Interview I had with a hacker

[Bug Maniac Aydon]

Scratch got hit with bots today. It was fucking wild

Anyway I got an interview with him and this is what he said

I will provide a bit of context when needed

Also I got snippets of other people asking him stuff

Initial Context

Basically this dude used an exploit to post a project bemoaning Scratch's moderation several times and get them front paged. He was a pretty cool guy tbh.
He says he intends to more attacks like this.

Context

Okay, so he used bots to get the same project onto the "Most Loved" section several times. The project in question was made in the style of Meme Zee video parodying an early-2000s Youtube video. That's the best way I can describe it

Context

The "Most Loved" section shows 20 projects at a time. At the time this was recorded 4 of them were the one the guy made. Before the mods deleted fucking everything, it peaked at around 8 of them being his thing.

Context

The original project brought up several moderators in a "top 5" list.

This is about as much as I asked before he closed his comments for the day and all his shit later being deleted

I honestly have a lot of support for this guy and hope he keeps going but also kind of glad it's back to normal

Also here's my account so it's not as hard if you wanted to try to do that https://scratch.mit.edu/users/TheBuzzyBeetle/

 

[Mathy]

this is kinda surreal for me as I haven't used Scratch since... freshman year of high school? i was an admin of the community wiki (i might still be, i don't think they ever removed my permissions LOL E: yes, as a matter of fact I still have the admin role on the wiki), and the last "dramas" i can remember were "Add Everything" studios and minimal effort remixing, the latter i guess is still ongoing.

Add Everything drama

A site feature that had been around as long as I was on the site but was revamped in the 2.0 site release, studios (or were they called Galleries? i can't even remember) are collections of projects. A studio has curators, users the creator sets as being able to add projects. A trend early on in the 2.0 days were studios that had no theme and simply added every project they found, often competing for who could find the most. These were known as Add Everything (AE) studios.

This was a very controversial trend, leading to at least one massive thread in the now-defunct DjangoBB forum (E: apparently the forum is still alive, actually. and the thread was 77 pages) where people would debate the merit of these studios. Notably, the anti crowd was very vocal. They would brigade every AE studio they could find with comments about how the existence of the studio was morally wrong (some messages were very rude, even having swears!), and I specifically remember them straight up fabricating reasons to support their point (one i remember: a user said "a study" showed that AE studios took a ridiculous amount of disk space -- this simply wasn't true based on how the database worked.)

Then I remember one user who made a bot that would randomly add projects to a studio, and if you commented on it, the bot would either add all your projects or remove them and blacklist you, depending on whether the AI thought your message was nice or mean.

I think this interview is cool for taking a look into the mind of someone who botted the site but I'm very lost on the context of Scratch and its drama, esp. regarding moderation.

another addendum

ah, so my last usage of the site was 2016? good to know i was still based back then.

 

[Bug Maniac Aydon]

Asked a (former) mod a bit about it