Reddit: “Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!”

I wonder if there’s a way to prevent people from even knowing that two different votes came from the same user.

What I outlined above should prevent anyone from knowing two different votes came from the same user… without specifically trying that user’s id on each. That’s what the salt (the comment/post id) is for.

I’ve personally been banned from one community for downvoting too consistently.

Votes should be anonymous.

I tend to agree, but the fact is that they aren’t anonymous. This tool just exposes the already-existing fact that Lemmy expressly does not guarantee anonymity for votes. The solution isn’t to not for the poster to not publish this tool. Believe me, such tools already exist in private even if none other than this one are published. Publishing this one only democratizes access to that information. (And not entirely, I don’t think. From what I’m seeing on the page, it looks like it still requires an admin account on an instance. Update: Actually, I’m not sure if it requires an admin account or not. Either way, though.) The solution is (if it’s possible) to make Lemmy itself protect voters’ anonymity.

The reason why instances know who has up/down voted things (rather than only keeping an anonymized “total” for each post/comment) is so it can prevent double-voting.

Maybe instead of usernames, the instances could store/trade… salted hashes of the usernames where the salt is the title or unique identifier of the post/comment being voted on? It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would allow the instance to figure out whether the currently-viewing or currently-voting user has already voted while also making it harder for anyone else to get that information. About the only way a tool could tell you exhaustively who had voted if that were how things worked that I can think of off hand is to try every username on Lemmy one-by-one until all the votes were accounted for.

(Of course, malicious instances could still keep track of usernames or unique user ids who up/downvoted, but only on the instance on which the vote was cast. Also, one downside of this approach would be increased CPU usage. How much? Not sure. It might be trivial. Or maybe not. Dunno.)

And there may be much better ways to do this. I haven’t really thought about it much. I also haven’t checked whether there is an open ticket asking for improved anonymity for votes already.

(Also, full disclosure, all of the above was written after only an extremely brief skim of the linked page.)

(One more edit. Something IHawkMike said led me to realize that the scheme I described above would allow instances to manipulate votes by just inventing hashes. Like, grabbing 512 bits of data from /dev/urandom and giving it to other instances as if it was a hash of a username or user id when, in fact, it’s not a hash of anything. Other instances wouldn’t be able to easily tell that it wasn’t the hash of a valid user id. I haven’t thought how to go about solving that yet. Maybe if it occurs to me, I’ll update this post.)

Both Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez.

I mean, as long as they don’t butcher them like they did to, for instance, Ready Player One.

4chan and Jira too. It does seem like a lot of things have had outages lately.

I really can’t overstate how much respect I have for Kuhn and the SFC. If RMS and the FSF are the Free Software movement’s past, Kuhn and the SFC are it’s future, and I can’t imagine anyone better to carry that particular torch.

Why wasn’t I told that was an option sooner?

Whoever created YAML apparently thought Excel was a masterpiece of software design.

Damn. You’re tempting me to make a novelty language.

Someone woke up this morning and chose violence.

I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to do any write operations. I’m honestly not even sure the service behind that login page offers any write operations. I might have to check sometime. I’m curious.

Where I work, the infra folks are way overworked. Getting them to do things is impossible given their existing todo list. And when you do get them to do something (by throwing managers at them) they half-ass it.

(I’m not blaming them. I blame the managers. It is frustrating though. Anyway.)

And as a result, there’s one system that I use frequently that they set up, but cut corners and never hooked it up to our single sign-on solution. And so in order to get into this system, everyone has to use a shared username/password. “readonly:readonly”. And every time I log in, my browser nags me about the known weak password.

If Satan walked into the room you’re currently in right now and said “I’m here to collect your soul to torture for eternity as payment for the bigger dick I gave your great great great grandfather on this date in 1925 unless you can make me laugh in the next 30 seconds”, what would you do?

I’ll take FOSS over the proprietary software we can be sure will do malicious things to us.

Lessee. Username’s a reference to Snow Crash, which is a cyberpunk book. Played the game “years ago”. The game must have a name not so connected to the content that OP would have already remembered the name before posting.

I’m going to guess Shadowrun for the SNES.

That’s awesome! Welcome to the club and don’t be afraid to explore your system and ask questions!

What would the “bot that finds bots larping as people” do exactly? Ban them? Block or mute them? File reports? DM an admin about them?

If it’s just for pointing out suspected LLM-generated material, I think humans would be better at that than bots would be, and could block, mute, or file reports as necessary.

Also, are you saying you intend to make a bot that posts LLM-generated drivel or a bot that detects LLM-generated drivel?

It’s almost as if the “aRtIfiCiAl iNtElLiGenCe” is as big a cult as blockchain is, isn’t it?

Yeah, that’s fucked. With some serious reverse engineering and reimplementing, it sounds like it could be a pretty great product, but even if something like a FOSS implementation of the protocol StarVision uses or something like Valetudo but for the Vega existed, I wouldn’t feel right about patronizing a company that does that kind of shit.