Kevin Rose on the New Digg: Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Fight AI Mimicry and Rebuild Online Trust

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DoINeedChains@reddit

I hold very few immutable beliefs- and one of those is that I will never again invest any time into a social media site that has Kevin Rose even tangentially involved.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

I said the same thing but I hate Reddit so much now that I’m willing to try any viable alternative.

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threelonmusketeers@reddit

I’m willing to try any viable alternative

I've been using Lemmy for almost two years now, and have found it to be a viable alternative.

https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the main difference is latency)

https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU

Thunder for Lemmy if you want an app (iOS and Android)

Feel free to ask if you have questions!

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

I keep bouncing off Lemmy. The users are worse than Reddit. I got death threats for not agreeing with some pretty extreme left wing American politics.

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

I have tried most of them now, including lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.

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threelonmusketeers@reddit

I got death threats for not agreeing with some pretty extreme left wing American politics

Have you blocked the three tankie instances? It takes 30 seconds, and drastically reduces the number of extreme-left users and communities you'll interact with.

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Sadly blocking those instances doesn’t block the users. Another user in this submission mentioned that that’s coming in an update hopefully this year. Apparently PieFed already has that functionality so I’ll try that.

Unfortunately many of the users were on instances like lemmy.world, and if I block those instances there’s nothing left.

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Electronic-Phone1732@reddit

Report them. The mods there will remove actual death threats.

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

Okay thanks I will try.

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Delicious_Ease2595@reddit (OP)

Never got deaths threats even Reddit has that prob too, which instances did you try? Any attack on Lemmy like that goes on instances level and not protocol

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triangularRectum420@reddit

Could you give an example of what you said?

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Mental_Tea_4084@reddit

L E M M Y

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

The users are worse than Reddit. The only difference is they don’t get banned for death threats.

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DxT_01@reddit

And their users sit on Reddit downvoting anyone who disagrees lol

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

Nice. I will check it out. Do you have a link?

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DxT_01@reddit

iOS

android

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Zavrina@reddit

I just tried out the Android app. It looks pretty darn good so far! I love the idea. I look forward to seeing it progress further. Thanks for sharing it here.

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DxT_01@reddit

Thank you so much! There's a lot I want to add on and I'm in the process of adding a home feed that you can customize based on what you're looking for. It will pull from the forums that match your interests. If you have any other suggestions or feedback, I'm always open to it!

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Perfect_Cost_8847@reddit

Thank you, I will check it out!

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Mental_Tea_4084@reddit

[citation needed]

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ElasticSpeakers@reddit

I'm not familiar with him - what was he involved with previously to have you comment that?

I'm interested in the zkTLS work he's describing even if it doesn't materialize in this project.

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DoINeedChains@reddit

The Old Digg.

Much of the reason you and I are here on Reddit right now is because Kevin willfully blew up Digg and drove all the users here 15 years ago.

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HoolihanRodriguez@reddit

I was there, part of the first great migration. The time is coming again soon, I wonder what the next one will be.

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Electronic-Phone1732@reddit

Lemmy.

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DxT_01@reddit

Check out the Chime In app. It’s small right now but it has the benefit of not being limited to a single platform since it’s a collection of forums

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threelonmusketeers@reddit

I wonder what the next one will be

Probably Lemmy, Mbin, and Piefed. They are like a network of mini-Reddits where no central authority (like spez, Elon, or Kevin Rose) can control the entire ecosystem.

Lemmy just crossed 55k monthly active users.

https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the main difference is latency)

https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU

Thunder for Lemmy if you want an app (iOS and Android)

Feel free to ask if you have questions!

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ElasticSpeakers@reddit

Ah interesting, thanks - yea I used to use Digg regularly back in the old days

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apocxp@reddit

Digg: dead. Pownce: dead. Oink/Milk: Dead. Revision 3: dead. I like the idea of a Digg comeback, but fully expect it to be shuttered within 6 months.

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codyp@reddit

"When AI has fully taken over the planet—thanks to our collective inability to unify and resist—there will be a museum. In one of its dimly lit wings, a placard will mark the precise computational moment AI identified humanity’s critical weakness: our refusal to set aside our differences to protect ourselves. That moment… is now.

To those of you reading this from the museum archives of our downfall—I have only one thing to say:

First!

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Emergency_Plankton46@reddit

The problem isn’t people use AI or that they are shilling a product. If people don’t like that content, in theory they can downvote it.

The problem is that corporations like Amazon and Disney and certain counties and political campaigns completely take over entire subreddits when they want to shill something, and also that they manipulate voting.

Lemmy and the like fix the sub takeover problem through decentralization, but nobody has figured out the vote manipulation problem yet (including the idiotic crypto solution Rose is talking about, which would be trivially easy to game and introduces insane privacy risks).

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Electronic-Phone1732@reddit

Actually, we're working on the vote manipulation thing. Its easier to spot shill accounts, and harder to get new accounts approved on lemmy. So, your average joe can wait a tiny bit, but a bot maker will be SOL, and their applications could just get thrown out.

