Toying with vote icons

magnora7 · 2021-03-07T05:46:31+00:00

Well done, they look great! Hopefully we can integrate them in to the site

magnora7 · 2021-03-07T05:46:14+00:00

I'm down with these icons, if you happen to get around to swapping them out with these clearer ones, this 100% has my stamp of approval

magnora7 · 2021-03-04T22:30:57+00:00

Stop dragging the quality of discussion downward on the pyramid of debate.

magnora7 · 2021-03-04T22:22:55+00:00

You just want me to unban people who openly broke site rules rules repeatedly? No. Sorry, not happening.

magnora7 · 2021-03-04T02:01:58+00:00

So create a whitelist? It's not a terrible idea but it really limits new users, which would keep the site from growing. I kind of do like the idea of a quarantined space for new users, a testing ground, but who then gets to decide if they're "real" enough to get out of this quarantined space? And don't you think the trolls will play nice for a bit in order to get around this restriction?

magnora7 · 2021-03-03T05:18:29+00:00

Yeah it was bizarre. I think they did it that way to ensure they'd have me on retainer for a month, to ensure I didn't build any backdoors in to the software, or something strange like that. I'm so glad to be done with that. It was a nightmare, you've got that right

magnora7 · 2021-03-03T05:17:19+00:00

Hey, long time no see. I've been suspicious for a long time, but I didn't want to alienate users and over-moderate in a place that's designed around escaping the censorship of reddit. It's a tough line to walk, but another forum would have different rules.

magnora7 · 2021-03-03T05:15:30+00:00

This.

magnora7 · 2021-03-02T14:10:31+00:00

Man you sure post some low-quality garbage

magnora7 · 2021-03-02T13:47:13+00:00

They'll be announced on saidit when they happen, don't worry

magnora7 · 2021-03-02T13:45:44+00:00

I ban this bot 10 times a day bro

magnora7 · 2021-03-01T23:51:29+00:00

Stop pinging me Jason

magnora7 · 2021-03-01T23:47:58+00:00

Trolls are trying to hijack this site by stirring lots of pointless drama, is what is happening

magnora7 · 2021-03-01T04:38:17+00:00

Yeah I saw it while it was happening and banned the names

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T22:29:45+00:00

That's the reason they do it, they know it gets peoples' attention while simultaneously destroying the quality of the website. Concern trolling is a powerful tactic to create attention-grabbing drama, which is why it's seen so frequently

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T22:08:26+00:00

I can post all the IP addresses you've used, if I have your permission. I can prove it, I have the server logs. You've clearly used a VPN many times over the last few years.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T21:54:27+00:00

It's the Monopoly man of the 2020s

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T21:48:31+00:00

You've used a VPN many many many times. It's right there in the connection logs. You've used almost 20 IP addresses across 4 different ranges. Not sure why you feel the need to tell such obvious lies

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T21:37:47+00:00

Could be one, could be 3-4. No real easy way to tell, tbh.

Yeah I assume it's from a bigger pool of people, and they have a list of like 100 forums they attack all the time on a cycle. And I'm sure they're for-hire too if you know who to contact

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T21:36:41+00:00

Yeah all the people who concern troll are always using VPNs. It's seriously the way to shut down forums. Someone has a org that does this, and they just go around stomping on and smearing forums that aren't dead until they are dead

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T20:57:30+00:00

Because drama that seems legit is more effective at destroying the userbase than simple spam ads that everyone knows are just spam. They need people to believe this community is falling apart, and that the admins are unstable. So that's what they talk about every day, and it's successful in driving people away because they begin to believe it because there is an appearance of a group consensus about it, when in actuality it's just one person using many puppet accounts

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T20:04:34+00:00

Apparently, it is big enough. It's not hard at all to pay 3-4 people $12/hr to destroy a forum if you're a government, or a giant corporation. They don't like competition and don't like people saying things they shouldn't say. This kind of forum destruction is becoming very widespread across all forums. If a forum gets more than 1,000 pageviews a day, it will probably be attacked until it dies. This is what the internet is like now, apparently.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:58:35+00:00

It goes beyond that, they're clearly being paid to do this. No one spends hours a day doing this every day for years. Even psychopaths have limited attention spans. The only explanation for the level of sustained intensity (and complexity of the attacks) is that they're paid to do it.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:56:58+00:00

Yeah it's sad. And it's very deliberate, and it's been going on daily for years. These are people paid to destroy places where people are trying to have conversations. That's all it is.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:49:57+00:00

Hm seems someone has used a bunch of accounts to fraudulently upvote this post

edit: It wasn't the OP, the trolls new tactic is to target innocent posts to try and trick me in to banning innocent people to cause drama. But instead I'm just banning the fraudulent accounts.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:46:15+00:00

Imagine if they had this in a satellite and tied it to an automated social credit score system...

