You mean the same Luke Skywalker who threw his lightsaber away while confronting the most powerful men in the galaxy on board their planet-killing superweapon? And also tried to talk down the ruthless crime lord who had both his sister and her boyfriend as hostages? :P

I think you’re underestimating Picard. Like, not only was the man a wild punk in his youth before Starfleet straightened him out, but it’s shown throughout the series that he’s more than capable of bluffing opponents with access to things like literal time travel.

If nothing else, if he fights Luke, he’s not going to fight on Luke’s terms if he can help it.

I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.

Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.

But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.

Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that’ll auto-ban accounts that post in “free karma subreddits”—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of

But, a bot that’s aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn’t need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.

I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.

The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.