Anon argues on reddit

(midwest.social)

Reddit is a shitty forum. American BS policies. The moderators can ban anyone they like on their own terms, being negligent or asocial. I had an account with tons of karma and I was critisising racism. I.was.critisising.racism. The moderater did not read careful, just thought I was racist and banned me. No response to any of my rightful appeal. Shitty forum.

Meh. It's a required feature at this point. Someone has stalked me on lemmy too.

At some point people started taking the internet beyond seriously. As if every random thing that's mashed into the keyboard is tantamount to sworn affidavit than must be held up to scientific peer review.

Yeah I've been stalked and death threatened myself, but only here. Hurray for .ml users, alienating the world one worker at a time!

Yeah I never got death threats on Reddit but I've had several on Lemmy. The last time I admitted this someone asked, "well what did you say?" As though death threats are okay if you hold the wrong political opinion.

Once had a guy join a discord I was in, acted normally for a few minutes, interacted with the crowd, the whole jig. Then, out of nowhere, they start pinging me and posting my reddit history from like 7 years ago. Really weird. They got banned pretty quickly for doxxing.

The funniest part was that they were trying to shame me or something by posting comments I'd made on various NSFW subs and posts. Told them to keep digging, I was sure there was some good stuff in there. They got very upset over that lmao.

And thats why I keep accounts separate. I don't link anything to anything, I have different usernames on different services and whatnot. Even if someone somehow figures out my (now deleted) Discord and reddit usernames and starts spamming them to someone, I can just say "well thats not me lol" In that hypothetical scenario, I'd hope they people I spent time chatting with, would believe me and not the weirdo who started spamming someones reddit history.

But also, I don't care. I try to be myself all the time, so at worst, the creeps will just be spamming stuff that I normally do/say.

I had one guy who was a real fucking creep go through my post history. So I honestly understand wanting it to be private.

I think it's one of the good things reddit has introduced. Would like if something similar was introduced on Lemmy because I find it kinda fucked up that you can pretty much spy on any given user on here if you're mentally fucked enough. It's a stalkers wet dream.

Is reading someone's previous posts really "spying"? It's public. I do it sometimes to find out if the person I'm conversing with is actually an idiot or not. I don't bring their other posts into the conversation but it's a good way to know if it's worth expending more energy on a conversation that isn't going anywhere.

Literally impossible in a federated open network. Your posts are going to be public.

But yeah, on other accounts I've had psychos following me around for weeks. One had a bunch of alts and some script that they used to downvote every single comment I made immediately after I made it, so that they always dropped to like -10, and they kept that up for weeks.

Like I just said in the comments of another post, I'm seriously thinking of just deleting all my Lemmy accounts. 5 years in, this place has managed to turn into reddit but with more unhingned "marxist leninists"

I feel you. I have had my fair share of run ins with crazy on this platform and I'm only still here because I like the people on the Danish feddit and I enjoy the adhd meme group. I don't like how the tone online has become so extreme over the years. You can't even disagree with one another these days without having a label slapped on you and being banned from all kinds of communities for transgressions that are ridiculously milque toast and middle of the road.

If it gets any worse and this type of mentality starts bleeding into the groups I enjoy being on, I think I'll bow out as well and accept that the social internet is dead and not coming back anytime soon.

We live in the time of the extremists. Anyone who tries to be moderate or normal is pushed out. That is what I have learned over the past couple of years. I just miss the day where people could have different opinions and still respect one another. I miss when not every fucking thing was caked in politics.

A fellow helldiver eh? For democracy soldier

imo if you don't want it to be public, don't post it publicly on social media

If they are particularly loathsome, that is when I google their username with "Site:reddit.com" and find their comment history and call them out for something such as being an unemployed veteran on federal assistance that is arguing against federal assistance for people that are different than them.

I never hid mine, I only deleted comments when I made a glaringly obvious mistake, such as commenting in the wrong post, or completely misreading the original post.

Comment, be honest, and let the chips fall where they may, is the rule I follow. If someone wants to call me out as a hypocrite, feel free. We're all hypocrites.

They did this to hide the bots in AI. It's BS.

makes it ripe for scams and disinformation

You can search the username and their history will come up though.

This is an anti feature to hide bots and trolls

I feel like most of those accounts with hidden history are bots

I mean I have mine hidden. Have wanted the feature for years. Really wish lemmy would add it, but so far they've refused.

It's not possible due to how lemmy and federation work. Potentially your instance could hide it from their own web ui, but any other instance could just choose to not respect that flag and display your profile fully through their instance's web ui. All the comments have to federate anyway, much like votes which are also not private at all through lemmy.

