Because honestly, it seems a little bit quieter over here. It seems like there are fewer upvotes in general, and traffic is a little down on most of the communities other than IP2, which weirdly is way up.
Anyone else notice anything or is this all in my head?
There's always fewer votes in general because this place has been slowly dying for the past five years.
I got blocked on the Conspiracy forum for saying stuff about conspiracies.. this site is kind of lame.
It's a low effort meme getting blocked by the filter and then I removed it.
This forum is run by a foid, and she does typical foid things.
Nope. i see no change. sites pretty dead. less active than a bbs at 2400 baud.
The only change i see in the world is 4chan war spam went down some.
however it is fair to say i likely have the largest blocklist on the site.
as in i filtered the bots weeks/months/years ago and didn't notice when they went offline with yandex.
I guess it's dead-ish. It's not the kind of place where you can just sit and actively chat with people without long waiting periods.
It's disappointing to me that there's no place like that - some non-corporate web forum where you can just talk about anything with anyone. Seems like it should be possible, and yet people mostly still go on Reddit where you're required to confirm to all majority opinions while unpaid basement-dwellers arbitrarily decide whether you pass their purity tests and bots scrape up every piece of data they can find about you.
Why do they do that? It's like they don't realize that they don't have to.
I've tried to create such. It can't be done without major money now.
Any place with open free chat gets 'attacked' instantly. the second you go online.
until you end up needing (cloudflare) who decides you can't have free open chat per their terms of service and that's the end of that.
they locked the world down and we didn't even notice while we were scrollin stupid memes.
As far as I know, Cloudflare's not that far from free and open - it won't allow CSAM repositories or forums for planning mass school shootings or fomenting armed rebellion, but it doesn't freak out over, say, radical ideologies or porn or most forms of shock content.
Or is that wrong?
Yep. And at any second someone could post a link or say something illegal. you have to deal with it or you are going to have a bad time.
You'll find you're required to have 100% active moderation. which is expensive or the service is not 24-7.
so you have to automate it. heavily. and add rules and restrictions. and now it's your scripts and bots fighting the attacking bots.
and you still have to watch it like a hawk and disallow so many open things.
and now it's not fun anymore. and you're not making money. and why are you running this?
So far the only way i've found that is workable for a non-commercial entity would be EXTREME VETTING. you apply to the site. we give you an extreme anal probe over your personal information. we MAYBE let you join. after you pay money. now the automated tools just watch users to keep them in line. much smaller set.
this site rides the line so hard.. and this place was only possible because it inherited a bunch of 'trump site' users.
ie... instant moderator team to help you. look at the other clone sites. just idiots screamin giberish in a huge # of posts.
See, here's what I'm thinking.
You make it text-only. No support for binaries at all. No support for hyperlinking, even. Just: language.
You create an AI bot to remove any commercial activity.
You put up a notice saying that you DO cooperate with law enforcement and subpoenas, so this isn't a place you want to be talking about illegal activity or CSAM.
You create broad-spectrum user tools for blocking low-quality contributors.
And you find a DDoS Protection Provider.
Seems to me that covers like 99% of your bases right there... it can't truly be that expensive to run a text-only forum.
number 1 kills most of the interest. (guys! check this funny pic/video/thing/site! oh wait. we can't. this place sucks.)
5 costs money. and the rest is very much not fun.
but i hope you try. you might be able to get one going.
I think that might be a feature rather than a bug. There are ten thousand places on the Internet competing to be where you show off a funny pic. Whereas a free-speech discussion forum is something that does not seem to exist at all right now.
ghislaine maxwell was an unpaid moderator??
many mods are paid langley and london interns.
and over at reddit, some bj'ers too.
What are "the Yandex bombings?"
I missed that.
Apparently Ukraine has bombed a half a dozen Russian data centers (operated by the company Yandex) and it's had a sizeable effect on bot traffic across the global Internet.
Thanks. That was my gut reaction to reading it, but I wanted actual human confirmation (rather than standard AI fare an internet search would yield)
Any idea why Ukraine would want to target Yandex data centers? Or if they just missed their real target of oil industry infrastructure?
Because the Yandex data centers are specifically being used for psyops and have actual military value. The bots are trying to diminish European and American support for Ukraine, or failing that, just trying to destabilize those countries domestically.
There is a widespread belief - and I suspect it's true - that Russia is doing its best to spread racist ideology through bot farms and paid shills. Russia isn't as diverse as the U.S., and its minorities tend to be geographically segregated instead of living shoulder-to-shoulder in the same city. Plus, Russians don't have meaningful elections anyway. So racism does a lot more to damage the morale and political effectiveness of the U.S. compared to Russia, and they use that to their advantage.
Makes sense, thanks.
The numbers go up whenever Blade falls down...
With Doggos as a mod, of course it will die.
Removed. Rule 1
Nope. Wrong.
Removed. Rule 1
And you don't think that this motherfucker repeatedly calling me a paid Jew is respectful and not making a personal attack?
The comment you replied to has also been removed for rule 1 violations.
Removed. Rule 1
Didn’t happen. Reported for violating site rules.
Removed. Rule 1
🎶I'm a bot, he's a bot, she's a bot, we're all bots, Hey! 🎶
Removed. Rule 1
Didn’t happen. Reported for violating site rules.
Which site rules are you thinking I've violated?
I am most certainly not a bot account, and since I'm not allowed to respond to you on this particular board, I just have to report everything you try to say to me.
You're free to reply. Would be good of you to avoid rule 1 violations as you would like the rule violations to stop against you. Just say'n
I mean, I guess I'm free to have a "conversation" where I repeatedly simply deny that anyone is paying me to be here while Skil gets all his replies removed because he's incapable of civility.
I don't know what good that would do for anybody, though.
Yeah, cyclical
Cute. Thanks for admitting to violations of the site rules.
We both violated c/Conspiracies' rules by being disrespectful to each other.
Neither of us have violated the "site rules," given that there is no prohibition against disrespect on Scored/Communities.
I'll tell you exactly what I think of you on another community; you can count on that.
And I’ll be there to prove you wrong and laugh at you.
I don't believe that you know the difference between proving something and saying that you proved something. But you will, indeed, type HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA because that's... that's what I'm dealing with, here.
And that’s why you keep getting humiliated. You think objective reality is a matter of personal opinion.
We're not doing all this infighting stuff here. Stop.