It’s feasible that there are other variables that have been missed, but essentially this works. The server asks us a question, and we answer it. We just skip the bit where we provide evidence.

It’s like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook on a test. The only thing the server sees is the paper we’re handing in, it has no idea if we cheated or not.

Boring technical explanation:

For a server (in this case, YouTube) to see what a client (your computer) is doing, it has to reach out and ask it. When a request is made, the two points will ‘handshake’ to confirm that they heard the request, then when they’ve done it. It looks something like this:

• Client to server: are you prepared?
• Server to client. Yes, I am prepared. (503 if failure)
• Acknowledge. Client requests [data].
• Request received.
• (Server processes request.)
• Server to client. Are you prepared for response?
• Yes, I am prepared.
• Acknowledge. Response sent.
• Response received. Close connection.
• Connection closed.

These steps can be repeated any number of times in response to a single user mouseclick, depending on what you’re trying to do. A ‘request timeout’ error is what happens if client/server asks “are you prepared?” and it takes too long for the server/client to answer “yes, I am”, so you hang up the phone.

For the server to treat clients differently at all, it needs to contact them for feedback. For adblocking, it has to ask your client if you’re adblocking. Usually the server does this by sending the client a request to serve an ad - if your client never answers back to confirm it was loaded, then the server knows you blocked the ad. The devs can tell the server that if it doesn’t get a certain answer, to enable the punishment effects. (They’ll technically be sent anyway; they’re just hidden/disabled by default if your client handshakes the ad.)

What these scripts do is lie to the server. The server asks the client if we received the ad, we ignore the script that checks whether the ad is loaded and instead directly change the answer to claim it has. Since all the server sees is the confirmation, it doesn’t know the difference.

They defederated because they were both large Lemmy instances with zero review process for joining users, and they’d rapidly starting acquiring bots and bad actors. Because of federation, these accounts could interact on Beehaw’s server like they were locals.

Beehaw on the other hand, has a human-powered review process for signup. It isn’t strict, but it keeps out bots or low-effort users. Beehaw’s community goal means that reducing the amount of bots, bad actors, and low-effort users on the platform is a priority for them. Their moderating is also human-powered, and very involved - not outright banning/blocking. They reach out to users to discuss their content’s intent, and issue warnings/requests personally as needed.

That level of moderation is fantastic for fostering community and is compassionate for ignorance and error; but it isn’t scalable when being hammered by bots and an influx of new accounts. Beehaw’s only protection from instances that shelter bots and bad actors was to defederate from them until those instances were able to address them somehow.

The Beehaw admins have reached out to the admins of the other instances; their hope is to find a solution that reduces the amount of bots and spam accounts creating on .world and .works. They don’t want defederation to be a permanent solution, it’s just the only feasible one they had.

By necessity, so that Reddit wouldn’t have been obliged to intervene and close the community.

I considered the r/Piracy sub a ‘gateway’ - it didn’t overtly provide pirated content, but it made the pirated content safer and more accessible for people who weren’t already familiar with it, or updated us on news for platforms going down or changing hosts. It made piracy accessible.

Of course accessibility means bringing in low-effort users, lurkers, and those who make choices out of comfort/convenience over principle, but it still provided a service.

And while I’m at it, here’s the filters to add to your uBlock Origin’s MY FILTERS settings to block YT’s blocker:

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false)

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0)

youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, [])

youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

The more ad-riddled they make the platform to try and monetise users, the more they make adblocks necessary to even be usable.

I didn’t use to both with adblockers. I didn’t like ads, but they didn’t affect me enough for me to go through any effort blocking them.

Now I use blockers everywhere, on every platform. Even for creators I like, because I know how little they actually make for ads - so how bout instead of watching 12 hours of ads so they can get 2c, I just send them a dollar or buy their merch every once in a while to not watch ads at all? Etc.

Ads could have had a place. There are ads that serve a purpose, that have minimal disruption but still give businesses a way to develop awareness for those who might want to use them.

