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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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I feel your pain. It reminds me of the Please Drink Verification Can copypasta. The new captcha's I've been facing have been particularly annoying, requiring me to click images that slowwwwwly reappear in a way designed to infuriate humans more than to ward away bots.

The problem with online anonymity is that it's only valued by a handful of libertarians, and millions of bots, pirates, scammers, and other unsavory individuals. Since most normies don't care about being anonymous, the vast majority of companies don't care either, and only see it as problem.

Since most normies don't care about being anonymous, the vast majority of companies don't care either, and only see it as problem.

They care about the exactly proper odds ratios -- out of X people that do action Y, Z% are bad actors.

One of the simplest and easiest ways to ward off bots, scammers, and trolls is to institute an minor inconvenience that disproportionately effects bad-faith-actors. Most normal users will think nothing of an enforced 30 second delay between login attempts or captcha inputs because they're only logging in so often anyway.

In contrast the scammer running a bot-net or the tumblr-troll hopping between multiple sock-puppets is definitely going to notice.

On the upside, this stuff hits people who aren't that focused on anonymity. The SO is an absolute normie for anonymity purposes, and is driven absolutely up the walls by a lot of the constant push for 'human verification' that doesn't work, and running normies at work through gov 2FA setups have made me and them want to strangle people.

It's a rather shitty silver lining to The Cloud, but I think there's a bigger alliance of People Pissed Off By Bullshit than one of Libertarians and Scammers.

((I've also been getting questions that are weirdly philosophical. Nothing quite at the level of 'what is good', but 'what counts as a sign' sorta way.))

These are the product of trying to use captchas as ai training data which i find both terrifying and weirdly reassuring in a way.

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