How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

They shouldn't be trying such a desperate solution without trying chlorox and ivermectin first.

Just don't leave the country after you participate.

For that matter, you may suffer remote retaliation even if you stay home. I would leave this to the military or other government branch.

Also there is the question of legality, government operation or not. It sounds to me like vigilante justice. And countries who like their anti-American cybercriminals will certainly treat it as illegal. (Hence the advice not to leave the country.)

We certainly need a way to stop cybercrime, international or otherwise. But this doesn't strike me as a good way to go about it.

Finally a prediction: in the not too distant future, one or more offshoots from this will turn into unmanageable domestic criminal organizations.

Now that all this information is valuable (to AI bot scrapers), it's all being gatekept from humans who refuse to log in and participate in generating more valuable content for AI bot scrapers.

It's basically Farmville (but for scrapeable content), but restricted to the existing domesticated population of users. If you refuse to have a collar put on you, you no longer are allowed to access an echo copy of information that used to be on the open web before SEO garbage displaced it all.

Surfing with javascript turned off to help defend against drive-by 0-days? Half a dozen anti-bot systems either block or temp ban you. Use the wrong IP address, and reddit prevents access.

You could say this is a natural evolution of order in a capitalist society, as explained by Cory Doctorow's views on enshittification. However, I would argue this goes back even further to RMS' views on open vs closed software. Essentially, when no money is at stake, people are willing to share. When money is at stake, people start putting the things people were sharing behind closed doors and charging for entry.

If you extend the open source metaphor, being able to fork your posts theoretically allows individuals (and by extension a community) to transcend greed and censorship. Consider how much historical content (both virtual and IRL) has become cancellable in the last 4 presidential administrations, depending on which side of the current wave of bandwagoning you stand on. Even before that, how much content was rejected or "rewritten" on spaces like Wikipedia to satisfy the personal views of editors who staked out and camped specific areas on Wikipedia. Mind you, this was before Wikipedia became a force multiplier for influencing, which led to attacks by astroturfers and state actors.

Which then leads me to the question... what forkable, censorship resistant alternatives to reddit exist? I don't want to have a brand just to have my own legion of supporters to defend and reinstate me, or rely on glacial bureaucracy mandated by law if I get deplatformed just for having a conversation just because some AI bot had a bad day.

Even Batman's job is threatened by AI.

It's just ET trying to phone home. Probably dialed the wrong number.

Ideology vetos reality, news at 11.

A lot of people behave pretty ghastly when it comes to money.

That was my first thought too. (Assuming the article is correct - all kinds of stuff gets published that doesn't hold up in the longer run.)

Remember that time is also big. Suppose that there have been 1000 interstellar civilizations in our galaxy during the past 5 billion years, and that each one lasted a million years before collapsing. How many would be active right now?

Frankly, I don't consider it a paradox at all. We've explored approximately 0% of our galaxy and found nothing. That doesn't tell us much.

Doesn't he know he's supposed to play the fiddle while he destroys his country?

I'm skeptical about that second part.

As for trolls, I wonder if some anti-vax propaganda is being pushed by hostile foreign powers as a way of hurting us.

It's just a story about Meta and AI.

Oh, nevermind.

For extremists of all flavors, violence is always preferable to the voting booth.

Surely they're not going to cut off the data centers just so ordinary people can have electricity?