(Disclaimer I am a complete idiot about this stuff)
Are disappearing posts an option on this site? I feel like disappearing posts (as an option, if you’re posting about travel or whatever no need) plus going private provides some defense against the most surface level intrusions against private citizens that might occur.
Picturing a scenario where there’s some new anti-terrorist witch-hunt, AI scrapes the web for candidate communities that might be turned into witches, UP gets shortlisted because of an NBZ post or whatever, doxxing/harassment ensues.
Private + disappearing posts would muddy the waters enough that UP would probably never pop up in scraping or would be a really imperfect target if it did.
They’re never going to put actual effort or serious resources into any of this, so the point is to make it require a modicum of effort to be a victim. Just like how walking fast and in the street is actually pretty good inoculation against someone robbing you at night.
I say yes now for every forum I post on including ones not related to politics. Not gonna post any details but we basically had to take a technical discussion board down because people were stealing our shit and selling it. I’m more or less over the idea that completely open / public discussions forums have value today.
I’m not under the delusion that it’s going to stop the feds if they come after someone. But it might keep this site off the witch hunt radar a little longer than otherwise.
I am not saying that the current administration is above searching for malcontents and punishing them. But if they have reached UP, they will have already imprisoned twitter users, FB users, and NY Times commenters. Hell even the Lawyers Guns and Money blog posters would be carted off long before us. If it comes to UP posters, there will already have been rioting on the streets etc. So I vote hell no, we shouldn’t go private. If it got that far we should all be on the streets with shovels and axes anyway
If we get to the point where a site like this triggers anything then all of you would have been picked up and shipped to Guantanamo for other reasons already. They are not scraping the internet looking for shit posters on tiny forums. They start with Reddit and r/politics and Facebook looking for people that unfriended their conservative friends.
Maybe you could go even further and have an AI that translates posts into MAGA and back. That would even fool outsiders posting and interacting with us!
