Lots of non-answers but to clarify - yes but no comments.

Sometimes a login wall might block you but if you refresh a couple of times it should work.

But lack of ability does not prevent any of that. Entrepreneurs who want to monetize stuff will find a way to spam and game the system.

As someone whos responsible for docs and public facing material I’d never push text only content these days. There’s just way too much UX value left out with this limitation. Sometimes more is more.

Additionally I’d argue that people who only want text are have advantage in the current system as you can strip and reformat everything on the front end and nobody will ever know or bully you into accepting their system. Just like nobody cared about ad blockers before they were widely adopted.

I heavily disagree with this. Stepping back to “walls of text with hyperlinks” is a bad idea that’ll service no one and will never succeed in any reasonable capacity.

Current web technology is not what caused bad web. The exception would be too powerful js where js should only provide interactivity and extra flavor to the page rather than run a full application which can fingerprint and punish user agents.

Javascript, embeded images and audio are awesome things that can improve content readability a thousand fold. Just look at best docs on the web - all of them use these features to tend their users. Even wikipedia added js flavoring like hover pop ups. Because it works.

Shadow banning is definitely too much imo. It’s simply unethical no matter how you look at it.

First, it doesn’t do anything to prevent bots. It takes less than a second for a bot to check whether they are shadow banned. It’s simply a tool to bully and gaslight people - just block them. Why these abusive games?

Fediverse is designed to do exactly that. It’s free flow of information which is a good thing. Don’t let corporations hijack this beautiful concept. We all want information to be free.

This form of propaganda is my pet peeve. It’s not “your posts” as soon as you put something to public you don’t get to eat your cake. It’s out there, you shared it. Don’t share it if you don’t want humanity to ingest and use it.

Inb4 “the pirates are destroying the industry”

Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)

As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.

For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.

Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.

Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.

Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)

yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol

develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol

I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.

This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.

Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.

I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.

Are these new users in the room with us? lmao

Apple has been really stretching their takes lately. Nice to see some fire under their ass though it’s not going to matter. Too many ignorant people falling for likeable propaganda.

23minute long summary? Can we do like 3 or smt?

The problem is that we rely to much on proprietary software just because people want money. We’re seriously losing billions of work hours in efficiency loss because our society can’t monetize free software. Now we have to reinvent twitter.

Cross platform being main feature missing from Apple music also a modern discovery mechanism and no way to control output device like on spotify. No group listens or social features. It’s not even close tbh.

I have tidal for some audio quality for my house speaker setup. Yt music for mtv chill nights and Spotify for everything else :)

I have youtube music and tidal too (I pay for all because I do love my music) as well as tried every other service and Spotify is still the best daily driver by far because it does everything well enough and innovates just enough to be interesting but stable. Everything else is lacking some piece of a puzzle like no lyrics, small library, lacking core features.

Other than that Youtube music is severely under rated because of music videos but the rest don’t really have anything special about them tbh

I must be the only person on Lemmy who actually likes Spotify. You youngings don’t remember the time before spotify where the best option was Apple’s shit-of-a-service that charges flat 2$ per song (no matter where you are in the world lol) or spending evenings in p2p music sharing channels and music forums organizing your playlists.

Spotify has objectively changes music for the better and I’d be very sad if it goes away because all alternatives are significantly worse still.