I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

Let the train hit:
a) Nintendo developers
b) Sony developers
c) Microsoft developers

Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

Now that really threw me.

The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

I don't mean that I'm scared by some terrible content on the internet, or that I'm actually afraid of using it. What I mean is the same feeling I often get from open-world games: FOMO, a sense of chaos, being lost and lacking direction.

Internet is inherently like an open-world game. There's so much content available. In your entire life, you won't see even 0.001% of it. This very post will probably be seen by like 100 people at most, which is such a tiny share of all internet users.

I get very anxious thinking about this. People often talk about how they miss "the old internet", which consisted of small websites and had to be explored. To me, that sounds like hell. I don't want to explore internet. I want to know where something is and how to find it. Information is on Wikipedia. Opinions are on Reddit. Et cetera. But the internet doesn't work like that - there's so much stuff that I don't even know how to grasp it.

I recently discovered https://are.na because someone mentioned it here on Tildes. I signed up, and immediately got that feeling. There's a huge amount of content, and I'm supposed to just explore in until I stumble upon something?

Tildes is one of the few websites where I don't feel that, because the amount of content is relatively small so I have a feeling of keeping it under control. But it also makes me think about how there are countless other small communities like Tildes, and ones that I'll never be aware of - and that's also pretty scary.

Does anyone else feel something similar? I've seen many people talk about similar feelings regarding keeping up with social media, but that doesn't actually bother me, but the amount of communities that can be explored does

This is more of an incoherent chain of consciousness from a lot of the thoughts I've had about being online over the past 20~ years. I welcome discussion and thoughts about the points I make in this post, optimism is appreciated as I've almost none left for this. (For context for the older folks on this forum, I'm not going to be getting into pre-2006 internet as I wasn't around to experience much of it. I know the internet has a very rich and storied past from before that period of time, but the vast vast vast majority of people didn't "get online" until after this period of time)

As we hurtle headlong into 1/4th of the way through the century, I've been looking back on the earlier years of the internet and missing a lot of it. Sure there were a lot of rough edges and problems, but I'd argue that would be true of any period of time for any large group of people. One thing that always stuck out to me in the past was how much the used to reward innovation, creativity, and hard work. Youtube, Twitch, Reddit, even platforms like Twitter and Facebook; they all felt a lot smaller and a lot more approachable for the amateur with some ambition. So many of the success stories you heard from around that era were just seemingly normal guys and gals who had some talent and drive and put in effort and made it big. Obviously there's some confirmation bias there, you don't hear the 1000 stories from the people who tried and failed, but I don't think you can deny that the "barrier to entry" was a lot lower back then in pretty much every field. I've gotten to know the founder of the company I work for, and he started it out of his house with a few friends from college and created what would be considered today to be a pretty basic product, and they managed to turn it into a 200~+ million dollar business in just over 10 years. Most of the stories I've heard are like that, just a guy or a couple guys sitting down and working on something over the course of a few months and striking it big off of it.

Now let's get to the point of this post, to me it feels like those success stories have slowed to a trickle, if not stopped completely. The amount of competition there is in every field is insane. Are you a fairly talented digital artist looking to make a little extra cash on the side? 10-15 years ago, you could easily get commissions for things like Twitch emotes, personal portraits, (drawing furry OCs), etc. Nowadays I don't know a single amateur artist who can find a reliable source of clients who are willing to pay any reasonable amount of money, and this was before AI took over the low hanging fruit for pennies on the dollar.

I'm going to continue to draw on personal experience because that's the only field I feel like I can speak with some authority on. In the Youtube/Twitch scene, being a reasonably skilled video editor used to mean that you could make a decent (if meager) living and build up your reputation by editing for large creators. Editors became known for their styles and even became mini-celebrities in the communities that they were a part of. Now it feels like every large Youtuber/Streamer has a team of faceless, nameless production staff that handle all of the video management, thumbnails, analytics, etc. There's no personality anymore, there's no individuality; you're part of the business, a cog in the machine. The .00001% of people who manage to crawl their way to the top of creating videos or streaming content have hyper-optimized the process so finely that there is quite literally no room for a newcomer to enter the space and attract a crowd.

