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Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks. Reddit, Facebook & Ins

by strgrd 10y ago

Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks. Reddit, Facebook & Instagram, Twitter... are all basically pay-to-win schemes at this point, benefiting greatly in terms of adoption from the grey market pay-for-likes botnets, where marketers and propagandists know they can make their content highly visible if they're willing to pay. People pay very little attention to the fragility that has arisen in the Web 2.0 economy. Once there is widespread understanding of the gaming, cheating, and botting, these social network institutions will crumble. There will be piecemeal attempts to reduce botting, but they will annoy end users, and annoy investors and shareholders as they come to realize XX% of their user base never existed. Web 3.0 will be the death of anonymity, with social networks and APIs that are, by design, hard to automate, and even harder to hide your true identity from. There will be CAPTCHA-like systems (possibly tied to hardware) that facilitate this. This will of course promise to fix the problem of botting, while heavily benefiting surveillance, for state, and for advertisement. There will be a new breed of social networks built around ensuring the content you are seeing is genuine or "organic", and yet the incentives will be much more perverse, and their networks, much more invasive.

nix0n 10y ago
I find it hard to believe people will complete captchas or give up anonymity in order to vote. The bot vs captcha arms race will continue, but I would be very surprised if the captchas started winning.
- ethbro 10y ago
  You don't have to employ AI/human differentiation (e.g. captcha) if you statistically mine user actions. I think that's where resolution is more likely to come from. By definition, shill accounts have different patterns than normal user accounts. Step 1) Deal with new accounts (preferably in an anonymous way). Step 2) Mine the actions of older accounts to detect patterns that point back to shilling. Not insurmountable.
- strgrd 10y ago
  What will make Captchas valuable in the future is their ability to act as signatures, verifying you, the owner of the account, were physically present when you did whatever action required verification. They will not just be roadblocks, but checkpoints verifying not just that you are human, but that you are the person you claim to be.
chadwittman 10y ago
I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future. There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records. New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity. These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge. We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity. As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/). I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.
- josho 10y ago
  > I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need. I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.
- strgrd 10y ago
  chad, in regards to history and how the internet will play out, I think you have to look at the power accumulated by information disparities. These online social networks have integrated population-scale monitoring into their design. For the most part, the entire internet has adapted to monitoring the individual in terms of groups and populations. This population-scale knowledge has created a huge information disparity between the people, the social network businesses, and their governments. For the governments especially, the social networks provide a bird's-eye view of the world with macroscopic detail. This amount of knowledge is unprecedented, and the implications of governments operating on this knowledge in secret, I think, are not yet understood.

by strgrd 10y ago

nix0n 10y ago

I find it hard to believe people will complete captchas or give up anonymity in order to vote. The bot vs captcha arms race will continue, but I would be very surprised if the captchas started winning.

ethbro 10y ago
You don't have to employ AI/human differentiation (e.g. captcha) if you statistically mine user actions. I think that's where resolution is more likely to come from. By definition, shill accounts have different patterns than normal user accounts. Step 1) Deal with new accounts (preferably in an anonymous way). Step 2) Mine the actions of older accounts to detect patterns that point back to shilling. Not insurmountable.
strgrd 10y ago
What will make Captchas valuable in the future is their ability to act as signatures, verifying you, the owner of the account, were physically present when you did whatever action required verification. They will not just be roadblocks, but checkpoints verifying not just that you are human, but that you are the person you claim to be.

chadwittman 10y ago

I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future. There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records. New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity. These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge. We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity. As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/). I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.

josho 10y ago
> I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need. I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.
strgrd 10y ago
chad, in regards to history and how the internet will play out, I think you have to look at the power accumulated by information disparities. These online social networks have integrated population-scale monitoring into their design. For the most part, the entire internet has adapted to monitoring the individual in terms of groups and populations. This population-scale knowledge has created a huge information disparity between the people, the social network businesses, and their governments. For the governments especially, the social networks provide a bird's-eye view of the world with macroscopic detail. This amount of knowledge is unprecedented, and the implications of governments operating on this knowledge in secret, I think, are not yet understood.