I know a lot of sites now use browser fingerprinting and the like in order to determine how likely a user is to be a bot. The modern web tracks a lot of information about users, and all of that can be used to gauge how 'human' the user is, though this does raise some other concerns. A sufficiently stalkerish site already knows if you're human or not.
This CGP Grey video is great, and covers how many captchas are often used to train the bots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9OHn5ZF4Uo
The Polybius documentary by Ahoy. https://youtu.be/_7X6Yeydgyg
Thanks for sharing these! I've only seen 1 and 5, so I've got something to watch this weekend!
Volunteer developer reading this post while debugging, thank you!
Training an AI to play snake or other simple games is not hard. Making it stop at a specific score might make it slightly harder, but not much. Then you just need to read the text from the screen either, which is trivial. No, not hard for a bots to get past. It might slow actual humans more than bots.
I was actually wondering if it could have been intentional.
Reddit has long been known for its userbase being capable of surprisingly big things. Getting John Oliver to AMA here might show that Lemmy is capable of the same thing.
He absolutely would be a great pick. And I suspect he would be interested. What I wonder is: how much would it grow Lemmy and the Fediverse? Impossible to tell, but even if it's only a small gain, I think it would be worth trying.
Speaking of, how are regulators / governments going to deal with Lemmy? Virtually all existing legislation is intended to deal with centralized stuff run by companies, not federalized. By some regards, there may be actual legal issues with the current setup.
Lemmy by its nature is unlikely to ever face the scrutiny that corporate-owned platforms do, but that doesn't mean we should be unprepared.
Edit: ...virtually all existing legislation...