4 ms·

In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways: Firstly, by appending forms to the end

In the olden days when bloggers walked the earth, emitting lengthy posts over RSS, they solved this problem in two ways: Firstly, by appending forms to the end of the post where someone could type out a reply that was more likely to be a few sentences or paragraph, rather than a full-blown essay. Secondly, by inventing "TrackBack", a standardized way for someone else's blog software to say "hey I wrote some stuff on my blog in response to this post of yours". Both of these would get appended to the end of the blog post's page as "comments". This very quickly enabled the new problem of "trackback/comment spam"; the enduring solution in the world of blogs to that has been "Wordpress' Askimet plugin", which is a very centralized piece of the otherwise mostly-distributed infrastructure of RSS-based blogs. I think it's like $15 a year on top of the $60 or so I pay for my Wordpress site on cheap hosting.

bigiain 3y ago
Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?
- krapp 3y ago
  I think it's safe to assume at this point that all public content and most private content on the internet is being fed to both AI and American intelligence services.
  - bigiain 3y ago
    And China. And Mossad...
- egypturnash 3y ago
  Askimet is completely owned by Automattic (the corporate entity attached to the main author of Wordpress). And Wikipedia says this of Automattic: In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI.[27] 27: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-d... "Announced" may be too strong; the link is to an internal email leak discussing this possibility, but "Automattic may be experimenting with selling data to midjourney/openai" is still pretty close to "Automattic's selling user data". Hell, I can see the positive spin blog post announcing this: "They're also giving Automattic a bunch of free cycles on improving Askimet's spam/ham filters, in exchange for a look at every other comment anyone is sending through Askimet ever. We're aware this is a thorny ethical issue; click HERE for the archives of our mailing list dedicated to this project." As for Palantir, my inner paranoid says that if the FBI/NSA/etc wants this data, they have some way of getting whether or not a deal with a public front like Palantir is involved.
ttepasse 3y ago
Thirdly there was the Salmon protocol, although with the Plussing of Google Buzz it never got traction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)

bigiain 3y ago

Hmmmm. Now I'm wondering it Askimet are selling every blog comment they scan to OpenAI (and Palantir)?

krapp 3y ago
I think it's safe to assume at this point that all public content and most private content on the internet is being fed to both AI and American intelligence services.
- bigiain 3y ago
  And China. And Mossad...
egypturnash 3y ago
Askimet is completely owned by Automattic (the corporate entity attached to the main author of Wordpress). And Wikipedia says this of Automattic: In February of 2024, Automattic announced that it would begin selling user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com to Midjourney and OpenAI.[27] 27: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/ https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-d... "Announced" may be too strong; the link is to an internal email leak discussing this possibility, but "Automattic may be experimenting with selling data to midjourney/openai" is still pretty close to "Automattic's selling user data". Hell, I can see the positive spin blog post announcing this: "They're also giving Automattic a bunch of free cycles on improving Askimet's spam/ham filters, in exchange for a look at every other comment anyone is sending through Askimet ever. We're aware this is a thorny ethical issue; click HERE for the archives of our mailing list dedicated to this project." As for Palantir, my inner paranoid says that if the FBI/NSA/etc wants this data, they have some way of getting whether or not a deal with a public front like Palantir is involved.

ttepasse 3y ago

Thirdly there was the Salmon protocol, although with the Plussing of Google Buzz it never got traction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)