You are correct. Some of the largest instances block bot traffic, but most don’t, meaning your posts have been seen by AI crawlers and will continue to be so.

Short of not participating in federation and only discussing things within a private non-federated community on a personal instance or something, I don’t think there’s a way to prevent it.

I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I read the OP, it seemed to me like he asked a relevant question about the linked video, I did my best to answer his question from my POV because I like talking about this stuff and I’m self-centered enough to think that my POV on it might be something other people might like to read.

To me, there are more valuable things in the world than tons of good videos. The systems that you “do not care” about, help to maintain the nice world that you live in, and whether you’re aware of it or not, failing to take good care of them will eventually impact your cushy existence. But, you’re free to believe me or not about that, and to value whatever you choose.

You don’t need to tell me any more about your value decisions, though, because I don’t share them and I don’t plan to start. Good luck.

Me personally seeing or not seeing ads doesn’t change the fact that good online news outlets are going out of business because the wholly-internet-ad-supported business model doesn’t support honest journalism, kids spend their time watching devices designed to get them addicted to the flashing colors instead of something designed to help them, etc etc and so on. Did you read my message?

I see a pretty small number of ads also, but if you took away from that that my main complaint is that I personally see a lot of ads, I think you should read it again.

This whole fuckin video is bonkers.

I’m looking for, I get targeted Google ads about camera stands from Adorama and B&H Photo that do match my criteria. I like that when I get into a rabbit hole about traveling to Singapore or buying a new laptop, all of the content that I get fed is relevant to what I’m interested in.

He picked out the one instance where high-powered advertising produces a positive result, while ignoring the 90% of it that is sinister in some way. Big categories of that:

• Creating a need that didn’t exist before by manipulating people
• Bending the nature of the underlying content to its ends (producing news that communicates the message rich people want expressed to the masses, instead of informative journalism) (producing TV shows that lull people into a stupor so they’ll be susceptible to the ad breaks, instead of that which will wake them up and create genuine engagement and a vehicle for creative expression) (disrupting people’s use of social media to communicate so as to manipulate them into being better consumers) (etc).
• Providing a way for someone who makes a worse product but has more money to spend to promote their worse product over a better one that doesn’t focus as much on marketing

You can join me or not in my tinfoil-fit view, but I would say that 90+% of the impact of advertising is one of those things, and a very very small percentage of it is what he’s talking about, good honest people who make good honest products and just want to laser-focus on customers who happen to want those products and make it easy for them to find out about them. Personally I’m pretty skeptical that these things with seeing ads for camera stands or his Singapore trip actually happened that way, but even if they had, it formed a very small percent of the ways that advertising impacted his world that day.

5 or 10% of the time, Google and Facebook miss the mark and they show me ads that I’m not actually interested in or recommend videos that aren’t even relevant.

5 or 10 per cent, yeah? You must be fascinated by ads for things. Personally they form an offensive tide of bullshit against my own mental landscape, 95% or so of which I’m not interested in.

Something else that I wanted to note is that this effort has not only led to better advertising but better everything. This is the primary reason that the UI and experience on apps and services like Chrome, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are so good

What in the ever lasting fuck are you talking about

Pretty much every single time that ad-supported-ness comes into the equation, the service gets worse then it was without it. BBC is better than Fox News. Mastodon is better than Facebook. Craigslist is better than everything. When the service is designed to be good, it’s good, and when it’s designed to draw ad revenue, the “being good” part of the goal becomes, by definition, secondary. I won’t say the two are always incompatible, but specifically with the examples he lists, they’re largely incompatible, and being good has become secondary.

I can kind of be charitable about what he’s saying, and agree that Chrome’s UI is superior to some purely-open-source browser that doesn’t have the same level of funding, or that Youtube is more reliable and performs better than some bodged-together video service. But I cannot possibly fathom the kind of brain that would look at the modern world and use TikTok or YouTube as examples of things that are “so good” and lead to “better everything.”

Among other things, the designed-to-be-addictive-to-drive-advertising-revenue nature of how they’re designed creates real harm in the real world. Youtube dopamine loops trap young kids whose brains aren’t developed, and playing with tablets all the time fucks up their brains. If you’ve been around kids in the modern world you’ve seen this. Political advertising and shill-friendliness on social media produces bad political outcomes that cause genuine tragedies in the real world. Few people involved in creating those products seem to give a shit about any of that, because they’re so focused on maximizing ad spend. I would not describe that as “better everything.”

To me this is the real harm in the system he’s defending. It’s not that tracking a person for advertising to them, in itself, creates that much harm in every case. It does sometimes, but his short-sighted view of the problem that it’s often fine, is actually valid. But the wider scope of letting advertising rule our modern world even though it’s objectively making everything shittier for no benefit to everyone (except making money for a handful of people who don’t need any more), is a very big problem, and defending that system because one particular aspect of it isn’t the part that’s really hurting people seems obviously wrong.

The search engine bots are absolutely powerhouse-obnoxious in how many requests they make, and there a ton of them, and Lemmy’s not real optimized to cope with the load – most big instances block all bot traffic simply as a matter of server survival as a result of that. So I would expect not to see any of them in search results any time in the near future.

Modern AI image generators are pretty good with creating text (and hands). You’re right that that’s very recent though (like the last 6 months); they used to be bad at it.

