Hacker News Reader

not_a_copon Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

Oddly, they don't answer the harder question.

How you can prove that a human genuinely wanting the information in the page is filling that information out? Imprisoned humans are great CAPTCHA defeat bots.

not_a_copon Reddit Transparency Report 2018

I get the feeling if you really wanted a true transparency report, you would discuss government requests, but also prevalence & detection & restriction of bots, prevalence & detection & restriction of vote farming, true likelihood of random submissions doing anything, acts of reddit censorship and the underlying and reportable reasons for doing so, user tracking and sales & mining of user information.

I don't see 95% of that there.

not_a_copon Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks women

Technology only gives you gadgetry, not morals. Hasn't anyone in Silicon Valley realized this yet? They're building a huge technological cage to control the masses.

not_a_copon Rising CO2 won't make trees grow more, study suggests

The headline is clearly wrong. Maybe they should have said "current trees". The tree tech has already been invented to circumnavigate present restrictions in tree biological restrictions. Very clickbait-y.

not_a_copon Ask HN: Is there any social network you trust?

Reddit has been known to be quite susceptible to shills for sometime. It is a source of both fake news and swayed opinion in favor of whoever has the most money to throw at it. I'm not saying that other places are immune to this, but the problems with reddit are actually very well documented, and management seems not to care. It's even possible they are shilling themselves.

https://thehustle.co/reddit-fake-comments

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

https://medium.com/@coinmall/how-easy-and-cheap-it-is-to-man...

https://www.cnet.com/news/reddit-election-misinformation-201...

https://mashable.com/2014/07/31/unidan-banned-reddit-permane...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=YjLsFnQejP8...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk

Also, reddit has changed comments before, or their CEO has. They have probably also banned people for less than transparent reasons.

Twitter is even worse with their shadow banning, and limiting viewership of twitter accounts, censorship of mainstream conservatives, while notably not censoring known terrorist accounts.

Youtube is known for allowing pedophilia posts, but having conservative politics also gets people banned.

I like mastodon, but I haven't used it enough yet to have a real opinion.

Also scuttblebutt (https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/) looks very promising but has made little real progress into mainstream as of yet.

Just a point of clarity - I am registered green party, but I don't think you can have true democracy with media manipulation.