I vote yes. We are not getting new people and there is real risk now that didn’t exist a couple months ago.
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False sense of security. dont be cowards like the spe folks.
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Non-Americans who plan to travel to the U.S., and who have been highly critical of this regime, have more to be concerned with than Americans who post on this site. Not enough to make it private, in my opinion, but there’s enough there for non-Americans to be concerned about based on recent news.
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I vote yes.
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intensely curious the threat model that’s supposedly thwarted here. going private doesnt do anything but make this site harder to scrape. do you think a federal agent that for whatever reason is digging into your background is going to be thwarted by a login screen? “ah darn, it says i need to log in first.”
bearer tokens for this site dont really seem to ever expire last i poked around with it a few years ago. if you ever logged into this site from any device, it’s trivially easy from those same devices to get back into it.
if you use fb/twitter or basically any big corp part of the web, the feds already can know anything they ever could care to about you. its pretty much why about a year ago i gave up any delusions about anonymity. it’s just cringey as fuck.
like if this goes private it’d be so stupid easy to just make a public mirrored site. the barrier is literally a bearer token that can be obtained from a registration/login in 0.63 seconds. wow, that’ll show em.
I feel strongly about this because having this site scrapeable means that everything we post here the AI/LLM training is subconsciously making part of its training set. this is one of the last pure part of the web left. please dont ruin it over fear of stuff you dont even understand.
i understand a little because a big part of my career the last few years has been defending against web scraping. trust me, login screens arent going to stop the feds. just dont be a dumbass with your digital security. i feel like i should post a guide.
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Could someone lay out the case for privacy. I am completely ignorant on the subject.
I don’t think the risk is a federal agent that’s vigilantly watching us. My concern is that an AI algorithm labels this place as an enemy of the state, uses an algorithm to deduce our identities, and puts every name it comes up with on a watchlist. Then one day I’m driving across the border to get some poutine, get flagged at the border, and 3 hours later I’m on a plane to El Salvador before anyone in my family knows I’m gone.
I’m not saying it’s likely, but I see that as how this regime will operate. It’s not McCarthyism where you have big public drawn out congressional hearings, or evil villains like Hans “the Jew hunter” Landa. It will be much stupider and lazier, where AI generated data creates lists and people get rounded up on a somewhat ad hoc basis.
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This kind of thing was already happening before this current state of affairs
I don’t think going private really gets us anything and as @jmakin said it’s trivially easy to circumvent if you want to. If they’re going to the level of going after posters on UP it’s already bigly joever anyway.
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Here’s a weird idea maybe we (not me) should try to get more new posters here
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Yes and no. While I have no doubt AI was being used, I don’t think UP was the type of place that was being actively targeted. But the feds don’t have the resources to go door to door hunting undocumented and dissenters Hans Landa style. But if Trump is upset about the lack of deportations, I could easily see them just casting a wider net and suddenly anyone who has ever shared a trump meme will get deported if they get stopped for a traffic violation. That is the level of escalation we aren’t at yet, but could possibly get to someday.
And I caution against using the logic of “going private is easy to get around” as it’s the same logic that 2A uses when they say that since no gun control measure is 100% guaranteed to stop all gun violence so the only option is the status quo.
I’m not saying we need to go private. To some extent I accept that my comments on our president made behind a poorly constructed alias may come back on me if things go full Germany 1939. Anyone with 30 minutes of time could probably find my real identity and address. But I’m also not saying that if the day comes where Trump rounds up 1% of all dissenters to scare the rest of us into falling in line, that I don’t want to take some measures to keep from being in that 1%.
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Probably best to hide your use of this website on your phone when traveling, whether we make it private or not
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Perhaps a camouflage website is possible with ai. Get an ai model to subtly alter every post by every user to make it pro-trump, and post it on the site publicly, as we log in through a secret hidden door to view the real unmodified posts
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Example:
I loved the season 2 finale of severance! Only complaint is not enough “Trump”! [Second sentence added by ai]
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maybe a need for a PHONY website! everything iS COMPUTER
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I searched for trump on my phone and it popped up a few things that might piss trump off. I posted a screenshot here.
Just search “trump” and see what shows up.
For all the they totally could spend a second and do X, they’re not, they’re lazy. No it’s not going to save you from the feds, we’re talking about the doge kiddie scripts.
Yeah I’m not going to fight either way, but I assume if there is a list to be worried about we’re all already on it.
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If your posts on this website are the most damming evidence of your own dissent, I think you are in the clear.
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