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:21:06+00:00

And by "a couple" you mean 5 dozen

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:15:49+00:00

Stop feeding the trolls. Last warning Jason.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:13:46+00:00

Funny how Jason is always in these threads, always mentioned by the OP, always pushing the agenda of the trolls

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T19:13:14+00:00

Stop feeding the asstrolls by responding to them.

Follow your own advice. Half the comments in this thread are you.

If you don't stop feeding the trolls, and repeatedly dragging the quality of discussion on saidit downward as a result, I will take action.

magnora7 · 2021-02-28T06:15:23+00:00

That's cool we have that in common. I was writing mostly overlays to interact with the machine rather than the machine functionality itself. I have a lot of respect for that though because it's certainly complex. I'd rather not say where so I don't doxx myself.

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T23:15:32+00:00

Thanks for the chat.

The fMRI stuff was detecting brain activity as part of a realtime feedback experiment. Basically we had a participant in the fMRI machine, then they would look at pictures on a screen telling them to think about certain things, or try to imagine doing or saying certain things. Then we would watch the brain's activity appear on the fMRI machine readouto, with about a 6 second delay. We could then correlate physical activity in specific brain regions to certain types of mental activity. I basically programmed the entire real-time feedback experiment myself for $12/hr, and then was promptly fired when it was finished. And not only did they fire me, but they created false allegations against me and I was escorted out by security on my last day, not allowed to return to my desk to fetch my belongings. I had worked in that facility for 12 years. I was put on retainer and full salary but I had to be accessable phone for a month, to ensure I hadn't backdoored the software somehow. It was terrible.

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T23:01:59+00:00

Yes but there's lots of things not in that GUI manager because they run on linux, but not on that specific package, so they're not in the list, so they have to be downloaded via terminal.

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T01:41:57+00:00

that sounds like a smart way to do it

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T00:34:38+00:00

A law congress would never, ever pass.

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T00:31:10+00:00

Yeah true. I have no idea how any of that works. I looked it up and apparently it is impossible to hide js code from the end user. So in theory they could always download the js file and look at the password being presented. But maybe that could be obfuscated somehow

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T00:24:29+00:00

Agreed!

magnora7 · 2021-02-27T00:23:41+00:00

no, but maybe that's a good idea

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:56:19+00:00

Thanks for the offer

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:56:10+00:00

Yeah. What's weird is the "Americans" bot usually pops up maybe once a week. But this last week, it's been making a new one every hour. This coincides exactly with the front page hijacking attacks this last week. So it's pretty clear whoever is hijacking the front page is also running the Americans bot, and has been for over a year. Talk about tedious

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:48:39+00:00

Yeah I agree, I'm down to swap out our captcha with this animated one if that's an easily doable thing

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:45:15+00:00

I just have the shows I want on my computer without ads. I just care about a few shows. When I watch actual TV like when visiting family, the amount of ads is very irritating to me now, it's like 1/3 ads! I don't know how people waste their time sitting in front of ads like that

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:41:04+00:00

I got a new computer, I am switching to linux for home computing finally. A lot of my games I worried about ended up working fine with a little tweaking. The WINE windows emulator thing is amazing, it just runs exes as if linux could run the exe itself, I always thought you had to boot a virtual copy of windows within linux and all that jazz, I didn't realize they'd built exe functionality on to the linux OS itself. You just click an exe and it runs instantly. So that was a nice surprise about WINE.

But there's a lot of exes it can't run, seems to work about 40% of the time, so I guess the next step is to do a window 7 virtual machine emulation on linux and boot to the windows desktop and stuff, I guess that's compatible with more types of executable files because it emulates the entire windows environment. So there's a few programs I might have to do that with.

