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Another easy way for spammers to game the system: Set up a link with a copy of a legitimate, interesting news from another location (perhaps from a social site

by jcl 19y ago

Another easy way for spammers to game the system: Set up a link with a copy of a legitimate, interesting news from another location (perhaps from a social site with similar interests) and submit it to a social site. Wait a few hours while the users classify it as non-spam and comments start to roll in. Then, change the page to be mostly spam. (You can't fight this by taking hashes or diffing pages; most pages these days have dynamic content.) Not only does this spread the spammer's message, but it also breaks down your proposed web of trust between social sites; sites that approve links that later turn out to be spam will be seen as untrustworthy.

fiaz 19y ago
Yes, this would break it temporarily. In the long run this strategy would lose. With enough eyeballs scrutinizing a site, such a system would eventually identify a site as spam and have it marked because of the dynamic nature of human judgement. So let's say that out of 100 visitors, 20 see legitimate content, the next 20 see spam, thus alerting the system that they have encountered a spam site. The Bayesian filtering would be for sites with established spam content and then matching it against other established spam content. This would be a cost of 20 visitors exposed to spam while 20 others are exposed to legitimate content. The remaining 60 users are diverted. Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to me... Spammers could keep on shifting the content of sites, and this would make it more difficult to apply the spam filter for similar content (but humans, the first line of defense, aren't so easily fooled); this is where site moderators can identify users as potential spammers and give them the boot. So instead of having a 1:1 filter for domain:content, you could have a 1:n filter and then match that against other sites with similar 1:n "content shifting". A danger here is that legitimate content gets associated with spam and thus gets filtered out; this would require more sophistication on behalf of the Bayesian filter in associating content - but I'm certain this is a solved problem that can be put to use here.

by jcl 19y ago

fiaz 19y ago

Yes, this would break it temporarily. In the long run this strategy would lose. With enough eyeballs scrutinizing a site, such a system would eventually identify a site as spam and have it marked because of the dynamic nature of human judgement. So let's say that out of 100 visitors, 20 see legitimate content, the next 20 see spam, thus alerting the system that they have encountered a spam site. The Bayesian filtering would be for sites with established spam content and then matching it against other established spam content. This would be a cost of 20 visitors exposed to spam while 20 others are exposed to legitimate content. The remaining 60 users are diverted. Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to me... Spammers could keep on shifting the content of sites, and this would make it more difficult to apply the spam filter for similar content (but humans, the first line of defense, aren't so easily fooled); this is where site moderators can identify users as potential spammers and give them the boot. So instead of having a 1:1 filter for domain:content, you could have a 1:n filter and then match that against other sites with similar 1:n "content shifting". A danger here is that legitimate content gets associated with spam and thus gets filtered out; this would require more sophistication on behalf of the Bayesian filter in associating content - but I'm certain this is a solved problem that can be put to use here.