Adding the ability to hide your post history is an awful feature.
Made spotting trolls a lot harder
I get the need for privacy given how many people have a habit of stalking or digging through post history for malicious purposes, but it also removes a lot of accountability. Accountability is equally as important, given that people turn into monsters without it.
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.
I got banned for making fun of a nonexistent race, and I was doing it to mock the concept of racism itself.
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.
It creates far more issues than it benefits. Hiding enables bad actors much more so than not hiding does, as it allows them to more easily disguise their history of bad faith arguing.
I find most hidden profiles on redit have been religious fundies or libertarians.
There’s a lot brigading state subreddits to influence elections right now :/
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.
“Well, did you sound like a nazi or not!?!?!? I’m waiting!”
I’ve had someone dig through my comment history as well, the funny thing was everyone else in the comments was pointing out they were wrong.
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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.
I had a guy suddenly start stalking me, following me around and posting rude comments in response to every post I made – his username was even a slight modification of mine. I was starting to get pissed until he posted “Mom always did like me better” and I realized it was my brother who had discovered my username while hanging out in my room.
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”
Lol how did you get that dedicated of a hater?
I posted a meme mocking Musk. They commented on it complaining about it, so I replied with some meme mocking Musk stans.
They did not take that well 🤣
But everybody mocks the man-child who has single-handedly disproven the myth of meritocracy while being so unlikable even other pedophiles stopped inviting him to their parties.
That guy must have his hands full.
Had to check; they haven’t been around much in the past year or so. Guess the stress of seeing Musk getting mocked was too much?
But looks like I remembered wrong: that person wasn’t the one with the zillion alts, they had just a couple (based on the number of downvotes). Can’t find the one who legitimately had like a dozen alts for downvoting, think that might have been on an account I deleted
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
Nah eat shit don’t victim blame asshole.
there has to be a better solution other than expecting others not to access public information
- (auto-)delete posts after a specified amount of time
- drawback: non-casual creeps can circumvent this by archiving posts
- separate online identities with multiple accounts for different purposes
- drawback: online identities can be traced from each other if you’re not careful
- or what i already suggested: only post stuff online that you’re comfortable with everyone seeing
- drawback: you have to hold back on what you post online
i personally use a mix of 2 and 3
- (auto-)delete posts after a specified amount of time
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.
You can search the username and their history will come up though.
History hidden from one’s Reddit profile is now hidden from
author:Reddit searches as well. This was not originally the case.
I had mine hidden because you say one controversial thing in the wrong community and they’re digging for dirt in comments from years ago.
I don’t understand how that’s supposed to work, you’d have to have posted some bad takes, and even if you did, “hey I made the wrong call based off what I believed at the time, I now understand where I was misled” isn’t going to turn anyone against you.
It really only affects people who don’t stand behind their words.
“hey I made the wrong call based off what I believed at the time, I now understand where I was misled”
This would never work. It actually would 100% lead to being mass downvoted. Not just reddit, but here too.
The way to deal with that is to simply not care about down votes. They are meaningless.
exactly. I wonder sometimes at comments. People seem to have limited experience with other people here, and are overly optimistic about how reasonable and kind people are… they are not. especially not in a social media setting.
Some of it too is differing audiences/communities. You might tell a joke in front of your poker bros that you wouldn’t tell in front of your kids … and there’s nothing wrong with that.
and for some folks the fact you pay poker or have kids make you irredeemably horrible person.
You overestimate the average persons ability to read what you’ve written and interpret the meaning behind it. I have no doubt that plenty of people will read your comments from years ago and nail you to the wall over some gross misinterpretation of something that’s not even remotely related to the topic at hand.
They’ve also got 10 other accounts to start piling on and hitting the down arrows, then the rest of the thread sees who the target is and joins in.
How do you feel about the lack of obfuscation on Fediverse? Piefed hides votes but otherwise we’re all kind of wide open to eachother
Small correction: Piefed no longer obsfucates votes.
Really? How recently was that? Do you mean like fuzzing the numbers like reddit or can they be scraped by lemvotes now?
Piefed experimented with having a secret account with a randomized name associated with each user, and the secret account would be the one the showed as the source of the vote rather than the real account. Pattern analysis would still reveal who was behind it, and the admins of your source instance could see the link between the real account and the “voting account” behind the scenes.
I don’t know the specifics, but if I remember correctly it ended up causing some issues with how activitypub federates stuff I think plus community moderators had some concerns, so the feature was removed.
Just double checked, you’re right. It can still scrape piefed votes for users. I think maybe the way piefed url’s work isn’t automatically compatible with the format lemvotes needs for individual posts. That’s why I thought they were obscured
That’s just where the internet is now; everything is accessible. Your public data is scraped and your private data is sold.
Yes for sure, but you were talking about unhinged reddit profile detectives. I only ask because I have conflicted feelings and am trying to figure out how to be less worried about it here
This is just the nature of the format. I quickly learned the unsubtle art of not caring if random strangers don’t like me.
noooooooooooooo we hates the panopticon 😖 I want to upvote unhinged stuff
This is why I regularly go through and delete my history. Yeah I know a lot of it is recoverable if someone really digs or especially if they’re actually recording me specifically but I can at least make it harder to do casually. I just wish there was a similar tool to powerdeletesuite for reddit but for Lemmy.
Why not just do make alts? Every now and then I look for something just to find deleted answers.
It’s a lot of effort in a fedi that wants emails and other verifications as signup criteria. One server I had to write an essay for.
Email is almost universal, but do you have to be on an instance that requires a whole essay? I think I got my account pretty easy.
There’s a lot of different requirements a lot of different places. although I did buy an email from a provider that offers multi addresses so maybe I’d better make use of that. idk. maybe. I’d also then have to keep track of which things I post to which accounts.
The second someone wastes their time in your post history you’ve already won
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.
Whats wrong with chinese food? Is it not suculant and delicious?
Ooh, that’s a nice headlock, sir
You know your judo well.
Oh that? That’s just .ml
/thread
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.
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
No these guys specifically praise Putin as a worthy succesor to Stalin’s legacy
No they don’t lmao what?
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 would argue that the second you get into an argument online with strangers you’ve already lost
Wait…
Fuck.
This is the real answer
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.
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
>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 downvotingThanks 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
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.
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.
The “win” here likely refers to that of a moral or ethical one. Thanks for helping prove the point.
I feel like most of those accounts with hidden history are bots
Bots or nazis. It’s real convenient that we can’t see the posts they make on /r/GenZFourthReich or whatever
Yes. It’s not good for reddit’s business if you can easily tell bot accounts, so they introduced this new feature
Which ironically makes it easier to exclude the bots since all of them will have the history hidden. Granted that will also exclude some non-bot accounts, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
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.
This is an anti feature to hide bots and trolls
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!’
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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?
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