Mastodawn

Soatok Dreamseeker

The Revolution Will Not Make the Hacker News Front Page

(with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) If you get all of your important technology news from "content aggregators" like Hacker News, Lobste.rs, and most subreddits, you might be totally unaware of the important but boring infrastructure work happening largely on the Fediverse, indie web, and other less-centralized communities. This is no accident. The rough consensus of these spaces has been strongly in favor of the…

http://soatok.blog/2025/12/17/the-revolution-will-not-make-the-hacker-news-front-page/

The Revolution Will Not Make the Hacker News Front Page - Dhole Moments

(with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron) If you get all of your important technology news from “content aggregators” like Hacker News, Lobste.rs, and most subreddits, you might be totally un…

Dhole Moments

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

Haha, someone tried to be funny and submitted it to Hacker News.

Too bad it won't work. I'm pretty sure my blog's domain is shadowbanned. ;P

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

aaaaaaand flagkilled

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46308263

You really thought I could be proven wrong with that title? Pfft.

Hacker News

Irenes (many)Dec 18

@soatok hah, right?

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok What's a furry? Is it like a sexual orientation?

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 22

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok What is it then? You think you're a cat, or you want to be a cat, or you like pretending that you're a cat, or something else?

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 22

@oneloop You know how to look things up on Wikipedia, yes?

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok I have several times, but I don't get it. "it's a subculture" Yes of course it's a subculture, but what are its defining features? Is it like goths, where they dress black because that's their subculture, and their subculture is dressing black, in a logical loop?

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok Is it like that you're embarrassed of who you are? Come to think of it, that's true for goths too. Maybe furries are like goths.

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok Are furries a protected category? Like, if I make fun of a furry is that a hate crime? That's not the case for goths, so I'm guessing also no?

cake-duke Dec 22

@soatok Is being a furry a choice? Were you born a furry and one day became aware of it, or did you learn about it and started getting into it? My guess would be the latter (again, like goths).

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 23

@oneloop You really like typing things out to yourself, don't you?

Why don't you keep doing that, but leave me untagged?

Cursed Silicon Dec 18

@soatok Marcan and jwz screaming "HOW DO I GET MINE BANNED"

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

@CursedSilicon Well,

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

@CursedSilicon (No, I did not try to spam upvote my own site. I think someone did that to try to get me banned because they hate seeing me there.)

Cursed Silicon Dec 18

@soatok Shout out to the time I posted something I wrote to Lobsters

And it flagged ME as spamming on HN for trying to post it there as well

Turns out some fuckwit runs a bot that just auto-copies every Lobsters post over to the orange site

And the mods are just...cool with it???

Tanaki (pumpkin spice loaf)Dec 18

@CursedSilicon @soatok holy fuck you're right

this makes me SO MAD it very explicitly says NOT TO DO THIS

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

@tanaki @CursedSilicon I guess, maybe email [email protected] to ban your blog's domain name?

Tanaki (pumpkin spice loaf)Dec 18

@soatok @CursedSilicon wonder if i could file a DMCA request 😈

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 18

@tanaki @CursedSilicon I don't think this falls under DMCA's purview.

HN doesn't scrape/host content. It just links to it. The user has to provide a title, even.

Dźwiedziu Dec 19

@soatok
Like DMCA requesters care about such trivialities, like adhering to the law :p

@tanaki @CursedSilicon

DHeadshot's Alt Dec 20

@tanaki
Sadly, they probably wouldn't allow a GDPR right to be forgotten request either. Does California have something similar?
@soatok @CursedSilicon

Soatok Dreamseeker Dec 20

@ddlyh @tanaki @CursedSilicon GDPR would accomplish what, exactly?

They de-index the submission by marking it as [dead]?

Internet Hedgehog 🦔Dec 18

@soatok @CursedSilicon there's a business model, $N to rank your domain up on the website, $N*2 to completely ban your domain from the website.

[object Object]Dec 18

@soatok @CursedSilicon “Can you tell us about this?” what in the fuck Daniel (moderator) how is anyone going to tell you anything about something only you know about? if it’s a service that sells upvotes and you need an account to upvote crap on the orange site, maybe ban the accounts? cause then you won’t run into the fucking obvious case where an upvote service turns into a shadowban service?

for a silicon valley smart boy, it’s really easy to bamboozle dang, isn’t it?

indrora, hacker at small Dec 18

@zzt @soatok @CursedSilicon In cases like these, dang has already gone and done that work.

There's hints on these sorts of things: reused email addresses, lots of accounts registered at the same IP address or within the same ASN. You can't stop the abuse but you can curtail it. Machines are much faster than you.

Some situations are totally legitimate: MSFT, AMZN both route their employee traffic through the same ASN and rages as Azure/AWS respectively. My current company's VPN is built on Azure.

At each of these, when I visit Reddit, Wikipedia, and others, I get naughty check pages. I couldn't look at Digikey when I worked at Amazon from the office because of how many bots slam their site, I'd just get dozens of "we're just making sure you're not a robot"

Not a Spring Onion Dec 18

@CursedSilicon @soatok

Step 1: Post your blog on Hacker News.
Step 2: Wait for the inevitable "Wait, isn't that the crypto blog with the furry content?"
Step 3: Reply with "No, it's a furry blog with crypto content."
Step 4: Banned.

Cursed Silicon Dec 18

@wakame @soatok Shout out to the guy *literally a couple days ago* who made a brand new account and used it to try and link an archived Kiwifarms page about Marcan (of Asahi Linux fame) as "evidence he's a weirdo"

That whole site is fucking atrocious

rootnode Dec 24

@CursedSilicon my fav was this week. A reply on the orange site:

“Jetbrains seems a bit lost these days. Look at that very recent screw up [0].
I thought about moving after 10+ years when they abandoned the commit modal, and jacked up the plan prices, but I barely understand how to commit things in Vscode anyway. Let's see in 2026.”

They can’t even use git within VS code. That’s how far they have fallen.

Evan Prodromou Dec 18

@soatok I want them to federate, though.

OliverUv Dec 18

@soatok oh, didn't know you had written about MLS! Looking forward to reading it.

Thanks for all the interesting reads you've provided this year (especially the Signal and fediverse key mgmt articles). Hope your efforts continue smoothly and with success!

@soatok I'd rather add each individual blog to my Miniflux than be subscribed to something like Hacker News.

John Maxwell Dec 18

Jocelynephiliac

@soatok I posted it to the lemmy fediverse group. This should be a fun experiment

Duncan Lock Dec 18

@soatok
Exciting infrastructure work, more like! Go you!!

@soatok I hate when people still recommend PGP.

Dźwiedziu Dec 19

@soatok
The Revolution Will Be Shadowbaned

(There is a poem under this title, but I can't find it.)

Agnieszka R. Turczyńska Dec 19

@dzwiedziu Did you mean "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", or is it something new?

Dźwiedziu Dec 19

@agturcz
It's a play on that and the concept of shadowbanning.

Agnieszka R. Turczyńska Dec 19

@dzwiedziu @soatok Good to know, thanks. I'll keep my eyes open then.

Nantucket Lit Dec 20

@soatok Glad to see other people blogging. I'd like to get more people behind the idea of "pivot _from_ video"