I'll expand on that last paragraph a bit because I know that its not really 100% true, I see Youtubers and streamers every single day that I've quite literally never heard of before, and they have millions of subscribers; the platforms have never been more diverse. But one thing they all seem to have in common is that the production value and effort required to make their content is 100x the amount it was 10 years ago. You can't just put a handycam on a 10 dollar tripod in your bedroom and make it big on the internet anymore note: this is explicitly ignoring Tik Tok because I have no interest/experience with that platform, and from everything that I've heard, "tik tok fame" is so incredibly fleeting and transient that someone can go from being a celebrity to a nobody literally overnight. It's the tabloid magazines of internet content, just a flash in the pan for the vapid and dopamine-starved. It also seems like one of the most toxic and manipulated platforms out there, quite literally millions of people putting out actual trash into the ecosystem, throwing anything at the wall to see if it will stick. (for anyone who thinks I'm being too harsh on TikTok, I'm referring to the part of the platform that's all astroturfed sponsored trash like "omg check out this new water bottle I found that filters out negative energy in your water before you drink it" and the 1,000s of other scams that infest that godforsaken app. That TikTok rant got a little off-track but it just makes me so frustrated to see how hyper-consumerism, low effort, and morally bankrupt the "creators" of that platform are. It's all about the "grindset" and "hustling to make a quick buck." As long as you get your bag, who gives a fuck right?

To circle back to some more context for why I'm making this post, I'm very active in the freelance/contractor space. A lot of my friends are/were creatives, freelancers, contractors from all sorts of fields; artists, sound designers, voice actors, video editors, website developers, app programmers, audio engineers, etc. I was talking to one of my friends about some of the projects they have been working on recently, and one of them was editing down a podcast for these two hustle-culture bros. The type of people who offer those $5,000 paid online courses on how to make "passive income" online; you know the type, I know you do. And the surprising thing to me was that these guys were actually "successful" they had suckers enrolling in their courses, they were making good money. You want to know what the one of the "hot tips for passive income" that they were using? They made AI generated "product review" videos on Youtube that would scrape Amazon product listings, and put together thousands of automated useless garbage videos a day and pump them onto any platform they could monetize. You ever try to look up a review for a fairly niche product to see if its any good, and all you can find is AI generated trash? Yeah, these are the types of people responsible. They have absolutely no morals, no respect for their audience, they will do anything it takes to make .0001 cents and completely flood the platforms they're on with worthless garbage making it unusable. It's the online equivalent of an industrial factory discharging thousands of gallons of toxic waste into the ocean a day to make a few hundred bucks from some boomers who can't tell that a video is worthless.

I use this as an example because this is happening everywhere, in every field. It's not always AI, its not always worthless trash; but the almost universal truth everywhere I see is that every possible niche online is absolutely packed to the brim with a million other people and bots who will do whatever you do for much less money and time. Competition for human attention and money has completely exponentially skyrocketed and there is quite simply not enough to even begin to go around.

If you stuck around through this rant and it resonated with you in any way, feel free to share your thoughts and opinions below. I ask that you don't just solely comment based on the title without reading at least some of the post. This is definitely coming from a negative headspace and I'm well aware that my personal experience may be skewed, but its so hard not to be cynical and jaded.

Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the invite-giver to reply to the comment of the invite-receiver to keep track?

—-

I received a link during Thanksgiving that lets me invite several people to a free trial of Kagi.

I tried convincing friends to try it out but most of them were not even interested in a free trial to a paid search engine.

If any of you are interested, please let me know.

I'll give you my link in private and you can register yourself to the free trial.

Posting just in case people are on the same boat as me.

--

Also, I hope it's appropriate to start a topic on this?
Let me know if this is frowned upon.

I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to make more improvements but I really have no idea how, it started with deleting socials and next thing you know I'm looking at LineageOS and de-googling.

If anyone has any suggestions on where to go next while staying realistic/not going crazy, i would love to hear them. I am not really sure where to set my expectations, basically I would like to have more control of my data. The other day Google photos gave me a memory recap which kind of creeped me out! I am suddenly not fond of whatever is going on under the surface of Google photos that's making collages and trying to sell my photo books. Also g-board giving me a pop up in the text prediction row asking me to rate the app??? Ew.

I am a fan of self hosting and run a small NAS (open media vault) but this too quickly turns into the privacy spiral and leaves me thinking I should throw my phone into a river and live in the forest. Would love to hear your thoughts/advice/opinions!

The user @trim posted an interesting question in ~Tech and it made me wonder: what are my forgivable sins? What kinds of misdeeds on the part of companies that are suppliers of goods or services do I tacitly concience or to which I will turn a blind eye?

Whenever there is a scandal, the easy answer is, "I don't know, but definitely not that." This, however, is just an ad hoc definition that can be applied to any unsavory revelation on the part of a service or product provider. What would I be left with? I couldn't retreat from society if I wanted to and the cost of commercial puritanism would be prohibitively high.

What I realized in that topic was that (1) I will not sanction providers merely for doing business with others to whom I am opposed and (2) I will not sanction providers merely for issuing words or statements that I disagree with.

