Yeah, I have no idea either, but it’s been around for more than a decade so it should be fairly easy to find a library that duplicates it.

I would be wary of AI-based solutions. There’s a risk of it picking up e.g. satirical/spoof sponsorships as actual ads, and perhaps not detecting unusual ads.

I’m slightly terrified of the day someone starts getting AI to reword and read out individual ads for each stream.

You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

It depends on the exact choices made by the developers, but generally the IP used by a user to make a post will always be logged - I think that’s now moving into legally required in some jurisdictions.

Mods/admins seeing that is a potentially different matter.

Seeing the IPs a user has used and what others have used them, or at least some sanitized version, can be helpful and I would argue is necessary before considering an IP ban.

• Are there 50 other accounts on the same IP, and they all always post from that one IP? Either you have a really prolific sockpuppet, or you’re about to ban a whole college dorm or big office, and maybe generate a shitload of bad publicity.

• Does the user post from a wide range of IPs already? Then there’s no point in issuing an IP ban; they probably won’t even notice.

It’s too easy to bypass an IP ban. That’s why providers have moved to tying accounts to things that should be harder and harder to replace - and more and more invasive. Email > phone > government issued ID…

Hate speech and cancel culture are usually considered somewhat opposites - cancelling is usually a ‘weapon in the toolkit’ against hate speech or whatever else you don’t like.

IP bans usually don’t work well on the modern internet. Many ISPs use CG-NAT with very rapidly changing IPs shared by many users. Places like college dorms are the worst.

Looking up which accounts stem from which IP is also a moderate invasion of privacy.

The usual issues with “banning the accounts that are constantly being used to harass people” are:

• Clearly defining harassment vs legitimate discussion

• Figuring out who’s actually being unreasonable - is one party being baited into responding, then that response is reported?

• Having enough staffing

Doesn’t really affect my point.

The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

Presumably it’s worth the same as it would be if you simply sold it.