The only reason it's even partially possible on reddit is because the only copy of your comments as data are on reddit's db. They aren't sent to other instances outside of reddit control because that's not how reddit works. So when reddit hides it through the UI, there's not another server to surface the comments. And reddit killed the third party API, so it's not trivial to just ask the API for all comments from a specific user.

It is however, trivially easy to just use a search engine for results from reddit with the username in question and find all the comments manually. It's a deterrant, not a real solution.

Bots or nazis. It's real convenient that we can't see the posts they make on /r/GenZFourthReich or whatever

Reddit started with fake users. It has always been part of their culture and history. Of course they will allow bots to hide their post history. It's the only way they get users to consistently post.

The second someone wastes their time in your post history you've already won

I would argue that the second you get into an argument online with strangers you've already lost

Wait....

Fuck.

This is the real answer

Sometimes you see a wild political take on Lemmy and you open their profile and see them praising Russia and China.

Sometimes? Often, lol.

Pretty sure some bingo cards have even been made.

Oh that? That's just .ml

You don't even need to open their history – you just look at their instance. I love Lemmy.

Whats wrong with chinese food? Is it not suculant and delicious?

Ooh, that's a nice headlock, sir

I call it the tanky check.

Who praises Russia? I see endless accusations of this, but its always someone misunderstanding opposition to the US as praise for each of it's enemies.

Does your instance federate with lemmy.ml and lemmy.grad? You get banned on those instances for doing anything except simp for Russia. Majority of the users there defend all of russia's actions.

See that's where I'm a step ahead, I've already blocked those instances

Yes. Are you confusing defending Russia's actions with having more nuance than attributing all of Russian's actions to Russians being mustache-twirling villains who do evil for its own sake?

You can solve this confusion by just showing me what you're talking about. It should be trivial if its as common as you say.

No these guys specifically praise Putin as a worthy succesor to Stalin's legacy

No they don't lmao what?

We’re not talking about people praising Russian cuisine, art, and literature. We’re talking about tankies taking Russia’s side on the invasion of Ukraine and parroting Russian propaganda about the war being NATO’s fault and Ukrainians being Nazis.

The war requires Russia, Ukraine, and America to continue. It'd be great if Russia would just stop, but as an American it's more sensible to oppose my own government's support.

Ukrainians being Nazis

There are a shitton of nazis in Ukraine tho, there's also a bunch in Russia.

praising Russian cuisine

I've tried Russian cuisine, its not great. Who is praising it? Swedes?

The war requires Russia, Ukraine, and America to continue.

And if a woman doesn't want to be raped, that's easily solved by her simply not having the sex be involuntary. Makes perfect sense.

WW2 would also have been over way sooner if everyone had just surrendered to the Germans and Japanese. I wonder why those fools didn't just heed your wisdom.

Fuck you

Username identifies you as Russian. Further arguments are guaranteed to be bad faith time-wasters.

You can't just call everyone you disagree with Russian lmao.

Sure I can. I can call you a bot or a clanker. I can claim to be black, gay, or from Florida. People need to stop accepting claims made on the internet.

I look to see if they are a troll depending on what they wrote. If someone’s life boils down to the need to win something in internet comments, they can have it. They got bigger problems to contend with even if they don’t see it yet.

Nah bro, I remember that post where some guy was criticizing OP's cooking, so OP checks that dude's post history and finds how he drinks his own piss.

I'm pretty sure OP won that argument by just mentioning that

They just wasted their time deliberating the opinion of someone who drinks piss instead of having confidence in their own abilities all to "win" an internet debate. That's not winning. At best they both lose

I don't know if I'd go that far. It's one of the easiest ways to identify troll behavior. Sure going through and analyzing every post is insane, but being able to click on someone's history and see that oh they say stupid stuff for reactions regularly is pretty helpful. I'd also argue that it's helpful when people are making intellectually dishonest arguments when they have ulterior motives. Racist dog whistles for instance, when someone makes an argument that's a pretty obvious dog whistle and then claims they're just asking questions the Post history can sometimes help cut through that nonsense.

Honestly I think having an LLM that makes it easy to automatically label users as “tankie”, “maga”, “troll”, would make social media much nicer. I would avoid making the first response to a user who is known for their stupid arguments.

On the flip side, having a “this user cites their sources” tag would also be awesome.

Yeah but how would you trust that the LLM isn't biased, or the company that licenses and puts it in a browser extension isn't either? I don't know.

I'm asking because I like the idea, it's a good one.

Because classification tasks like this do not require frontier models, they could easily be run on a cpu locally with publicly available models.

That... doesn't answer the question. How do you assert that the base model you download and run doesn't have a bias one way or the other?

By using and testing it, obviously. It can’t magically develop a bias later on.

