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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • I don’t believe that’s possible. I think at one point there was a way to disable all access to the history API, but I don’t believe that option exists anymore. Additionally, it would break a lot of websites.

    Unfortunately I think this is probably a result of the way YouTube implements their “auto play next video” feature, and they are unlikely to change that.

    An option might be using an alternative YouTube front-end, rather than using the YouTube site, but I don’t have a lot of experience with those. (other people on here do though)


  • No. The API is correctly named, but I can see how it could be misleading (and concerning!)

    That API allows websites to programmatically go somewhere in your history. It can go forward, back, or to a specific point in your history, but it can’t see what that history is, it can only go back 3 pages back or forward 2 pages for example. It doesn’t actually know the history, it just navigates to those points in history. So Google isn’t going to know that you were on Pornhub 3 pages ago, for example.




  • I haven’t been active on 4chan in well over a decade so I can’t speak to the state of it now. Do you know anything about “Project Chanology”? Around 2008 a whole lot of us “/b/tards” decided to take on the Church of Scientology, and even went outside and protested in front of their churches. Given the reputation of 4chan-ers as being deplorable neck-bearded basement-dwellers most people were shockingly well-adjusted normal people in person. I would describe it as normal people who found it entertaining to be as shocking as possible online, almost as a form of satire (and possibly against the rapid commercialisation of the internet, would be my guess based on my own experience), but were nothing like their online personas (in the majority of cases). But every once in a while you’d come across someone who didn’t quite pick up that it was satire, probably because they had pre-existing bigotries and were looking for like-minded people. (Think about how TheDonald started off as satire, but was quickly co-opted by people that took it seriously).

    This particular screenshot reads like satire to me, but the problem is you don’t know for sure and odds are good that someone will take it seriously, co-opt the conversation, and turn it into something very serious. That’s part of why I starting avoiding 4chan, it used to be offensive memes for that sake of shocking like-minded people / friends, but it eventually became used as a propaganda or recruitment tool for people that weren’t “in on the joke” and to “test the waters”

    TL;DR: Probably not, but (depressingly) you never know