There is probably no need for moderators to do anything. Moderation is crowd sourced. I believe it only takes 4 people that have at least 31 karma to flag something to make it go away. Someone can briefly vouch it if they have 31 karma but then it can get flagged again.
If there are not at least 4 people that click flag (assuming I have the right number for flagging) then perhaps this is becoming a political site meaning they will have to revise the guidelines. I suppose a moderator could revise the sites code to auto-[dead] submissions with political keywords thus requiring a vouch or if that already exists add some words to it.
What happens when the majority of people assume anything that looks like bigfoot is some person in a hairy suit and then a scientist creates a human primate or monkey chimera hybrid for the purpose of harvesting human organs and it escapes? Do game departments and law enforcement ignore all the calls? Are we allowed to capture and tame it? Would it be treated as a human or a monkey? Does it get human rights or animal rights? Do the answers change if it speaks English?
The organ harvesting purpose implies that the monkey chimera would have higher-order intelligence, right? Or are we to assume the organ harvesting is of the "rip and tear" variety as opposed to the "precision" variety?
How very sad. The monkey chimera was fluent in English, but got subdued in India.
Barely 5% of the internet have DNSSEC signed zones and a big chunk of that are handled by CDN's that do the signing automagically for the domain owner as they also host SOA DNS. Mandating DNSSEC would require years of planning and warning those that have not yet set it up and in my opinion DNSSEC tooling should become a better first class citizen in all of the authoritative DNS daemons. as in there should be so many levels of error handling and validation that it would be next to impossible for anyone to break their zones.
So do we wait for all the stragglers? Wait for the top 500 or top 2500 to make it mandatory? Who takes financial responsibility for those that fell through the cracks?
My opinion in response to their opinion is that people should plan for the worst and hope for the best. My personal plan is to back up the ISO's of every OS I use and accept the possibility I will have to manually patch applications outside of the normal artifact build process and when I can not then I may have to make the OS read-only or some level of "ephemeral" and not put any sensitive data through the OS. I assume that interested parties know this will be a PITA and most will not do it.
This is of course not a new concept. Ages ago people would make and distribute their own ISO for Windows 98 that had patches (service packs), adjusted default settings, optimizations, registration removal and sometimes malware embedded in the ISO. So I guess we will have to appoint trusted parties to make custom MacOS, Windows, Linux, BSD ISO images. Old hardware and BIOS may become very valuable and sought after when laws start requiring shenanigans tied to TPM's or custom CPU's that integrate such age verification lock-downs. This may be vindication or justification for data and hardware hoarders and a boon for malware distribution.
Only catch is that people would have to stop using sites that implement this type of verification. Their domain names could be an optional list in uBlock.
I β€» predict β€Ί that prediction markets will be more tightly regulated or entirely outlawed at some point. i.e. CFTC loses jurisdiction.
- More tightly regulated if governments and NGO's can use it to make money, control people and/or narratives, get taxes similar to how casino's are taxed by removing CFTC jurisdiction.
- Outlawed if they can not find a way to do any of that.
That would be an interesting exercise. I suppose if it were outlawed the feds would seize all related domains and raid the HQ for Polymarket and Kalshi both in NY and freeze all their assets. It might spring up in another country under another domain name but then those could be seized as well. It could move to Tor but then money would have to be moved around on something like Monero I suppose. Anywhere money is involved gives countries incentives to cooperate.
Which countries would be best for them to operate out of if they were outlawed? What percentage of their user-base would use the Tor Browser?
Odd, I just noticed both Polymarket and Kalshi are hosted on the same IP address in San Fransisco. The IP belongs to Amazon but is not part of their cloud. That CIDR used to belong to Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting and then Aptum Technologies and now Amazon in SF. Kalshi used to be based out of SF but moved to NY.
echo -en 'Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I donβt rewrite an Iran missile story' | wc -c
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HN also forces editorializing to less than 81 characters. I too sometimes struggle to editorialize the title to something that fits and ideally does not lose context.
Heck no, that's removing the important part of the news! Specifically, that a new kind of unregulated anonymous bet-making is leading to new kind of violence against journalists.
In contrast, the piece isn't really about Iran, or about Missiles, although those underscore the gravity or perversion of what's going on.
_____________
Such a cut isn't necessary either, compare the original versus this 79-character version:
Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I donβt rewrite an Iran missile story
Gamblers on Polymarket vow to kill me if I donβt rewrite an Iran missile story
The assumption that Gamblers care about winning a bet should be obvious and implicit, so that's an obvious thing to omit. The ongoing nature of the vowing is also unnecessary when simply having past cases is bad enough.
It's a big deal to me! I have a bet riding on this! If the mods don't change the headline to contain the word "rewrite" by midnight PST, then... eh, nvm, I probably shouldn't even joke about this.
(To be clear, this whole story is horrifying. I hope there's a way to identify these bettors and bring them to justice.)
There are plenty of semi-private invite only or private phpBB forums that have walled off the bots, grifters, shills, trolls and AI. Many of us found that being too inclusive invited everything that facilitated the enshitification. I encourage people to create their own small community and keep it small. Quality of quantity of crap.
I think you misuse the term enshitification here. E. is intentional and top-down, what you discribe is a demographic shift that you dont nescessarily have to wall off. A reputation system, like here on HN or user customizable filters, can work in your case too. The difference is, is a top-down authority in charge or entites below.
I totally get it. Having small semi-private bubbles escapes the top-down. There will always be someone operating a forum but anyone can run a forum, especially today with tools to automate deploying them. I see each forum as a distributed directory of categories that are independent from the corporate capture top down. No corporate, no capture, only as censorious as each admin. Forum operators are only beholden to the law. Reputation systems are no perfect as they can amplify echo chambers which HN and Reddit are certainly not immune to. They are quite the double edged sword and create their own sub-class of enshittification which I must compensate for by removing karma from my view. Nothing is perfect nor ever will be. I will always use a balanced combination of walled off forums and bigger platforms like this to dip my toe into the pool of the masses which I can escape any time I want a break from it.
I saw a great lot of forums decline and evaporate without being hit with any of the ailments you listed. People just lose interest because it is not "fun" enough - unlike the social media ragebait.
Certainly true in some cases. People also migrate as a flock to a new thing and stay if enough of their friends moved if there are enough colorful flashy widgets. I see it more as corporate capture and mass surveillance for sales, marketing, selling trends to governments and many other reasons. Those of us that remained in our little isolated bubbles are also on those platforms and remain connected even if the platforms get too censorious or controlling. People are less afraid of being "cancelled" if they have a place to fall back on.
Biggest example of it, is Blackberry. It ceased to exist while being a great business tool loved by managers of fat ass companies everywhere - who were more than willing to shell out a lot of cash for Blackberry servers and handsets, so money was never a problem at all, it was a key business tool for F500 corps. It only died out because users BADLY wanted the enshittified iOS experience with IG and the like that Blackberry locked them out of, and begged and lobbied their bosses to switch them over to iPhones for corporate messaging...
Adding Blackberry was just like a private forum in that it's users data was kept inside the corporation on private servers and outside the view of governments. That is a threat to many third parties that would love to have visibility into that data for a myriad of nefarious reasons. The same switch-over also happened with internal systems moving to Google docs and other centralized monitoring. I would love to see a chaos monkey test of all the big centralized systems going offline to see what breaks.
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