The problem:
The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.
Status quo solution (failure):
#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.
It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.
The fix:
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stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.
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stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).
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stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.
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stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.
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stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy – because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.
This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.
I do not see why. You’ll have to elaborate on why a social problem cannot be remedied with tech.
Well actually we need to get to the bottom of why you think the problem is a social one to begin with. For example, websites are Cloudflared for a number of technical reasons, not social reasons. Cloudflare is implemented & manifests as an exclusive walled garden (again, technical). Marginalized communities are excluded because CF is not good at separating ham from spam (technical). Someone not excluded by Cloudflare posts a CF link because they are not informed by the technology they are using (again, technical problem).
Some of the enshitification is indeed a social problem. E.g. a website hammers visitors with popups because it’s the way the ownership has decided to sustain a profit (rather than donations for example). So there’s a social problem. But why do you think tech cannot solve a social problem? If the popup-infested site is tagged as such so users can avoid it, the UX improves because users avoid more shitty sites.
People want to share (social), what they have seen (social), with their friends/community (social). They don’t want a bot/filter to change what they are sharing (technology). The current situation where a bot posts a comment saying here are some alternative links, is a good medium. Your not putting words into the mouth of the poster, not changing their content, but also providing options.
i.e. I want to see youtube links, I dont want to see some weird youtube proxy links. I want canonical source of truth links, and its up to me to put that into my player (newpipe). So when I post I include canonical links to youtube.
That’s much more difficult to implement a social solution for and not even entirely solvable. If Bob wants decentralized GAFAM-free links & Alice has your preference of direct Youtube links into the exclusive walled garden, then the social solution is hundreds of thousands of authors manually posting both kinds of links. Who is going to create that level of awareness? What’s the remedy when awareness fails (because it will)? Which link gets the privilege of the URL field? There is only one URL field; should it be the exclusive link or the inclusive one?
Only tech solutions have a chance at solving that problem.
What’s a “source of truth link”?
I don’t consider it a problem, social platforms should enable people to be social. So it succeeds as long as it shares whatever the poster wants to share.
Source of Truth is the canonical thing… i.e. a link to the youtube view and not a link to piped proxy of the youtube video.
If the same video, exactly the same, was also hosted in peer tube, or rumble, odyssee, those would be good options for bots to “link also here” as a comment.
Not a problem that people are marginalized and excluded? If you don’t recognize the problem then you’re not going to be useful in solving the problem either.
Of course. The question is, all people, or some people?
So IIUC your answer is “some people” and exclusivity is fine. And it’s fine if the excluded group sees titles and abstracts of content they are blocked from… and fine if we click a link and get hit with captchas and popups and other garbage. Correct? If web enshitification is okay, then no problem to solve… is that your position?
“Source of Truth” sounds like some kind of religious biased spin. I wouldn’t throw that term around too much. Invidious is not a proxy. It’s a client. A connection is still made to Youtube for the exact same video stream you get if you point the browser to Youtube. The only difference is that invidious is more inclusive & gives users a download option, unlike Youtube’s default client.
It’s literally proxying the video from YouTube to the client. Definitional proxy
You should tell the #Invidious developers that because they think they created a front-end, not a proxy. If you go into their IRC channel they will fight you on your claim but perhaps you can present some evidence and get them to put something on their project pages about being a proxy.