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Discussion (90 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Say more!
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
: DD
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..
Such an excellent line from a young person.
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...
This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
https://i.imgur.com/1NDF3n6.png