deleted by creator

It could be anything that makes it worth paying money for the accounts in the first place.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside, it’s difficult to tell if an account has been bought, hacked, or if the original owner just decided to become a scumbag out of nowhere.

For example, have a look at https://www.reddit.com/user/fakerht, a 4 years old account that, just 30 minutes ago, decided to promote a scam site that attempts to steal crypto by luring them with the promise of an airdrop.

deleted by creator

That mirrors the tension many reddit mods struggled with recently… It’s difficult to push back against Reddit without also punishing its active users in some real way.

The folks using Reddit are still real human beings. But I get that not everybody is going to draw the line in the same spot.

To push back on that a bit, many Reddit “aged accounts” are used to push scams to the great unwashed masses.

I’m not sure it’s morally okay to turn a blind eye from who’s buying those accounts or why.

I honestly don’t know. The only advice I’d have for the layman would be “just don’t do this”, but I understand that’s little more than an invitation to be ignored.

Running strange software grabbed from unknown sources will never not be a risky proposition.

Uploading the .exe you just grabbed to virustotal and getting the all clear can indicate two very different things: It’s either actually safe, or it hasn’t yet been detected as malware.

You should expect that malware writers had already uploaded some variant of their work to virustotal before seeding it to ensure maximum impact.
Getting happy results from virustotal could simply mean the malware author simply tweaked their work until they saw those same results.

Notice I said “yet” above. Malware tends to eventually get flagged as such, even when it has a headstart of not being recognized correctly.
You can use that to somewhat lower the odds of getting infected, by waiting. Don’t grab the latest crack that just dropped for the hottest game or whatever.
Wait a few weeks. Let other people get infected first and have antiviruses DBs recognize a new malware. Then maybe give it a shot.

And of course, the notion that keygens will often be flagged as “bad” software by unhelpful antivirus just further muddies the waters since it teaches you to ignore or altogether disable your antivirus in one of the most risky situation you’ll put yourself into.

Let’s be clear: There’s nothing safe about any of this, and if you do this on a computer that has access to anything you wouldn’t want to lose, you are living dangerously indeed.

There are a near infinity of those out there, many of which just grab other scanlation groups’ output and slap their ads on top of it.

Mangadex is generally my happy place, but you’ll have to wander out and about for various specific mangas.

Several of the groups that post on Mangadex also have their own website and you may find more stuff there.

For example right now I’ve landed on asurascans.com, which has a bunch of Korean and Chinese long strips, with generally good quality translations.

The usual sticky points with all those manga sites is the ability to track where you are in a series and continue where you left off when new chapters are posted.
Even Mangadex struggles with that, their “Updates” page is the closest thing they have to doing that and it’s still not very good.

If you’re going to stick to one site for any length of time, and you happen to be comfortable with userscripts, Id’ suggest you head over to greasyfork.org, search for the manga domain you’re using, and look for scripts that might improve your binging experience there.

One of my guilty pleasures is to rewrite trivial functions to be statements free.

Since I’d be too self-conscious to put those in a PR, I keep those mostly to myself.

For example, here’s an XPath wrapper:

const $$$ = (q,d=document,x=d.evaluate(q,d),a=[],n=x.iterateNext()) => n ? (a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a)) : a;

Which you can use as $$$("//*[contains(@class, 'post-')]//*[text()[contains(.,'fedilink')]]/../../..") to get an array of matching nodes.

If I was paid to write this, it’d probably look like this instead:

function queryAllXPath(query, doc = document) {
    const array = [];
    const result = doc.evaluate(query, doc);
    let node= result.iterateNext();
    while (node) {
        array.push(node);
        n = result.iterateNext();
    }
    return array;
}

Seriously boring stuff.

Anyway, since var/let/const are statements, I have no choice but to use optional parameters instead, and since loops are statements as well, recursion saves the day.

Would my quality of life improve if the lambda body could be written as => if n then a.push(n), $$$(q,d,x,a) else a ? Obviously, yes.

I agree, but there’s a non-zero chance I don’t have a full picture of things yet, and maybe things aren’t that bad. Or won’t be that bad.

On the surface, inconsistencies like this seem like they might encourage users to group themselves on a few massive servers that have a lot of local content guaranteed to be consistent rather than spreading themselves across many small instances (power law graph goes here.)

But maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe the system naturally converges toward clusters of interests where each instance is primarily focused on a few things, and while the federation mechanism exists and is mostly useful, it is a secondary feature behind a primary use-case where folks preferentially engage with their local communities.

Overall, I wonder how much of all this is colored by expectations we’ve developed while using Reddit.
All this fediverse stuff is built on very different foundations than things like twitter or reddit, and while it’s easy to gloss over it because the UIs look superficially similar, they’ve made some fundamentally different trade-offs.

But maybe the consistency stuff could get better over time too. Maybe there’ll be a smoother experience to better flag when and why things are inconsistent (“instance X hasn’t sent us activity updates since T”, “instance X has partially defederated from us”, etc.), and maybe even offer targeted palliative measures rather than a generic disclaimer.
All this stuff is under fairly active development still, so there’s hope.

Welp, I’m new too, but I think this is more or less working as intended.

The federation mechanism is a “best effort” thing, so there’s literally no guarantee that you’ll get the same view for the same thing loaded through two different instances.

I started writing a userscript to “normalize” URLs so clicking on a link to kbin.social on a different instance would transform the link URL to keep you on your original instance, but with the distinct possibility of missing content because of it, I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea.

The auto-refresh-and-btw-lemme-close-the-image-you-were-looking-at behavior isn’t happening on every instance, but it definitely happens on lemmy.world. Maybe this is an artifact of the websocket approach, and that’ll go away in 0.18? No idea.

At this point, the usage pattern I’m leaning toward is to find good communities/magazines, subscribe to them, and stick to the “subscribed” view. The most consistent results will always be with subs that are local to the current instance, so if most of your subscriptions are on instance X, you probably don’t really want to have your account on instance Y.

There have been efforts to build reputation systems that don’t rely on central servers, like early day bitcoin’s Web of Trust, which allowed folks to rate other folks with public key crypto, thus ensuring an accurate and fair trust rating for participants, without the possibility of a middle-man putting their thumb on the scale.

One problem with it is that it was still perfectly practical for bad actors to accumulate good ratings, then cash out their hard-earned reputation into large scams, such as the “Bitcoin Savings & Trust” (for $40 million in that particular case), which quite possibly made it measurably worse than not having a system that induced participants into making faulty judgments in the first place.

I think the main practical value of something like reddit’s karma is an indication of age and account activity, both of which can probably be measured in other, if less gamified ways.