Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit

When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)

So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:

when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.

I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.

  • leanleft@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Analogy

    Imagine a restaurant where diners place orders through a discreet slot on the kitchen door.

    • The web user is the diner who slips a note into the slot asking for a specific dish.
    • The web‑service backend is the chef who receives the note, prepares the meal, and slides it back out the slot for the diner to collect.

    Now, the diner adds a bizarre request: “Please serve the food, but I never want you to know you ever cooked it.” In practice, the chef can’t fulfill this—once he’s touched the ingredients and used the stove, his hands are inevitably stained, and the kitchen’s heat tells the story. Likewise, when a web user asks a server to fetch data, the server must process the request, so it inevitably knows it handled that request, even if it can’t tie it back to the individual’s identity.

    Ad‑blockers, cookies, IP addresses, user‑agents, and browser signatures are like the various “fingerprints” a diner might leave on the restaurant’s doorstep:

    • Cookies are tiny crumbs the diner drops on the floor while walking to the slot. The chef (or later staff) can later sweep them up and infer that the same person visited before.
    • IP address is the diner’s shoeprints on the hallway carpet leading to the kitchen—an easy way to trace where the diner entered from.
    • User‑agent / browser signature is the unique style of the diner’s napkin (its color, fold, and logo). Even if the napkin is discarded, the pattern tells the chef which brand of napkin was used.
    • Ad‑blockers are like the diner wearing a cloak that blocks the kitchen staff from seeing the crumbs he drops, trying to keep the chef from noticing the usual “tipping” (ads) that would normally be left behind.

    Just as no chef can truly be blind to the fact that he cooked a dish, a web service inevitably knows it processed a request, and the “fingerprints” left behind (cookies, IP, user‑agent, etc.) let it—or any intermediary—recognize or track the diner unless the diner takes strong steps (like using a cloak or wiping the floor) to hide those traces.

    https://f-droid.org/packages/com.fauxx.full

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I think that’s an overly reductive analogy. Of course the backend web server knows what it processed on its own hardware, but it doesn’t need to know the IP that the request originated from (if using a VPN) and it certainly doesn’t need to fingerprint the browser with hidden scripts.

      Likewise, the browser probably doesn’t even need to make that information available to those scripts. There are extensions to block some of it, but apparently not all. And blocking some things can break some websites.

      But there’s no reason the chef in the back should be running a forensic analysis on the fingerprints on the ticket, the footprints on the dining room floor, or the crumbs swept up at the end of the day. And if you suspect that they will do this, then it should take be overly complicated to wear gloves, and maybe some boot covers, and possibly a full hazmat suit if you’re really worried about dropping crumbs and dander.

      Not that all that should be necessary, because it shouldn’t be standard practice for web servers to collect all this data to begin with…