I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.

One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.

It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.

Uganda ain’t blue enough!

I honestly assumed I was colorblind in one eye (I am diagnosed, at least)

To be fair, that post specifically asks people who don’t have a technical background. It can be used to show that laymen have the capacity to use a federated platform like lemmy, but not that they are a significant portion of the userbase (albeit that post does have a lot of replies).

Not really an answer to the question, but does anyone else think that the phrases “take a shit” and “give a shit” seem swapped? You say you’re gonna take a shit when you are giving one to the toilet, and you say you don’t give a shit when you are unwilling to take shit.

One of the reasons I really disliked Reddit and stopped using it years ago was this way of using the voting system. If I make a post, and it gets voted something like +4-10, and a reply that is some rewording of “that’s a dumb statement”, what am I to think? I’m certainly not going to change my mind, no one gave me a good reason to.

If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.

I’m inclined to believe a lot of people do this. This is not to say they are terrible for doing this, it’s that it’s human nature. Replying to someone with a well thought out post takes effort and, from my experience, makes the me realize i don’t know shit about the subject. Point is, this way of using the voting system breeds half-thought opinions which is a host of a lot of other problems.

That video is actually about sand cave, not nutty putty. Still worth a watch though.

I think wikis have already gotten there, at least for games. All of the game wikis have gotten consolidated into fandom/Wikia, which, from my experience, has enshittification levels that makes viewing Reddit from a phone browser feel likea slick experience. You can’t avoid it either. Wikis that used to be very good (at least compared to fandom, like gamepedia), have somehow gotten all pulled into the enshittification vacuum.

A few days ago I was on the Minecraft wiki, but I was playing b1.7.3 so I was viewing it on wayback. And holy shit, before fandom bought out gamepedia (albeit I was looking at the pre-gamepedia wiki), the wiki was actually usable.

If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.