Movie trailers (including when they stopped trailing movies and started leading them) are examples of ‘acceptable ads’ to me. When I purchase something from a store and they include a printed card from their sponsor. When sports teams have logos for being sponsored. A work van with the business logo parked while out on call. Etc.

But the internet’s online ads? Email spam? Telemarketing? These are forms of advertising that are actively hostile, and they’ve become the default. So now a user that wants to be on the internet at all is best served by block all ads, including the ones that would’ve otherwise been reasonable.

Google will never make me feel guilty for blocking ads when they’re already making their search engine unusable, too.

I’m hoping kbin will be more popular and improve at it gains users. I like the microblogging feature, because it ‘tiers’ the content we’d share, and makes different users/communities easier to discover.

But it’s a very new platform, so it will be a while before it sees fruition; it also has almost all users on a single instance kbin.social; so other instances lack content (it doesn’t federate as cleanly as Lemmy) and makes users over-reliant on the admins of that instance, undermining the point of federation.

Unfortunately few platforms design with accessibility in mind; they consider it a ‘nice to have’, not a ‘need to have’. As platforms get bigger they’ll gain the interest of coders that consider accessibility to be as much a ‘need to have’ as the rest of the front-end. After all, Reddit itself was never accessible - 3rd party devs made it so, and they will again.

“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”

If I care about creators, it makes far more sense for them to run a Kofi tip jar of some kind and let us donate directly. Having thousands of viewers watch a cumulative 35 hours of ads so they can get 7c for it is ludicrous.

I’m not even kidding. The ‘profit’ creators get from ads is basically zero. If they want to monetise, they use Patron, Kofi, merch stores; or they line up sponsors that pay them directly (this comment brought to you by Raid™: Beats© by Legends®)

I would much rather pay a creator 10c a month and not have to watch 30minutes of ads of their platform. Way more profit for them, way better QoL for me, and it’s not like I need to go out of my way to find ads.

If they care about creators and charities, they should donate money to them. They have very little use for your time, but your lifespan is the only resource you can never ever earn back. What a fucking waste to give so much of it away, and for nothing.

Ultimately ChatGPT is a text generator. It doesn’t understand what its writing, it’s just observed enough humans’ writing that it can generate similar text that closely matches it. Which is why if you ask ChatGPT for information that doesn’t exist, it will generate convincing lies. It doesn’t know it’s lying - it’s doing its job of generating the text you wanted. Was it close enough, boss?

As long as humans talk about a topic, generative AI can mimic their commentary. That includes love, empathy, poetry, etc. Writing text can never be an answer for captcha; it would need to be something that can’t be put in a dataset - even a timestamped photo can be spoofed with the likes of thispersondoesnotexist.com.

The only things AI/bots currently won’t do are whatever’s deliberately disabled on the source AI for legal reasons (since almost nobody is writing their own AI models), but I doubt you want a captcha where the user lists every slur they can think of, or bomb recipes.

Transport in my area is so shit it would take me an hour just to get to a place I could spend cash; I would buy nothing.

Except maybe a therapist out of my own pocket to deal with something dangling financial stability in front of me.

Because of all the ‘um actually’ corrections from people whenever they’d say “Tom and me bought drinks.” And not just to the point one starts thinking it’s always “Tom and I” - I’ve had people ‘correct’ my ‘to Tom and me’, as well, because they think “Tom and me” is always incorrect.

This is also why I don’t make a big deal about correcting others’ grammar; it’s often a tool people use to feel smarter (and thus superior) to other people. Language is a communication tool; if I know what you mean and there’s limited ambiguity then I don’t much care if you said ‘would of’ instead of ‘would’ve’; and certainly not enough to interrupt a conversation to correct it.

Besides, between autocorrect, typos, and the brain’s weird word-association tricks, a linguistics professor is capable of making significant grammar mistakes and not even notice, even if they’d know they were wrong if pointed out. So swooping in to tell them “hey you did this thing slightly wrong” in lieu of engaging with their intended point is not meaningful contribution.