Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.
There was also 2ch. net that was a lot bigger, but 2ch "alumni" aren't as good. It's not just cohort, it has/had better action-reward loop than other systems.
4chan doesn't manipulate the feed, so far as I know. Nor does it require a phone number to use.
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
I think blaming people who are trying to make a buck using the fastest route is not the way to achieve non-monopoly.
A practical point: Mozilla made design choices in the past that made it harder to hide the automation footprint. For some time it was more difficult to disable the navigator.webdriver flag in Firefox compared to Chromium.
That's why we support Brave, Edge, Ungoogled-Chromium, and our own custom Chromium fork that we're working on.
Just because we only support Chromium doesn't mean we're pro-Google-dominance.
There are enough Chrome forks at this point that Google no longer has the power to unilaterally remove features from Chromium. Manifest v2 extensions still work great in Brave for example.
That's not really true, https://github.com/daijro/camoufox is at parity with patchright on stealth, it's just that Firefox has way less market share so it's not worth the >2x maintanance effort for us to support multiple browsers.
People are making millions/year just by writing articles on Substack. Just look at the "paid leaderboards", number of paid subscribers, and multiply by 70% of the annual price of the newsletter.
Our newsletter is doing mid-6-figures. You simply can't find that content anywhere else, and I am not aware of a newsletter-piracy phenomenon. Even if it existed, I think many people would pay to have guaranteed day-1 access.
I would say that the average Hacker News user is negatively biased against LLMs and does not use coding agents to their benefit. At least what I can tell from the highly upvoted articles and comments.
Btw, you can buy a MacBook Pro Max M1 16" 64GB SoC RAM, 1TB SSD in excellent condition, with warranty, refurbished by Amazon with a brand new battery for $1,500 right now.
Corporations are switching laptops on a 3-year cycle.
Next year, there will be a flood of M2s, in 2 years, M3s, 3 years, M4s, nada, nada.
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