Wait. Is it not against the HN guidelines to regularly submit links to your own sites? Isn't that considered self-promotion and, thus, against the rules? I've got nothing against the author, personally, as I'd do the same, but seeing his submission page, I'd like to know how normal getting in trouble is for this practice or if the guidelines are enforced at all in this sense.
I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
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Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#72```
The first and most obvious one was a filter of inappropriate words and expressions. I won't explain which ones or how it works inside, for obvious reasons, but it is quite effective. The machinery is in the heuristics.
The second, and most natural, was to cut the maximum number of characters way down. Less room is less ammunition to cover content and less space to hide a link. ```
- you forgot the third fix, disable copy paste inside chat boxes, remove all swear words by replacing them with **
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#73I'm mostly curious why anyone would bother with doing attacks like this to some random individuals personal blog, was it one person or multiple people? What was the motivation? Is it just bots crawling the internet to spread hate? A sad state of affairs, but certainly seems like having a strictly moderated comment section is a better option for a site like this.
Bored kids. Bots. And scammers/spammers. On the scale of the internet, there are a lot of all of these.
Same reason any blank wall in a city will soon be covered in graffiti.
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#74If the chat is saved as an example of how lot to talk. Can that be used for training an LLM on how to talk or what to remove from a chat?
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#75Talking about this like there's an "attack" feels very melodramatic. It seems to me like the non-constructive messages are either shitposts or just curious probes (testing whether certain codepoints make it through, testing whether bad no-no words make it through, testing how various things will render, testing whether the input is sanitized...). There's links to God knows what and some walls of inflammatory language…
It’s a blog post written by AI. AI makes everything ponderously dramatic.
That explains the opening line:
>Sometimes the most irrelevant piece of a project becomes its absolute protagonist.
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the last few minutes of messages, I get the feeling that all it takes is a handful of motivated (i.e. jobless) malicious individuals to make an entire community or a corner of the Internet look like it has devolved into barbarism.
By my recollection the devolution started around 30 years ago.
Suspiciously close to the birth of the modern internet?
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#77This sounds like the kind of feature that ends up being quick to initially implement but takes up way more engineering time to maintain than everything else combined. The author concedes at the end that most genuine uses of the feature are people just saying hello. So maybe the solution here is to disallow unrestricted input and just have a few buttons with fixed things to say.
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Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#78Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ages and ages ago I had a guestbook, forum and chatroom on my site just because I could, just because it was fun. I think only one other person ever used it, though. But the possibility of having a random interaction with someone was what made it interesting. Now my comments feed is my curated Mastodon account, very much a filter for nonsense. I wouldn't even think of putting a chat up on my site, it would almost ent…
I tried Mastodon for awhile but found the fediverse was almost as bad as the centralized control verse. It sounds like it works for you, though.
It helps that I have a small, single user hosted instance so I don't need to worry about admin drama. It also helps that I generally align with the culture politically but also avoid posting about politics (because I think doing so is mostly performative and not useful.)
But I think just about any layer of moderation will do. I'd be using Disqus except it's too "engagement" oriented and collects analytics I don't want or need.
Re: I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
#80From the earliest days of websites allowing text input from users, this has been a thing. The same with any website that allows you to draw things, it will quickly show people drawing crude (in content not skill) objects. This is just human nature. Once people realized you could use these forms as attack vectors, we were off to the races. Now that bots can do it for you, I'd only imagine the time before first bot usi…
Exactly. I remember a website from the late 90s that let anonymous users control an LED sign in some shopping mall in Japan. More often than not there were things like swastikas and penises on the board. This type of behavior is nothing new, unfortunately.
Did these LED controls actually control lights or did they just switch out images?