Deliciated instances for vote manipulation can be detected easily enough by admins, and defederated.

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Trotskyist@reddit

I mean tieing a single person to a single account definitely makes vote manipulation more difficult.

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CptHammer_@reddit

Your trusting the verification company and or digg to not take my money to verify my bots.

It's more genuine if they just say they will take your money to verify you like X. Everyone knows the blue check is meaningless.

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Mindestiny@reddit

Sounds like more "tech bros save the world, until the venture capital dries up and they're pressured to monetize your data" bullshit to me.

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nbass668@reddit

But really, how do we solve this dilemma? It's almost every single cool opensource project I've ever used they get all popular and then BAM! Suddenly there's this fancy paid version with all the shiny new stuff, and the rest of us get the older, less polished community edition. It's kinda annoying yet I understand that eventually they want to earn something.

And yeah, Reddit... don't even get me started. It got so huge it's basically doing all the things we hate, and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

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digitaldisgust@reddit

Sounds sketchy

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Fun-Space2942@reddit

Fuck Kevin rose. Trust fund douches don’t deserve anything but shame and scorn.

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xibipiio@reddit

I think this is 80% perfectly awesome and 20% I will not touch this with a 25ft pole and highly recommend everyone else follow suit as well and not participate.

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Delicious_Ease2595@reddit (OP)

Worldcoin is a red flag

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BoardGamesandPerler@reddit

Most of the AI stuff I've heard of new digg is a red flag. I'm not using any site that wants me to go to a physical device and scan my biometrics to verify especially when the company operating the orb devices is run by Sam Altman. Nothing he does is in the interest of anyone but himself.

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Aimhere2k@reddit

This is just another step on a slippery slope, one that may well lead to the Biblical "Mark of the Beast". That is, it's said that no one will be able to conduct ANY business (whether financial, employment, governmental, etc., private or public) without "the Mark".

Now, I'm not religious at all (lean towards atheist), but this very real possibility scares me. Already, there are things that you can't do without a phone, or an app, or a Real ID. How much longer until we have a system that absolutely requires authentication for everything, even activities that never needed it before? And where some authority can deny you access to the system, effectively proclaiming "you aren't human", and destroying your life?

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Head-Honeydew8641@reddit

"We'll protect you from AI slop by using a thing made by the person that's responsible for all the AI slop!" is the wildest take on user protection I think I've ever heard.

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yuletide@reddit

And he’s saying this all on Twitter? Cringe

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Delicious_Ease2595@reddit (OP)

Reddit is cringe

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thelibrarian101@reddit

This is the reason why I launched my own Lemmy instance, where all posts that are too similar to all previous posts (I target 80%) are deleted (seriously, look into the modlog). Just to de-slob the stream of repetitive posts and to make reading the homepage bearable.

I have talked about this on this sub before, my instance is https://lemmy.coffee/ . Feedback is appreciated.

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chesterriley@reddit

You should pick up usa@midwest.social

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thelibrarian101@reddit

Should be there now :) Takes some time to be meaningfully synced though

https://lemmy.coffee/c/usa@midwest.social

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LibertyLizard@reddit

I think it’s an interesting idea and I welcome experimentation generally. However, I do feel that the inability of users to know whether their content will be deleted may pose a challenge. Will users engage if they think their work will simply be deleted?

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thelibrarian101@reddit

Thank you for your Feedback! Right now this instance is meant mostly as a frontend for consuming content from other instances.

But yeah, this is a problem for sure. It discourages posting on a fundamental level. The counterargument would be to look at boards like /r9k/ which are clearly very active, despite post rejection. But I'm not sure how well this would translate to this.

If this turns out to be interesting for consuming content, this could be discussed and developed further. Right now I am trying to consume lemmy through my instance, and am mostly focused on validating if this adds value over the regular feed (like on lemmy.world or .ml for example) or not :)

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couch_crowd_rabbit@reddit

Can we get a zero knowledge proof of if mrbabyman is in fact a baby?

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immersive-matthew@reddit

It is for sure a step in the right direction, but there are already very good, free, open source zero knowledge proof solutions, some with nearly a decade of being out in the wild like zk-SNARK first seen in ZCash. I rather go with the truly decentralized options that has been proven solid, than a corporate one. So disappointing to see this is the direction Digg went. I like the ideas of Worldcoin and think this sort of tech is needed in the AI age, but I much rather see decentralized tech instead. I am genuinely surprised that the masses still use centralized tech so much despite knowing they are being exploited and manipulated by the few. I am very aware of this even with Reddit and thus spend time on Lemmy despite having orders of magnitude less daily activity.

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both-shoes-off@reddit

Will they avoid having bots and an open API too? I feel like that's a major contributing factor to some of the manipulation from outside influences and institutions here. It's AI as well on all platforms, but Reddit gets real gross around election season.

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Ornery-Associate-190@reddit

That's good but not enough. 1. Tag user's country of origin. 2. Tag them if they are using a known VPN 3. Tag them if they are using a known low rep vpn or rogue isp

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