabble game because they suspected their opponent (a “friend”) was cheating. It’s hilarious to think that two humans are watching two instances of a likely optimal bot play against each other and rooting for their instance of the bot.
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#318I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles. Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would…
This reminds me of the old VBulletin plugin "Miserable Users"[0]. We also had a community suffering from this problem (during the early 2000's). Bans would take care of a lot of problem users, but would just give energy to those truly out for blood, troll, bored, or very immature. We had one user get banned over a dozen times while we tried banning IPs, name regex or anything else we could think of. Finally, like you…
Kinda reminiscent of advice I’ve overheard for breaking up with a narcissist: make them break up with you by being boring.
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#319I ran a website for youngsters several years ago. One of the duties to maintain it was to moderate discussion boards. Some kids were difficult to manage and would not accept to be banned (via email/IP/or whatever solution) and would keep recreating profiles. Ultimately I dealt with those ppl by “greylisting” them. Added a sleep() prior each page rendering of 5 to 25 secs (actually it was more sophisticated and would…
This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong…
Isn't that what Facebook does, by preferentially connecting you with people you interact with the most?
Re: I Add 3-25 Seconds of Latency to Every Site I Visit
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't already, you should browse HN with ShowDead turned on. There are people who have been banned for years and blissfully post comments several times per week completely unaware that almost nobody is seeing their comments. Often, the comments they're posting into the black hole are indicative of why they were banned in the first place but if I see a comment that is dead and it does add to the conversation th…
I just checked, and I have ShowDead on, so I must have had it on for a rather long time since I don’t at all remember hearing about it or turning it on. I also don’t recall seeing a dead comment, or perhaps I don’t know how to identify them.
It just says [dead] next to the time when the comment was posted or something like that.