Everyone has a different definition of what unbiased means, so this would not be a “one size fits all” kind of thing. You would simply use a model that you personally deem good enough.

Not obvious. You're right, there is no magic in this technology, and you clearly don't understand how it works.

There is not a single LLM currently available that is able to consistently provide a correct or workable solution when faced with a semi complex word problem that's able to be contained in one paragraph. They may nail it on occasion but they cannot do it consistently. The "problem" of figuring out if someone is a bit eccentric, has poor social skills, is actively trolling, only trolls sometimes, or any combination of the above, is orders of magnitude higher than that. (edit:) To say an LLM is capable of that kind of logical determination is completely ignoring the evidence to the contrary.

That might be the worst idea I've ever heard in my life.

As with all people who are apparently experiencing AI psychosis I highly suggest you just learn to do things for yourself. You can make your own tags based on your own observations and experiences.

I thought it was a good idea

Yes but I do not have the time to read through everyone’s comment history. This would easily scale out to every comment that pops up on your feed BEFORE you waste time on it.

If there is exactly one thing AI is good at, it’s text classification. Don’t let your (perfectly reasonable) disillusionment with all the other uses of AI make you think that’s it’s a completely useless tool.

Hell, you probably don’t even need an LLM for this, there are lots of AI text classifier algorithms available.

Yes you're right that's certainly does sound like a reason why we shouldn't have any more clean water. Totally worth it.

Running LLMs locally does not require water cooling. Not sure what you’re talking about.

I think a cool solution would be to aggregate all of the tags that each user has received from other users and if there are frequent enough overlaps, a suggested tag might show up next to their name.

Of course, that would require user tags to be logged, which is not currently the case, afaik. It’s also not foolproof, because I’ve got at least one user tagged as “belligerent and stupid,” which, while probably helpful for others, is not likely to come up in other users’ tags. Most of my tags are probably pretty common though: troll, occasional troll, thoughtful, insightful, etc.

And finally, it might be susceptible to brigading or worse, if someone decides to make a bunch of accounts to tag LGBTQ users or something. Using the same federation rules as in other scenarios, where users or instances can be blocked or defederated at the instance level would help that, but I don’t know if it’s possible.

>go to history

>Most recent post is about mass downvoting

Yeah checks out lmao

Edit: hmmm can't figure out how to add green text brackets here

You need to escape them, like this:

\> go to history

\> Most recent post is about mass downvoting

Thanks mate

mass downvoting

There are accounts that exclusively downvote random comments. Not controversial comments, random ones. I have no idea what the person running the bot gets out of it.

Probably kids practicing their first bot or something

A false sense of power and control.

Winning

>like this

Whenever I feel the need to check the post history I now just stop replying and move on.

Winning lotto numbers are in my comment history trust it's a good use of time

Nah, post history is a great way to adapt to someone's style and beat them...

Obviously the direct "well hurrdurr your post history has this and that, argument invalid" approach is idiotic, but you can use the post history to point out fallacies (say, if someone is more lenient about an issue just because the politics of the person/people involved), but also to prepare what kind of counter-argument they might bring so you can slap back immediately.

See, most debates that are good, are good because of the right comebacks, counter-arguments, and the wit being used. But a good majority of those aren't thought up on the spot! No, debates are 95% about prep, and one of the most important factors is who you're debating. Their personality can be an incredibly useful tool against them, because with the right words/phrases you can manipulate their reactions - while essentially saying the same thing. You prepare to a debate by guessing how your opponent will react, and the more you know about their personality (post history), the better you can prepare.

So yeah, post history can be super useful if you know how to use it. And it's most useful when the others - the person in question included - don't realise that you're using the post history.

Wow this comment is very Ben Shapiro debate bro coded.

You sound kind of evil dawg. The internet is for fun.

The "win" here likely refers to that of a moral or ethical one. Thanks for helping prove the point.

Hiding post history is a gift to fascists, like so many other decisions reddit made. One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.

Clicking someone's username was like dogs sniffing butts. You want to know: what kind of asshole am I dealing with? But dipshits trapped in tribalist worldviews only knew that people would slap them down for hypocrisy, so wah wah wah admins come save me, if blocking to force the last word wasn't enough. I had so many idiots sneer about /r/LinkIsCute posts, like I'm supposed to be shamed about liking a popular character in a clearly intended fashion. It's just the desperate grasping modern version of some child with a quivering upper lip countering 'yeah, well... nice hair!'

Disqus had private profiles for years before that and nobody even cared

I think that's more because no one really cared about disqus. It was just a solution for comments on news articles and blogs, right?

It's a social plugin that used to host many [redacted] opinions, so being private on there had its merits, but at some point it acted like a forum of its own. Now it's somewhat dead, but not quite.

Anon argues on reddit

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