The one thing that still miffs me about linux is installing programs. In windows, you click a download link, a thing downloads, and you click it, and it installs. You can use a mouse the whole time, it's very straightforward. In linux you almost always have to open a terminal, the installs are a list of terminal commands and instructions you have to copy-paste one by one, instead of a simple download link. Out of 20 programs I downloaded, I think only one had a linux download link that was clickable and worked. Just feels old and clunky tbh.

But otherwise linux has come a long way, especially mint and ubuntu. For instance, every driver worked instantly, I haven't had to install one driver or dependency. This was not the case 10-15 years ago, it used to be dependency hell to get all your devices working.

Anyway, pretty pleased with linux these days for personal computing. I'm about 50% switched over, I still have some programs to try and migrate. There will probably be a few things I'll keep my old Windows machine around for. Linux is definitely faster though. And probably the only way to truly own your computer anymore. Windows and Macs are full of built-in backdoors.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:26:01+00:00

That's why it's important to find ways to legally reduce the amount of taxes paid, so we stop funding it as much as possible. Not that it really matters though because they just print more money. But for my conscience it's good to know I'm not participating as much as possible

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:22:35+00:00

My parents had a Commodore64 and the little 10" CRT tv I used to watch all the time as a kid, after they stopped using the Commodore. It was a bit before my time. My first real computer experience was DOS and playing games like Caesar II. My first personal computer years later was an IBM Aptiva with a pop-up cd drive and windows 95. It was awesome.

I was going to work as a CPU design engineer but after a few internships I realized what a nightmare it was, and how it was all boring incremental crap that was basically done by Chinese people for pennies on the dollar so it's very hard to get a job as an American too. Then I programmed fMRI machines for a year and then was fired the week I finished their research experiment codebase, when I was misled to believe it was a permanent position.

And software engineering has always been a turn-off for me, I like simple good code but I loathe bloated architectures. I've heard the same stories about leaving tech, it's high burn out, especially the stuff dealing with anonymous people online these days is pretty annoying because there's so many dedicated paid shill/bot farms now, and lots of people who realize they won't get caught. I can justify the work for saidit because I'm creating a public good that's beneficial for communication and culture (or that's what I tell myself anyway) which is at least better than some projects that just exist to make money, or don't even get used. So I've got that going for me. But yeah, it's just a lot of complexity to manage, it's tiring for sure

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T22:11:21+00:00

No worries, just trying to inform. Thank you.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:39:43+00:00

Yeah I think I got that one too, if I didn't just let me know

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:37:56+00:00

the whole "blacks vs asians" thing really got promoted by the media a lot in the last week. I've seen that narrative everywhere suddenly... just more divide and conquer at work. Our media is psychologically abusing us

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:34:08+00:00

And the guy you replied to... the uv## accounts are doing the self-upvoting

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:32:49+00:00

Because those same people started intentionally hijacking the front page of saidit every day, and still are doing it every day. The whole thing is a giant troll attack that's been ongoing for months, it's kind of ridiculous tbh

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:30:52+00:00

Yup, and the uv## accounts are the ones doing the upvoting, like the one you replied to

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:17:53+00:00

Yeah this is the "Americans" bot, it posts news articles and then posts comments like "Americans would rather die than fight tyranny" and other disempowering automated phrases

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:12:04+00:00

Yes it's an ongoing attack. It's not genuine marketing, it's shills using ads to fill saidit with garbage. They're not ads for anything anyone would actually want

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T21:10:51+00:00

Hey welcome to saidit. I'm pretty tired of the tech scene in a lot of ways too, I can relate.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T10:00:37+00:00

I don't think you're a bot. Don't let the trolls get to you

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T09:54:28+00:00

wrong sub.

Delete your account under preferences

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T09:26:11+00:00

That's a cool idea. I could probably cook something up maybe, like 2 grids and the letters, each rotating independently, all the same color on top of each other, with some animated wavy effects distorting all that.

I found this code available, view the demo, we could modify this maybe: https://www.codeseek.co/martingrand/animated-captcha-concept-WxPZVY?lang=en

That was the only one I could find, everything else was research papers

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T07:55:34+00:00

Nope

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T04:05:29+00:00

Imo maybe 10% of it is genuinely engaging imo. Most of it is just noise

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:50:48+00:00

It just kinda comes across as shitting up the /new area because we see it all at once there instead of just in the sub as intended.

