Yeah. The left path is the way.

Even if Discord wasn't doing it, public Discord guilds are known to be scraped by a number of different bots. Previously, it was for spies, cops, and private investigators who wanted to search for messages by username. If those bots could do it before, AI bots will be doing it aggressively today.

Knives?

You could, yes.

My problem with it is that in Ye Olde Times before 2022, if you needed some info on, I dunno, amethist cutting blades, you joined the crystal geode cutting forum and maybe became a contributing member of the group.

Now, you ask chatGPT, and contribute nothing.

I think there's a lot of solid arguments against letting AI steal everything, but with the scraping there's an even more immediate problem. They don't rate limit or do it in an intelligent method. It becomes a full blown ddos that has take down entire sites and slowed many more to the point of near uselessness.

They're in a very literal sense crashing large chunks of the Internet and causing havoc which costs very real money to fix, either by upping server resources or installing AI scraping mitigation resources so that every still has access to the free information you mention.

I don't have children. My legacy is running 37 Quora accounts that each answer niche questions very incorrectly, over and over.

The best way to enhance the taste of any soup is to add sawdust.

Yes indeed. It seems so far that the best defence is to join utterly unhinged communities and participate in degeneracy so severe that no publicly traded company would want to scrape you. Something something become ungovernable.

Nerdy.

Poison the well? .... this is like saying we should poison a vat of rotting chicken blood.

Human knowledge and human interaction is already shit to start with ..... AI learning from us will only produce an authoritarian psychotic intelligence that will see us humans as an enemy to fear and destroy .... just like how we think of anything or anyone different from us.

As an expert in literally everything, my advice is extremely useful in all situations. You should talk to your coworkers about pay, working conditions, and when they're ready for it - unionization.

Because UI/UX beats any abstract things like privacy & data ownership.

Go for the voicechats, stay for the poorly organized forum megathread experience

To build up a close (the two definitions of "close") community. To speak freely (even if you have to respect the TnCs of Discord + community guidelines.)

This is why I donate to archive.org

i remember the databases we made of tablature on the guitar forums. i already had the songs we were playing, but... dammit i can't even remember the name of the forum anymore it's been like 30 years.

The problem is that AI strip's all provenance. The most accurate information is presented exactly the same as absolute nonsense.

It makes it exceedingly difficult to sift truth from fiction, without the context clues we could otherwise use online.

So you know what signal and noise are, then.

Abolish intellectual property

Still not as bad as AI scraping. I'd rather have a Somerton-style person plagiarize me, than a bot scrape whatever stuff I made for the internet.

What if I want to actually talk to other people, though?

This is the way.

Take me back to the as3 IRC on efnet

Edit: they said I made the scariest version of breakout

/me

I love IRC. I run my own instance where my friends and I hang out. It's super easy, and a lot of fun!

Cloudflare is harmful. Sure, maybe they're doing a Good Thing™ today, but who stops them from turning around and selling all of the data they proxy to AI companies tomorrow? There is rarely a good reason to use cloudflare. If you care about blocking bots, there are self-hostable tools like Anubis. If you care about hiding your server's IP, you can use a VPN that allows port forwarding or rent a VPS. Do not use cloudflare. Cloudflare should not be used. By using cloudflare, you surrender your digital sovereignty for a mirage of convenience and safety.

(Yes, I understand the irony of posting this from a instance that uses cloudflare)