That said, I'm curious about others. What are your criteria for bad behavior in a service or product provider that you would judge to be nonetheless admissible?

Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I wondered about this recently. I took three seemingly-solo Youtubers as examples at different scales.

Penguinz0 has 16 mil subscribers, and as far as I know his uploads are just him talking into the camera, giving his opinion about recent things in games and pop culture (I could be very wrong about that, I don't know why he's popular). Looks like he uploads at least a few times a week, so that could be manageable.

Videogamedunkey has 7.5 mil subscribers, and he used to do weekly uploads until very recently, I think. Given that his humor and editing style is a big part of his content, I'd be surprised if he's got anyone else working on his vids.

Northernlion has just over 1 mil subscribers and uploads multiple videos daily, and (in)famously refuses to do any editing. He just basically streams on Twitch all day and uploads clips from that.

I would imagine the day-to-day running of the business, i.e. answering emails and phone calls, would be where having help is most advantageous as you grow, but it also probably depends a lot on what kind of content you make. How big can you get before it's too much for a solo operation?

Given the current state of things, I have been trying to avoid internet sites that could trigger anxiety. This is harder to do that I thought it would be. So I'm reaching out to the fine and resourceful Tildes collective for links to sites that are less known, and may provide, if not joy, at least interest, uniqueness maybe, fun, or education? Stuff that may be comforting, engrossing, or diverting to give some respite to those of us who are feeling pretty crushed.

Here are two sites I can offer, but I don't want to limit anyone's idea of what might be a good suggestion.

Futility Closet "is a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible." (description from their about page)

Strange Company bills itself as "a Walk of the Weird Side of History"

(edited to add links)

Solution

I added 20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com to my hosts file and everything is working fine now.
I also changed DNS servers away from my ISPs, thanks to all the recommendations in this thread.

cat /etc/resolve.conf
nameserver 1.1.1.1
nameserver 1.0.0.1

That seems to be working

> nslookup duckduckgo.com
Server:		1.1.1.1
Address:	1.1.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 202.39.62.156
Name:	duckduckgo.com
Address: 2001:b000:1a0:3505:202:39:62:15d

except (note that non-autoratative IP address which belongs to my ISP) ...

> ping -4 duckduckgo.com 
PING duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156) 56(84) bytes of data.

My ISPs address again. More...

traceroute to duckduckgo.com (202.39.62.156), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
...
30 * * * *

Why do ping and traceroute not use the new DNS server's I've configured (after re-booting too_)
The only thing to work is to add

20.43.161.105 duckduckgo.com

to my hosts file and now everything seems to be working as expected, though I have doubts now that changing the DNS configuration has done any good.

I know ISPs cache things like youtube to reduce costs so I'm wondering if 202.39.62.156 handled caching of duckduckgo, and they pointed their nameservers there and that box is broken.

Thanks for everyone's input and patience (lol are you still reading???)

Original Question

I've used Duck Duck Go as my main search engine for many, many years.
I have several search engines installed in Firefox including 2 for duck duck go. One for the /lite version and one for the full version.

[See update at bottom]

In recent days neither of these work. I would type my query into the search engine, press enter as I have done for years.

All I see is a blank page.

The latest development is that when I try and enter ANY search to either of those engines I get a GOOGLE 404 not found page.

    
    traceroute duckduckgo.com                                                                                                             ─╯
    traceroute to duckduckgo.com (216.239.38.120), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
     1  * * *
     2  * * *
     3  The usual internal routing of my ISP
     4  ""          ""            ""
     5  ""          ""            ""
     6  ""          ""            ""
     7  ""          ""            ""
     8  * * *
     9  any-in-2678.1e100.net (216.239.38.120)  4.089 ms  4.077 ms  4.181 ms
    
    ping duckduckgo.com                                                                                                                   ─╯
    PING duckduckgo.com (2001:4860:4802:32::78) 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=1 ttl=117 time=10.1 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=2 ttl=117 time=8.52 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=3 ttl=117 time=6.87 ms
    64 bytes from any-in-2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net (2001:4860:4802:32::78): icmp_seq=4 ttl=117 time=8.83 ms
    
    --- duckduckgo.com ping statistics ---
    4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.873/8.584/10.118/1.155 ms

cat /etc/resolv.conf
> MY ISPs name servers
> MY ISPs name servers

Sure enough I cannot find any pages on the site 2001-4860-4802-32--78.1e100.net which is obviously belongs to google.

This is very very strange.

Could someone verify if they can use DDG or whether they see the same as me?
Does anyone have any idea what's happening?

UPDATE
I can connect to and use DuckDuckGo using a browser VPN. This appears to be a mess made by my ISP.
I'd still like suggestion to overcome the problem though.