Pizzasgood

Yup! The ones I clicked with genuine motives were all Project Wonderful ads. Project Wonderful was an ad service that catered specifically to creative projects, mainly webcomics. People running webcomics would host a Project Wonderful ad widget on their site to make a little extra money, and when they had some money to burn they’d pay to have ads for their own comic run on other people’s sites. I often discovered fun new comics this way. It’s the only ad service I’ve ever actually appreciated. I was sad when they shut down.

I’ve also clicked some other ads in an un-genuine manner. These were all advertisements for dresses, swimsuits, skirts, etc. The purpose here was to convince the advertising agencies to stop plastering random shit all over the internet and instead decorate it with a bunch of pretty clothes and sometimes pretty models wearing those clothes. Worked pretty well, as long as I remembered to click an ad or two every few months.

I haven’t done this in a while though. I wound up house-sitting for family members a lot in the last couple years, meaning I’d end up stuck using my laptop for a few days or a week instead of my real computer. The laptop has a lot less ram and runs into problems browsing the web sometimes due to ad company programmers being incompetent fuckwits who write leaky code. I finally got fed up with this and installed uBlock Origin on my laptop to make it more usable while away from home.

That was all I’d intended to do; I was fine coexisting with most ads on my desktop and just using custom scripting to nuke individual specific ad slots that were being nuisances (e.g. jerking the page around on wikis I frequented). But since I have Firefox set up to synchronize between my laptop and desktop, I incidentally wound up with uBlock Origin on my desktop as well. I’m not sure if there’s a way to have that be asymmetric while still having all the other browser extensions continue to synchronize (because I would prefer if websites kept getting paid for my traffic when I browse on PC, especially webcomics), but for now I’ve just happily enjoyed not having ads anymore. The internet is so much more peaceful this way. Though I do sometimes miss all the pretty dresses.

True. However, thanks to the magic of virtual machines you can run multiple instances of arch on each device! Just be careful you don’t run too many overlapping arches or they’ll transform into domelinux and the HOA will fine you for architectural mismatch.

That does rule out the creators, yeah.

When you say it happens instantly, do you mean that you instantly get a “Post deleted” notification of some sort, or just that you hit “Reply” and the post never shows up?

I ask because there’s a blog I comment on sometimes that occasionally pretends like it’s posting my comment, but then the comment doesn’t appear. My first assumption was that I was encountering some kind of moderation filter, but it turns out I wasn’t. That blog just has poorly designed error handling. If I take too long to write my comment, the session expires. That’s fine and normal, but the problem is that the blog software doesn’t bother to warn me before posting, and it doesn’t explain itself after the post fails, so it creates confusion. Once I realized what was going on though, I realized I could just hit “Back” to recover and copy the comment I wrote, reload the page to get a fresh session, paste the comment, and hit “Reply.” Works totally fine that way.

Maybe YouTube is doing something similar and dropping attempted comments due to expired tokens or shoddy networking? It would explain why it seems so random and nonsensical.

If it really is bad auto-mod systems, there probably isn’t much you can do about it besides complain to YouTube. Any workaround that would be easy for you to use would be equally easy for the spammers and trolls to use, and is therefor not likely to remain a usable workaround for long.

As far as I know, none of my (very few) comments have been deleted yet, so I’m curious how that works and how you know who was responsible. Do they notify you when it happens and explain who made the decision?

Don’t ease into it at all. Wait for a moment where it would be funny, then go whole hog with it. Treat it like a joke… but then just keep going. Never go back. Don’t even acknowledge there is a back. Pretend this is how you’ve always talked and they’re insane if they think otherwise.

The article’s title presents this in a misleading way. The bill in question wouldn’t prevent people from using their preferred names and pronouns. What it would do is prohibit the government from spending federal funds to implement or enforce any rules or recommendations encouraging its employees and contractors to respect those names and pronouns.

So in other words this is an attempt at protecting hate-speech, not at restricting free-speech. Shitty, but probably not unconstitutional.