Yeah that's why I also think he's not helping the site. He does all this bumbly stuff "by accident" and generally makes a mess of things. And when I tell him better ways to do it, he gets in a 50-paragraph argument with me about it. He's making the biggest mess he can without triggering a ban, is often what I see from him, unfortunately

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:34:07+00:00

If you say so. He seems to spend most of his time collecting subs like baseball cards, quadruple-posting links, and stirring drama any time it pops up. Doesn't paint a good picture

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:33:15+00:00

If we hired someone to code, I would be the one to find them, and we would review all code thoroughly before adding it to the codebase. Security has been a focus from the start, but I also don't want the site to die off and be irrelevant, so there has to be a balance

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:23:38+00:00

I think that's more to distract himself from what he's SUPPOSED to be working on, maybe.

Hours every day for 3 years? C'mon

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:22:18+00:00

Yes, but the trolls have also used some 8 month old accounts they've been aging, which has been verified 100%. This attack has been almost a year in the making, and is part of a larger ongoing attack. They also try to get people on the inside who "play nice" so then when things go bad they have more leverage and control.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:20:15+00:00

I merely said to you, the things you say to me on a daily basis.

And it caused you to break down and regard us as having a "feud" (we're not, I don't care).

Imagine that.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:16:45+00:00

So it was just coincidence he was mentioned twice and has the same formatting in his own posts?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:13:22+00:00

It's from a surveillance satellite project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:11:27+00:00

That would be hilarious, but he's already trying his damnedest to get rid of all the stuff on his plate.

Not really, he keeps taking on more and more, and always seems to show up during these dramafests to stir the pot.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:10:22+00:00

And funny how the shill OP post just happened to mention Jason twice, in very glowing terms. And uses the same formatting style that Jason does in his posts. Coincidence?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T03:06:44+00:00

I'm very disappointed in you Jason. I thought you were better than that. I wish I could say I'm surprised.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T02:55:34+00:00

Now who's trolling?

You were trolling before? That's good to know.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T02:54:06+00:00

I mean it's understandable that some died, but 6500? How is that even possible?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T02:52:53+00:00

I am beginning to think he knows exactly what he is doing. Why did the OP mention Jason so many times? Why does he have the same writing style as Jason's posts?

Coincidence?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T02:43:31+00:00

Don't have a breakdown Jason. I know you have those sometimes.

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T02:02:24+00:00

When deliberately malicious posts are a good portion of the front page every single day, what's the point in leaving them up? Just make this site look foolish, every single day?

Funny, that's exactly what the trolls openly say they want! Why are you repeatedly promoting their agenda? Do you want to ruin saidit?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T01:53:46+00:00

The soft bigotry of low expectations

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T00:19:20+00:00

Uh huh. You're being a bit obvious, don't you think?

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T00:10:42+00:00

Yeah just bring them to my attention, that's all that's really needed. Thank you

magnora7 · 2021-02-26T00:02:16+00:00

You need to stop stirring the pot, I notice you do that a lot

magnora7 · 2021-02-25T23:58:51+00:00

You need to stop feeding the trolls

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T17:29:45+00:00

This remix is pretty good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey3Bqog52rQ

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T14:46:44+00:00

They really are, it's kind of disturbing. Just had about a dozen more accounts involved today.

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T14:37:51+00:00

Correct. Deleted

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T14:35:13+00:00

I bought water at the grocery store at 2pm so that was a good sign, they weren't out of stock. Plumbers are still impossible to come by. Almost everyone has electricity. Temps are normal now

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T05:58:26+00:00

The air of incompetence is part of the shtick. Then they can do evil things and go "Oh we did an oopsie, we didn't know, that's what we get for having a bad leader" but meanwhile the unelected deep governmental people know exactly what they're doing, they just keep swapping out puppets every few years

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T04:37:35+00:00

Wait isn't this the same one from a few days ago?

He says the word "eager" wrong with an n at the start, it wasn't even used as a noun or anything, clearly just a (very) dumb mispronunciation

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T04:28:07+00:00

Yeah I agree it's very organized. It's known JIDF has done this sort of thing for a while, could be them. I've had run-ins with them before. They stole one of my subreddits long ago fraudulently through the redditrequest system and literally put up a JIDF flag on the sidebar after they stole it. That was like 6 years ago. Then when I started calling those people out, the reddit admins immediately banned my account for something I did 3 months prior...

