331–340 of 593 posts
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Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...
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Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be go…
> I miss phpBB and Invision forums. As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
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Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be go…
phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about. People's habits changed. I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
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phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about. People's habits changed. I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off. The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database. Those old forums were not built with the adv…
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phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about. People's habits changed. I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many providers starting using the vague word "lewd" a word I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a long time.
Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-domain active for the old time users so they had a fast connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many forum operators stopped accepting new users and made their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist and some got married, had kids and real life took too much time and energy to also run such sites.
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phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about. People's habits changed. I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
What, really, is the difference between phpBB and discourse (not discord) in the context of the discussion we're having here?
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Hackernews is also addictive. Fortnine is addictive. World of Warcraft is addictive. NFL is addictive. Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the social media. The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
HN doesn’t optimize for addictive . Fortnite and wow do. No opinion on NFL, but they probably do at least somewhat.
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The problem with that is if someone gets a hold of the logs from both the centralized service and the social media site they can compare timestamps and may be able to match them up. Most people will be doing the whole process (site gives token, person gets token signed, person returns token) as quickly as possible which limits the candidates for a match. Worse, if the central service is compromised and wants to make…
Yes, timestamp comparison will be possible. I don't think there is a reasonable way around it? And authentication on to someone else is also unavoidable with reasonable privacy. I think a system with both of those drawbacks is still preferable to most other options.
Briefly, someone (probably your goverment) issues a digital copy of your ID cryptographically tied to a key in a hardware security module you provide. There is a protocol that can be used to demonstrate to a site that you have such an ID and that you can perform operations on it using that key, and can be used to disclose anything from the ID that you wish to disclose (e.g., what country you are in, or that your birthday on the ID is at least 18 years in the past) without disclosing any other information from the ID.
This avoids the timestamp problem because the issuer of the ID is not involved in verifying things from the ID. They have no idea when or how often people are using their IDs.
So far people working on these systems are using smart phones as the secure hardware with the keys locked behind biometrics. Google's made on open source library for implementing such systems, the EU has one nearing release after several years of development, and I believe Apple's new ID storage in Wallet supports such a system.
The EU has said that they plan to add support for security devices other than smart phones, such as stand alone security keys or smart cards.
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Teens can still talk online. Social media is an obvious poison and we shouldn't give kids access to it.
The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately, which is why many western countries are going to fall into this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and the open web forever.
This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from government (the bootleggers and politicians for more nefarious reasons of course).
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HN doesn’t optimize for addictive . Fortnite and wow do. No opinion on NFL, but they probably do at least somewhat.
HN lets users opt to automatically lock themselves out after a while (noprocrast). Fortnite and WoW do not. Sounds like one knows they have users with problems, no? I think the term addiction is way overused in this stuff. If a company makes a product you enjoy using that doesn't mean you can just describe it as addictive and get out of jail free. If there's some chemical in it that messes with your brain, fine, othe…
The current alternative is that unaccountable private interests control this, so some regulation in this regard seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control for public control is only barely better.
The best solution that I can think of is ending algorithmic feeds, and having subscription feeds, or maybe user curated feeds, only.