When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
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My biggest beef with this new shaky-information world is that they hardly ever accurately date-stamp and time-stamp things anymore. This took me less than a minute to type and I find it mostly worthless so I’ll be donating this one for free.
But I get upvotes. They are more valuable than my time or money.
What I’m particularly concerned about lately is the growing share of online forums that don’t even publish their content on the web.
The most famous example of this type of forum is probably Discord.
As those of you on Lemmy know, many people chose Discord as an alternative after Reddit’s deterioration.
Hasn’t this problem already escalated to the point where access to content isn’t guaranteed not only to some bots but even to individuals without accounts?
Shouldn’t those who love the web be extremely wary of online communities that don’t even try to be based on the web?
That’s what I think.
If search engines truly only show the “existence” of forums, then the open web is truly over.
I don’t think that we should be wary of them. It is only natural that when the whole web is overrun by bots, these gated communities will pop up. It’s an easy way to keep a lot of bad traffic out, while a space for users to interact and be authentic.
And yes, I think the open web is truly over.
I don’t contribute anything worthwhile anywhere.
Not wrong, but I feel like you’re preaching to the Choir here.
it helps to clarify one’s mind from time to time :)
The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
Those aren’t paywalls.
meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
Reddit sucks for a number of reasons, but your internet literacy also kinda sucks.
The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:Those aren’t paywalls.
They are. You pay with you being tracked, profiled, your data etc for advertisement and other uses. That’s what these “free” services use to monetise the user.
Yea but thats not what a paywall actually is.
well it feels like one
meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit, and incognito mode means that browser cookies routinely get scrapped.
VPNs prevent the site from attaching an IP address to the site visit
While this is a popular selling point that VPN providers like to advertise, it’s pretty misleading in terms of what this actually means with regards to tracking. Realistically, this does almost nothing to prevent sites from tracking you. They don’t see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and see you on your VPN as “Hans Schneider”, instead they see you at your home IP as “John Smith” and on your VPN as “still John Smith, but either traveling in Germany or using a European VPN”.
Advertisers have tens of thousands of individual data points on nearly every single person who uses the internet at all for any purpose. All a VPN does is obfuscate ONE data point. That’s less than 1% effectiveness at hiding your identity from advertisers. A VPN does basically nothing against all the other fingerprinting methods advertisers have.
Think of using a VPN like speaking into a walkie-talkie: your voice comes out at a different location, but if the person on the other end already knows what your voice sounds like, then they still know who you are, just not necessarily where you are. Unless you’re taking other efforts to mask your voice, the walkie-talkie isn’t protecting your identity in any way. Likewise with a VPN, if you go to the same sites from the same devices and log into the same accounts and otherwise engage in the same online behavior, the VPN is only hiding where you are, but it’s still trivially easy for an advertiser to determine who you are.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, because VPN providers harp on this idea so hard in their advertisements that it tricks people into thinking VPNs are capable of things that they just simply are not.
So how would one acquire the obfuscation they are seeking for? Making advertisers don’t know who you are for everything you visit. Is it possible?
yeah i get your point but that’s not what i meant. i’m using VPNs to do google searches, for example, in incognito browsing tab. so google knows the 10k searches i did, but it cannot connect them to each other, as session cookies between them are deleted each time i close the browser (which is about every few minutes). and i don’t log in to any account in the incognito tab either, so it can’t use account identities as fixed points either. and it cannot associate the queries by IP address either.
edit:
after seeing this website … https://amiunique.org/fingerprint i get what you mean now. i have to think about this.
Try this while on a VPN and in incognito mode: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
I bet you’ll be surprised at the methods companies use to fingerprint you - browser agent, Do Not Track enabled/disabled, timezone, screen size… not accepting cookies is also a data point to filter you by.
wtf. why does my browser send such an uniquely identifying token. wtf
(there’s more to the right of it, i cut it to preserve privacy)
WTF
TIL. the way trackers can do stuff
That’s not what a VPN or incognito modes do.
It absolutely is. I’ve verified this by toggling the VPN off and wallah access is restored.
wallah
Please tell me this is a joke/reference.
Not a reference, just a little BoneAppleTea for breakfast 😉
That’s because Reddit bans VPN IP addresses. You still have an IP address when using a VPN, and VPN IPs aren’t exactly secret information. Reddit blocks all the VPNs they know of with an ever-updating blacklist.
Yes, that’s what was said…
I’ve been slowly replacing, by hand so it doesn’t trigger their detection alerts, all of my 15 years of comments on Reddit, a lot of it valuable answers to tech questions or programming problems, with a randomly prompted unrelated paragraph of ChatGPT whatever.
When one of the first exodi(?) came, a lot people replaced their comments with random words through scripts, back then it was not as detected and prevented (which Reddit promptly scrambled to prevent), and thanks to people doing that I’ve eventually blocked Reddit from my Kagi altogether, simply because 90% of what I found was either questions with scrambled answers, comments that are just ads from bots, or just unrelated bullshit. So, it does have an actual impact.
Have fun selling that to AI companies.
LIke you I deleted all my comments and verified they were deleted. When I looked a couple of months later, Reddit had actually restored each and every one.
I’m slowly deleting them again. Maybe this time they’ll stay gone.
Deleting (or editing) comments does not change what the hosting website has, it just updates what they display. so there will be lines in a database saying:
- the original comment was “blah”
- on the 6th of August 2024 it was changed to “blah2”
- and the 20 of January the comment was deleted
There isnt a way for you to remove that unless there is some legal mechanism for you to force them to remove all data about you.
Even with GDPR requests there’s zero guarantee they actually comply with deletion requests. They may decide to show something that may lead to think they have complied. That’s it…
The irony is that this argument will probably get more attention on Reddit than on any open forum: Centralised platforms are great for discovery and awful for preservation. Use them as the billboard, not the library. Keep the valuable stuff where you control the rules, the backups and the future.
agreed there, the rule should be, if your goal is to make sure your information is out there… don’t limit it to one place. Post it to Lemmy, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, keep it on your PC, and a flash drive, and have off site backups.
Exactly. Platform loyalty is a bad archiving strategy. If one platform disappears, changes the rules, or buries old content, your work and links still survive instead of vanishing with someone else’s business decisions.
Yeah, I’m sure this post won’t ever get scanned.
?
Half of what I post anywhere is horseshit, but you won’t know which half or even whether this reply is included in it. Good luck.
Unfortunately most of the internet is login-gated at this point. And honestly a lot of it is justifiable, lest you let the bots run wild scraping your site until it goes down completely.
a lot of lemmy servers use anubis to hinder bots. it’s quite effective actually. makes the bots do some hard cryptographic riddles before accessing data. insignificant for human users who only read 100 posts but significant for bots who want to read millions of posts.
You can download archives of Reddit comment and submissions from Academic Torrents.
I’m not aware of any similar public archives of Fediverse content.
hmm i’m not entirely sure either but it seems like fediverse content should be easily archivable.
probably this is another engineering challenge to think about once that i have checks notes a few months of free time …
Interesting, if I’m not misreading that index you have 2007 to 2015, then jan 2024 onwards monthly (at 30-50gb a file) but not the 9 years in the middle
Way ahead of you, brother.
Off topic, but that blue/black graphic looks recessed about 1/4" into my phone screen.
Way cool!
