hacker news, Reddit and similar have always been about following subjects or topics you like, getting the latest discussion in a field of your interest. twitter was all about following people not topics, so you'd get a wider range of topics, but you tended to focus on accounts more and give more weight to specific users than you might here. If you followed a variety of people it was quite addictive - so many celebrit…
Reddit (at least anything that ever shows up on /r/all) is no different than X/Twitter. Even nice tech subs have the same issues occasionally. X and Reddit are no different.
I think the fact that you never have to interact with /r/all on reddit makes it quite different.
I never quite "got" twitter, it was never fun for me to participate on. It's telling / disturbing that folks had such trust in random accounts ...
Which ones do you use then besides HN obviously? I'm interested to know what you think = anonymous + trust.
>what you think = anonymous + trust.
I really don't as far as social media goes. If I see a link here the account posting it likely doesn't play any part, trust comes from the source of the content more than random user.
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
Interesting. Maybe gps location data snapshots factor into it. You could probably defeat that with app permissions though. GPS spoofing is also possible, but a lot more friction for troll accounts.
Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
Reddit (at least anything that ever shows up on /r/all) is no different than X/Twitter. Even nice tech subs have the same issues occasionally. X and Reddit are no different.
I think the fact that you never have to interact with /r/all on reddit makes it quite different.
Isn't x the same (I don't use it much). Can' you just look at posts from people you want?
I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.
It looks like this shows where each account was originally created from. So new accounts can get around it, but all existing accounts that didn't have the foresight to be using a VPN from the start are now burned.
Going forward this is going to be a bit of a cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of other tricks X can do to determine country of origin. Long term I agree the sock puppets have the upper hand here, though forcing them to go through the effort is probably a good thing.
a town square isn't just a place, it's always a polity that requires common values and a shared culture. Otherwise you at best have an airport lobby. A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so. Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designe…
> A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so. Upholding at least some utterly basic foundational values of humanity doesn't require holding any stake.
And if you're not interested in upholding basic values? What if you're looking to intentionally destroy things instead?
Verified residency is better than nothing for putting real money on the table. Although if you've been to a local town meeting, you'll know it's still not perfect.
I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.
There's a Popeye's at Eglin, maybe all that traffic was a chicken sandwich influence campaign?
I'm not saying those trends charts demonstrate anything, just that commercial human astro-turfers or bot networks are no less of a thing than intelligence ones and it wouldn't really be a conspiracy theory to think McDonalds or any other company, trade association, lobbyist, PR firm etc, is operating a lot of social media accounts that could theoretically show up on a report like that if they were doing a lot of it from a specific place.
I'm not sure how they are getting the info but it's not as simple as logged in IP, mine says I'm based in Costa Rica, I was on vacation there 2/3 months ago, but it's not primarily where I use my x account and I've logged in from a phone and a computer from other countries since, and CR would be a relatively small amount of time in my total usage, so I find it strange it thinks my account is based there.
Interesting. Maybe gps location data snapshots factor into it. You could probably defeat that with app permissions though. GPS spoofing is also possible, but a lot more friction for troll accounts. Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.
I was thinking about it a bit more this morning, in Costa Rica I used a local sim from a local carrier, but since then I've been traveling but using esims from Airalo, they still use a local carrier, but I wonder if it's kinda like how the 2 factor auth stuff often won't let you use a VOIP/twilio number it needs to be from a real carrier, I wonder if x has a matrix of signals they use to decide to switch it or not, and within the carrier metric, esim re-seller is deprioritized over a real telco or something? Who knows, but it's kinda fun to think about! :)
> how open are you to a US citizen verified town square online? You'd have to scan your passport or driver license to post memes and stuff. I had this same idea before and it’s not terrible. If it guaranteed user privacy by using an external identification service (ID.me?), it might get some attention. You would likely have to reverify accounts every 6 months or so to limit sales of accounts, and you would need to pr…
wouldn't that happen with this too if you require people to sign up with their US passport because then now everything you type is going to have much more weight I guess facebook in a sense is already like this with all the verification required. the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you…
That’s why I think verification has to be done with an external service provider using an anonymized token, to verify is/is not citizen. It would have to be very clear that the social site does not have your identity.
> the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.
The same would happen if people knew your IRL identity on a social site, see all the attempted “cancellations” on both sides of the aisle these last few years.
And why IRC went from default showing IP information to cloaking
That was and still is a choice of the user. The problem with not using a cloak was that you'd stand a very real chance of getting DDoS'd or, worse, outright hacked (made easier by the fact that in ye olde modem days, your computer was directly exposed to the Internet with no firewall/NAT to protect you), and even with using a cloak and a NAT router you'd still have trolls sending "DCC SEND" [1] into channels, immedia…
Libera has a policy of just handing them out (to anyone that registers)
> Accounts registered after March 2024 that have a verified email address are automatically assigned a generic user cloak. If your account does not currently have a cloak, you may contact staff to receive one.