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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • Could you imagine what language would look like 10-15 years from now if this actually took off.

    Like, think of how ubiquitous stuff like ‘unalive’ or ‘seggs’ has become after just a few years trying to avoid algorithmic censors. Now imagine that for 5 years most people all over the internet were just inserting random phrases into their sentences. I have no idea where that would go, but it would make our colloquial language absolutely wild.





  • did you use the same websites on brave that you normally use?

    No. I exclusively have used Brave just for Reddit specifically for this reason. I also used Edge, which came installed on the laptop. Maybe data from Edge is used in Brave or Reddit is somehow able to track that? I never went to Reddit in Edge, let alone logged in, but I did log into my Google account (which has never been linked to any Reddit account, but I’ve been logged into it on the same browser as my older Reddit account in the past).

    did you use a different operating system?

    I’ve used Reddit with my old account on Android phones and my old laptop, which ran Windows 10. This new one uses Windows 11. I did log into Windows 11 with my Microsoft account. Maybe that’s how they tracked it? That seems far-fetched, but maybe?

    did you use a brave account on it?

    No, and I only use Brave in incognito mode. I know that doesn’t prevent anyone else from tracking anything, but it’s supposed to not save local files after closing the browser.

    did you verify that your vpn was using an exit point ip address that you’ve never used before every single time you accessed reddit?

    I mean, I don’t track every IP address I’ve ever used. As far as I know it’s been a new IP address, but I really have no way of guaranteeing that. It seems incredibly unlikely I happened to stumble upon one I’ve used before, though.

    most importantly: why bother using reddit?

    Lemmy isn’t to the point where it can be a Reddit replacement. Sure, for some stuff it’s fine, but the user base is just too small. There are multiple subreddits for local communities around me that are very active which I like to check. There are communities for more niche hobbies, games, and books I like to follow. There’s just WAY more content on Reddit that you can’t get on Lemmy.



  • No, I don’t think so.

    A few months ago I got permabanned from Reddit. I had an older account I hadn’t used in a few years. I logged into that one and found it, too, was permabanned, with a reference to my other account. I tried to start a new account, and it got immediately banned.

    A few weeks after that, for unrelated reasons, I got a brand new laptop. Without ever even going to Reddit on that laptop (let alone trying to log in), I downloaded a new browser I had never used on any device before which advertises it’s focus on safety (the name of the browser is Brave). I connected my VPN. I created a new burner email account. Then I created a new Reddit account. Within 2 days it was permabanned referencing me trying to evade a ban on my other account.

    I have no idea how they were able to know it was me. It was a new account, made from a new device, with a new email, through a new privacy-focused browser, on a VPN (so different IP address). There should have been no way for them to track me, yet they somehow still did.

    I’d really like to know how they tracked it. Not even just to get back on Reddit. If Reddit is able to track you like that, then you know other companies and governments can.






  • Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn’t suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.

    But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.

    Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.

    This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn’t like the choice countries made.

    Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.

    So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn’t recently, it didn’t happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.