Same thing happened to me. If I block someone on Mastodon or another Fediverse microblogging instance, they’re blocked. Because that part of the Fediverse was built by people who had been harassed and doxxed off other platforms.

Here? Blocking just means you don’t see the troll, but they can continue to inflict all kinds of havoc on your post scores. Ironically, “karma” isn’t a thing on Lemmy like it is on Reddit, but votes are still used to rank your posts.

I guess there are a hundred great folk on here for every preteen edgelord, but that kind of nonsense really spoils the fun of this platform. Sorry to see you get downvoted for a perfectly reasonable post.

I do not hate AI, because it doesn’t exist. I’m not delusional.

I do resent the bullshit generators that the tech giants are promoting as AI to individual and institutional users, and the ways they have been trained without consent on regular folks’ status updates, as well as the works of authors, academics, programmers, poets, and artists.

I resent the amount of work, energy, environmental damage, and yes, promotional effort that has gone into creating an artificial desire for a product that a) nobody asked for, and b) still doesn’t do what it is claimed to do.

And I resent that both institutions and individuals are blindly embracing a technology that at every step from its creation to its implementations denigrate the human work — creative, scholarly, administrative and social — that it intends to supplant.

But Artificial Intelligence? No such thing. I’ll form an opinion if I ever see it.

I mean, good for them. Now, if anyone has actual mental health issues, please get in touch with a trained, human therapist.

A similar thread came up recently asking for human curated search engines. I don’t have the answers for either, but we need a concerted effort to sift through the hallucinated bloat filling up the internet. And when I say “effort” — it’s not going to be a small task.

Basically, I think we haven’t seen the worst of it yet, and we really, really need a scalable solution if we don’t want to just abandon these interwebs entirely down the road.

Now now, no need to go for the nuclear solution! 😂

Anyway, there are plenty “AI”-generated books on POD already, as well as outright bullshit published in print…

Then you’ll love being able to read a description of Android Authority at the same time.

I’ve only used Newpipe, and I’m quite happy with it. Saved me so many commercials, tracking, and probably rage baiting recommendations as well. TBH I just turn off recommendations and comments, I’m only there to watch the videos.

Anubis makes your browser solve a challenge to verify you’re not a LLM crawler scraping content. It shouldn’t have the effects that OP describes.

That actually sounds interesting, yeah. Thanks for clearing it up, I was obviously out of that particular loop 👍

Hooray, they finally found a use for it ☠️

Good call, thanks for the added link!

Okay, I’ll stop (what even is it?)

Edit: if you’re at all concerned about privacy, maybe provide something else than Play Store link for alternatives. Google bad.

You could try something like the huge AI blocklist for uBlock Origin. It cleans “AI” results out of Google, DDG and Bing searches.

I’m not sure how a curated search engine would work in practice, though it’s a nice idea. It would just be an enormous task, and vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors if you crowdsource it. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

As @ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works said already, a self hosted searxng instance would give you some individual curation capabilities, but wouldn’t be a “for the greater good” project as I think you might be looking for?

While a fully functional version is available on F-Droid, the Play Store edition is subject to Google’s imposed limitations.

I think that’s the cause and solution rolled into one sentence right there. Use F-droid instead of Play Store.

That may work, but has its own downsides. Say you’re looking for a reference photo of really any object, but in the worst case scenario a child or an animal… You’ll be on a bunch of watch lists in no time flat.

Oh, let me wish 🙂

Upon which, logically, users just stop using Chrome?

Great deal, and all I have to do is join the worst site in the world LinkedIn?

“LOL”, I guess?

While true, doesn’t have anything to do with my comment?