This is the subreddit (which was intended to be a backup/alternate sub for /r/undelete): https://www.reddit.com/r/undeleteundelete/

They also have a wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

So this has been a problem for a while. Usually it was just an edge case thing though, or trolls playing around, but now it's a serious problem that affects almost all sizable forums. Our current attacks could be JIDF, could be Chinese, could be US, could be Russian, could be all 4, could be something else. Who knows. I would say JIDF and China both probably do not like some of the things posted on saidit, so they would have motive. But I really have no idea. Could just be a crazy guy in his basement who works for hire off craigslist paid by some random person that just doesn't like saidit for some reason. But it seems pretty well coordinated, especially if you include the DDOS attacks (which are STILL ongoing, like every 3rd day for literally years) so I'd guess it's at least a 3-4 person organization.

Also the DDOS attacks still occur even though they're obviously not successful, which indicates to me someone just has an automated DDOS attack botnet on a rotating schedule.

Speed of a calculation also randomized?

Cool idea but each page is always completely custom so there's no baseline metric to judge against because the filesize is always different

Also some data may be cached if they did not clear it (like site icon).

Perhaps, I'm not sure how to detect this in a way that would be useful though

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T04:13:52+00:00

The Digg exodus to reddit was in 2010. The technology has gotten better and better for infiltrating forums, I have no idea how Aaron would deal with this. Also there weren't really long-term large-scale paid shill groups when Aaron was around, imo they've become a prominent thing in just the last 10 years or so

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T01:52:12+00:00

You can also run a system-analysis (network-test, speed-test, mem-test, screen-size, browser-version) to see if registrations are very similar

Yes I have done this. They spoof their IP, spoof their browser and even spoof the version number of the browser. It's constantly changing for all of them with every comment and post it's a new browser, new IP, new everything, basically randomized. They've really got it down to a science. Although perhaps the randomness itself is a giveaway...

Thanks for your questions, good ideas. We just need something that is easy to do once, but very hard to do 100 times. Another option would be to have them pay $1 in some cryptocurrency to register an account. This would mean they'd have to pay me to attack the site, which upsets their whole method that is based on being able to register unlimited accounts. But it would obviously deter some real users too. But that might be a cost worth paying.

Why not use the questions to help convince attackers to stop?

Lol you might as well try telling wet paint not to dry. Not worth the effort, trust me. Plus if one does wake up and quit, they just replace that person, so this doesn't actually mitigate the attack.

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T01:46:10+00:00

Yeah it's pretty wild when you really step back and think about it, we're like temporary whirlwinds of metabolites

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T01:16:13+00:00

Hot shower (really finding a deeper appreciation for this one lately after no water for a week)

Cold brew coffee

A nice computer monitor and keyboard

Sunshine

Plants, which are basically molecular rube goldberg machines that somehow grow and have a vascular system

Thinking about stuff. Did you ever think how nice it is that you have the ability to think about anything? And plan things, and imagine possibilities? It's amazing that we can do it so easily and most animals can't really do it at all.

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T00:48:28+00:00

I believe you said it just popped where it exited the ground and went into your house?

Yeah just like a 3' segment above ground and outside the house is what broke off.

You should be fine just digging down a foot or so to a clean and unbroken section of pipe, and replacing it with more pvc. A split section of straight pipe should probably be replaced back past the the next fitting, as the split may travel further than visible

Thanks, that makes sense. It has several straight PVC cuffs along the pipe that comes up from the ground. There's a shutoff valve on that pipe, so maybe I can cut it just after that to get a fresh section and a good unfractured cut.

so in potential future freezes you could cover or wrap your exposed piping with a blanket or tarp with a low wattage 'real' lightbulb, or leave the water trickling that night.

Yeah definitely going to take these things very seriously for the rest of my life after this event. I just didn't even know my mains was exposed like that, I thought that pipe was just a separate line to have a hose hookup for that side of the yard.

