There are no checks whatsoever, no email or phone number required, no verification options—it just hands you an account for a 99-year-old, with full access to all chat features. (It took maybe five clicks from having no account to being able to play Blood & Gore.)

Come on now Kotaku. I was a kid once on the internet. I lied about my age once to sign up for Neopets, which had text forums, private messages and user-created pages. You could even use HTML and hotlink images. It really wasn’t a big deal because my parents paid attention to what I did online, and the audience of the website was just children or people who wanted to play a simple game.

My mom ended up playing it, so she must have known I lied about my age to get access. She had hella neopoints.

For content marked 17+, you do need to verify your age with documentation

WHY IS THERE CONTENT FOR 17+ ON ROBLOX? Isn’t this the TRUE child safety problem? Why do this at all? Why attract people looking for 17+ content on a platform for children??? I read that Hindenburg report, the entire platform is a mess. This company deserves to fail and those investors deserve to be left holding the bag.

Ohhh… I’m a Krita enjoyer so I didn’t know this about gimp. TIL, haha

You made this image with a green pepper? That’s impressive, great work.

Thank you. That answers my question. I figured you wanted to remain anonymous, but I liked your answer and I’ll be interested in what you find.

I was trying to word my initial post in a way to prevent you from becoming defensive, perhaps I failed. Though, I do feel quoting yourself is a bit… gauche, no? Especially since you are remaining anonymous.

Are you a single person or a group of people? Do you have any credentials that you’d like to share that might give some context to your research?

Where is the quote in your bio from?

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Pssh everyone knows the only correct diet for a cat is their natural one: giant ocean predators (salmon and tuna) and corn-fed livestock. All mixed up with preservatives and taurine and ash, just like their mawmaw cats used to make!

Ah yea, everyone that has an opinion that isn’t mine is dangerous and deserves to be silenced. I totally agree. I think lemmy.world should refederate, and then defederate a second time, just to make sure they get the message.

There wereultiple cross-posts daily pointing to specific threads posted on hexbear to organize brigading.

Yeah, I do remember that. That’s why I’m not signed up there. They weren’t changing anyone’s minds with their shitstirring and were doing it for their own enjoyment (which is damaging to all communities, even nonpolitical ones, if people avoid your platform due to trolling).

That said, it was a past problem, and posters on lemmy.world are still out there complaining about Hexbear like they’re relevant. I’m speaking about the current situation.

I’m not advocating for them to re-federate with lemmy.world (I have no dog in the race, anyway, being a part of neither instance) but I do remember watching the Hexbear mods/admins shutting down the actual brigading of threads before lemmy.world de-federated. Not sure it was a solvable problem, anyway, Hexbear is rather antagonistic in ways I don’t agree with.

Have you considered you are just observing this:

Hexbear is for communists to talk to communists. They get plenty of the “default” liberal opinions from waves hands around vaguely and are entitled to their own community, no?.

Obviously if you go into Hexbear and just start posting anti-China stuff they’re going to ban you. It’s not like the English-speaking world is bereft of anti-China news articles.

….theres a dead bug on the counter and you call this nigh impeccable?

I’m never eating dinner at your house

He’s had that gross side project for a while.

edit: removed link, he doesn’t need publicity

It kept popping up on /r/all back before I got away from that place. I always felt like the only person bothered by it. Redditors 🤮

I had totally forgotten until you reminded me.

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Yea, I agree. It’s good enough. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like it was a bad solution, it’s just not perfect and people ought to be aware of limitations.

I used a small instance in my example so the problem was easier to understand, but a motivated person could target someone on a large instance, too, so long as that person tended to vote in the posts they commented on.

Just for example (and I feel like I should mention, I have no bad feelings towards this guy), Flying Squid on lemmy.world posts all over the place, even on topics with few upvotes. If you pull all his posts, and all votes left in those posts from all users, I bet you could find one voter who stands out from the crowd. You just need to find the guy following him everywhere: himself.

I mean, if he tends to leave votes in topics he comments on, which I assume he does.

It would have to be a very targeted attack and that’s much better than the system lemmy uses right now. I’m remembering the mass tagger on Reddit, I thought that add on was pretty toxic sometimes.

Also, it just occurred to me, on Lemmy, when you post you start with one vote, your own. I can even remove this vote (and I’ll do it and start this post off with score 0). I wonder how this vote is handled internally? That would be an immediate flaw in this attempt to protect people’s privacy.

While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?

I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.

Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps

Since you’re not an American, can you explain why you feel the need to comment on this when you don’t really know what you’re talking about?

The fine is from an Ohio state law that is (imho) unconstitutional in the United States. These people have been using their horse drawn buggies on these roads for centuries. The roads they go on are rural. Not interstate highways or autobahn or whatever.

It’s not economically feasible for every country road in the USA to have wildlife mounds/fences because of how vast our country is. Drivers here are required to stop for obstructions, fallen branches and wildlife and if you can’t you’re going too fast. I just don’t buy excuses about this, the Amish aren’t going down the road at 4 am in a blizzard. They’re way more visible than a deer and they have reflectors. I live around here (not Ohio, but basically Ohio), this law is inexcusable and targeting a religious group. It’s also legal to walk down these roads or ride a horse or drive your tractor at 20 kilometers per hour dragging a combine or something. It’s farmland.

The entire county this takes place in has only 50k people. Rural area.

I found that other commenters post about rape distasteful by the way. There are better ways to point out victim blaming.

Ok I’ll say it.

What’s Figma?