American classic car,1935 Ford Pickup, poster ,retro ,illustrator, vibrant colors,Idaho color view landscape, with words "Idaho"

Who is fearful? I glanced over this thread and I didn’t see a lot of fear; it’s mostly just people observing the dishonesty.

Maybe there is or isn’t a reason to worry about Facebook coming into the community, but discussing it (at least as I’ve seen in this thread) doesn’t mean either anger or fear. It’s just discussing. It’s a good thing to do.

I think it’s doubtful that they actually are. If they were actually reaching out to any Mastodon “leaders,” I think the leaders would be saying something about it and posting the communications.

Yeah, the whole article is like that. Not only is the writer apparently clueless enough to get basic facts about Mastodon wrong, but each one is wrong with a flavor of a Facebook-favoring way (like implying in several different subtle ways that Mastodon includes some sort of harmful behavior or some limitation, and we need to carefully monitor to make sure it doesn’t negatively impact any Facebook users, and that’s the issue). And, there’s absolutely no curiosity or follow-up question even after statements that are clearly inviting them.

For as long as this article is, it is remarkably free of journalism. It is basically a press release from Meta saying that they’re planning to implement Threads in a few months, and don’t feel like saying more about it than that.

“Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?”

This is a fascinating question, both in its lack of an answer, and in the inherent framing of the question that of course they’re going to introduce incompatibilities, and the discussion is simply about how to do it.

Mastodon allows some artistic nudity

…

Additionally, specifics are still murky regarding exactly how user data will be handled after the connections between networks are established. For example, if you federate a post from Threads and decide to delete it afterwards, what happens to the cached post on the servers of the other networks?

That… is not the central question that’s on people minds about how user data will be handled. Presumably you were in a position to ask Rachel Lambert, the product manager at Meta who started the company’s journey towards interoperability, a more obvious and salient question, and include in your article her response.

Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders.

Who are these leaders and what are they saying about this? This, also, seems like it would have been pertinent information to include. If Meta’s answer was “You’re not allowed to know that at present,” then including that response seems like it would have made the article quite a bit more informative than simply pretending it didn’t occur to you to ask for any details about this.

I have a dream of creating a community where people can argue about factual questions and give citations, with an AI moderator that will award points for things that are demonstrated based on solidly factual citations and no points for things that are someone yelling with increasing firm confidence that their opinion is the right one. My dream is (a) the AI moderator could be made to work and (b) it would cause people to lose the “me and my agreeing-people are right about everything by definition” mentality that’s pretty easy to develop in a forum where you can literally say anything at all without getting any feedback aside from other people telling you they agree or disagree.

Probably my dream on counts (a) and (b) both is incorrect, but it is my dream. In my dream it works.

Well… that’s why I used the smartest bears analogy. I’ve noticed the mods are usually pretty on top of removing content that’s genuinely personally insulting or racist or what have you. But there’s a wide, wide grey area of someone whose post is discussing “the issue” in a technical sense, but just comes at it from a perspective of “here’s why I am right and you are wrong and not only that you’re clearly not smart enough to see my side and I can’t believe I need to explain it to someone again” with 0 interest in learning anything on their side. IDK if it’s reasonable to try to remove comments or ban people for that behavior, but it definitely doesn’t lend itself to a good discussion, and it’s common (probably majority) particularly on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml.

A lot of it depends on the instance. I think there’s a little bit of a smartest bears type of problem going on, with a lot of the bad-faith content coming from just ignorant and abrasive people being sincerely ignorant and abrasive, not anything that’s a bot or a deliberate troll.

Personally, I’ve done some rounds of unsubscribing from tech and politics subs on lemmy.ml and lemmy.world, and when I’ve done that my amount of toxic content and interactions went way down. I think the prevalence of the exact same thing on the tech subs points to it probably being just a bad-person problem in large proportion, although I’m sure deliberate malfeasance is at the root of some of it also.

Ooooooooohhhh

Makes sense

Depends on skill level and the exact nature of the flaw. There’s definitely going to be a nonzero number of malicious people who lie in the middle distance “I can come up with a way to exploit flaws if I have a detailed trail of breadcrumbs” and “I can’t be bothered to do an unlimited amount of work to track down how to do this, I have other malicious things on my schedule for today.”

Why would you even put the number at that point

That would make it possible in general for any instance operator to game the system in ways that are by design impossible to analyze, for dubious benefit.

It would also involve some pretty substantial changes from the current ActivityPub protocol (not just a new way the protocol works, but a change to some of what are currently its core operating principles about e.g. deduplication of entities across the network). You’d have to either talk the authors of every ActivityPub software into accepting your new way, or else abandon the idea of your software being able to interoperate with other ActivityPub software.

Votes pretty much have to be public in order for the whole federated system to work – otherwise anyone could just stuff 50 votes for their favorite comment, and there’d be no way to tell where they came from. Given that, I think it’s important that the software be honest with people about the situation, “disincentive” or not. Personally I’m fine with my votes being public, but an important part of that is that I know they’re public and can vote accordingly.

Every up and down vote you make is public. Friendica, kbin, and mbin all expose who voted on every post to any user, and anyone tech savvy on any software can dig out the totals at any time.

In my mind the UI should make this very obvious (honestly I think there should be a pop-up that warns new users of this every time they vote until they check a box to disable it), because it’s not what people expect. But votes are very public.

You’re making me wonder now what weird shit I’ve wandered my way into

Edit: Welp, I looked into the drama; not enough to really understand it but enough to get a general idea. All I can really say is I want no part of it.