Thanks for the advice! And yeah I'm extremely glad this didn't break over the house itself and flood the house. That would've been a nightmare, especially with the power out for days and it below zero

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T00:35:37+00:00

Thanks for the Jon Stewart clip too, I miss him. I wonder why he doesn't have a podcast, he could rival Joe Rogan if he started his own. Probably has a gag order as part of his severance from comedy central, I'd bet. Probably also burned out as hell. But I miss his moderate yet intelligent opinions, everything's too polarized now. It's nice to see him make appearances on other shows occasionally though

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T00:18:00+00:00

One interesting development with the cultural attacks is how familiar they are with Saidit, and how they tried use our interests against us.

For instance, when we set up saidit, within the first week someone had used an automated script to register over 1000 usernames. They already had the API script set up because we're built the same way as reddit. They just pointed the script toward our site and stole a lot of people's usernames from reddit, so they couldn't register the same names on saidit.

These people know what they're doing.

I agree, Amelia handled it well given the circumstances. I think Amelia is taking a break but will probably be back, they just need to take a breather after all the craziness from the attack, which I totally understand! It's upsetting to see some people on saidit fall for the attack tricks, but that's why those tricks are used, because people do still fall for it. That's why education and discussion about these topics is so important. In theory, if we understand how the tricks work completely, the tricks no longer work on us. So all of us have to learn all of the tricks. It's a lot to ask, but the whole global internet culture has to mature in this way for things to move forward, I believe. We have to see the tricks for what they are, and learn not to react emotionally to those intentionally trying to provoke us.

magnora7 · 2021-02-24T00:07:59+00:00

Would it help to have new accounts automatically placed into "quarantine"?

Or accounts that are "suspicious".

No, because limiting user engagement from the start will inhibit growth of the site. And more importantly, the attackers often use aged accounts. They registered literally thousands of accounts many months ago. That cat is out of the bag, as far as saidit goes. So account age is not a reliable indicator for anything most of the time unfortunately.

In the case of suspected manipulators, we could even mark them as "sus".

Any manipulation marking system like this will be hijacked by the manipulators. They literally have hundreds of accounts. So they will mark people they don't like as 'sus' and the whole system will be immediately broken and maliciously hijacked.

Voat had a similar failure. They had a "protectvoat" group that was to maintain the quality of the site. That group got hijacked by attackers. They then used the power of that group to silence any normal conversation, and silence new users. This is what caused voat to become the mess it was.

I like some of your other ideas, I like that you are thinking about these problems, because they are very tough problems indeed. The voting buttons thing might be cool, but at some point there is too many buttons. I think 4-5 is the max number of buttons. And from a software perspective, adding another button would be a huge huge deal, because the whole database is written around there being exactly 2 voting options. To add a 3rd button to the saidit/reddit code, it would probably be a 100-200 hour project. And I wish that was an exaggeration.

Anyway, keep thinking... I personally think the core problem is that it's too easy to register usernames. A lot of the core issues come down to the fact one person can easily use a bot to make 1000s of accounts, and with a VPN and fake IP addresses, there is basically no way to connect those accounts as being owned by the same person. So there needs to be a way to keep it closer to 1 account per human. Most sites accomplish this now with phone numbers, or connecting through facebook, or something like that. I have thought perhaps we could do it in a way where the person has to write a 5-sentence essay on 1 of 100 topics, like "Why does war exist?" or "What's the purpose of language?" and then we see how intelligent and grammatical their responses are. This would be much harder to automate, but with GPT-3 bots getting good now even that might not be enough. And of course this would all have to be on a new site, because like I said the cat is out of the bag with saidit username registrations

magnora7 · 2021-02-23T23:55:08+00:00

Yeah the UK is as much a joke as Australia and NZ at this point. Absolute nanny state, with few people putting up any resistance. Australians because they're so soft because life has been good for so long so they don't see a need to resist, and the UK because they're so browbeaten in to conformity over centuries.

I wear it only exactly when I'm explicitly required to, that's my little resistance against it. I'm walking across the grocery store parking lot, the only one without a mask on. But I'm not being a jerk, nor am I breaking any rules. I'm just re-normalizing lack of mask outdoors. Feels like a good balanced approach lots of people could take without causing friction

magnora7 · 2021-02-23T23:49:11+00:00

I love watching comedy TV shows that are a few years or decades old. I can't count how many times I've watched Whose Line Is It Anyway, or Frasier, or Corner Gas

magnora7[A]

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