> My issue is that crawlers aren’t respecting robots.txt

Cloudflare has a toggle switch to automatically block LLM's + scrapers etc:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

> Bluesky

FWIW, I've been consistently posting quality stuff on Bluesky for the last year, and despite having a few hundred followers, I get ZERO engagement.

People in the Bluesky subreddit tell me it's not a "post and ghost" platform in that you have to constantly interact with people if you want to earn engagement, but that's too time consuming.

In other words, the discovery algorithm(s) on BlueSky sucks.

Maybe it doesn't suck. Others are just better at posting discoverable content than you. (note: "discoverable" =/= "engaging")

If we believe the discoverability algorithms to avoid "engagement" is respected, who would be more discoverable? The person coming in to show off one high quality article every 6 months, or the person doing weekly blogs with some nuggets of information on the same topic?

Maybe your article goes viral, but odds are that the weekly blogger will amass more followers, have more comments, and will build up to a point where they 99% of the time get more buzz on their updates than the one hit wonder.

It's just Twitter 2. It's the same as Twitter, made by the same people who made Twitter, doing the same thing as Twitter in the same way as Twitter, with the same culture as Twitter, plus a fig leaf to decentralisation.

> Whitelisting solves the problem for me. I curate every tweet I see with a browser extension. Strangers can't kick down the door. I only see content from my direct follows. It dramatically reduces the stress. Maybe a little like horse blinkers.

This extension? https://github.com/rxliuli/mass-block-twitter

> Social media as a vessel for diverse discussion is a tall order. It’s too public, too tied to context, and ultimately a no-win game. No matter how carefully you present yourself, you’ll end up being the “bad guy” to someone. The moment a discussion touches even lightly on controversy, healthy dialogue becomes nearly impossible.

Worth reading Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now book:

https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accou...

> Feds and criminals

How does one tell the difference?

One faces consequences when breaking the law, the other is tasked with breaking the law in the name of upholding it

> But things will change, because of the scale

Yup!

Plus we can't ignore the inherent reflexive + emergent effects that are unpredictable.

I mean, people are already beginning to talk like and/or think like chatGPT:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.01754

> That's remarkably short-sighted

I agree. Once these models get to a point of recursive self-improvement, advancement will only speed up even more exponentially than it already is...

> I remember reading that llm’s have consumed the internet text data

Not just the internet text data, but most major LLM models have been trained on millions of pirated books via Libgen:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/mark-zuckerberg-gave-metas...

Worth reading Re: IQ tests-

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

Maybe if crispr gets really good.

How would that even work, it feels like the body/brain would have to be reshaped?

probably not as a lot of genes are not really used to the extent they were