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I don't think the problem is federation. The problem is media where participants have nothing at stake, so that abusers can't be made to pay the costs of their

I don't think the problem is federation. The problem is media where participants have nothing at stake, so that abusers can't be made to pay the costs of their abuse. Changing this isn't incompatible with anonymity - for example you could require anonymous participants to post bonds in a cryptocurrency. But e-mail spam, for example, would never have been a problem if the recipient of an e-mail could push a button and destroy $1 of the sender's money. Getting the incentives right for a social network is undoubtedly harder, but you can't even start until people have something to lose.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PakG1 8y ago
I was originally thinking that putting this in monetary terms would cause the rich to have an inordinate advantage for free speech. Then I realized that the larger their speech reach, maybe the larger their financial penalty (taking the example of spam). But then in that case, it still simply becomes a case of who can afford it. It's like defending against a DDOS attack, it depends on who has the bigger pipe. Agree that getting the mechanics for social networks would be hard. Not sure if financial mechanisms are the answer (not saying you're saying that). It puts a price on speech. There has to be a better way.
pessimizer 8y ago
I'm not sure how that makes sense. Wouldn't that just mean that trolls could attack targets financially in addition to silencing them?
- TheDong 8y ago
  Presumably it would still require manual human moderation to ensure that a slew of reports isn't a coordinated attack. But also, presumably fewer trolls would exist if you had to put up a "$x" bond before signing up in the first place.
  - ohhellno 8y ago
    So fewer trolls, but the ones who remain will be trolling the system and bankrupting people. Perfect.
Fnoord 8y ago
Yeah, Bill Gates proposed that solution to spam. Another one is having people register with proven credentials of their legal name and physical address. Yet Hacker News isn't using these. Because shadow banning, for example, works. Having someone's voice lost while they don't know about it (keep living in their bubble) works. The lesson here: don't assume that your solution is the only solution. Usenet, e-mail, and forums have taught us already that the solution to this problem is advanced, silent filtering (which have been innovated in the anti-spam arms race [1]) essentially akin to shadow banning. The enforcement of law also tends to help. [1] RBLs, Bayesian filtering, and the already mentioned shadow banning
- m1573rp34130dy 8y ago
  whats kinda usefull is to let the shadow banned all talk to each other, so they can keep each other company, it seems less likely they will realize the gig is up and try to make another sock puppet...
- repolfx 8y ago
  Shadow banning doesn't work against any adversary that's more sophisticated than an annoying person on the internet. As you observe, email spam filters are basically just "shadow bans" and spammers aren't confused by them at all, they just send themselves test messages. Spam filters work for lots of reasons but not because spammers can't figure out if they're caught or not.
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > Because shadow banning, for example, works. Having someone's voice lost while they don't know about it (keep living in their bubble) works. Shadow banning is evil and intransparent. It may work, but at what cost?
  - csydas 8y ago
    Why evil? Or more specifically, why any more evil than any other form of punishment with regards to online communication? If one bans a user as opposed to just shadow ban, the end result is the user either gives up or just makes another account. In rare instances they reform, but usually it's not a reform, it's a change in methodology to avoid whatever condition got them banned in the first place. This isn't rehabilitation, it's learning not to get caught. In either case, straight up ban or Shadow ban, someone is silenced as a punishment. In either case, the user likely isn't learning their lesson. In either case, the tools are ripe for abuse. What is the exceptional cost of shadow bans besides them being opaque?
CJefferson 8y ago
The quantity of physical spam I get through my letterbox suggests charging doesn't cure spam -- although I admit it reduces it.
erpellan 8y ago
Every solution needs to be robust in the presence of an adversary who is more technically savvy, motivated, organised, numerous and dedicated than an average user. That's why it's really hard. Any tool you give an individual to protect themselves can be turned against them by an army.
- naasking 8y ago
  That's why white/blacklisting and similar measures will never work. What you need is proper delegation with an incrementally built web of trust. Instead of your email address being a human-readable public address, it should be a revokable cryptographically unguessable address that's unique to each person to whom you're introduced. Introductions happen via a protocol which generates a new address given to that person, and you then assign a purely local pet name you use to refer to them [1]. Given any generated address, you can trace back the history of introductions that led to it. This very clearly solves spam problems since it completely upends the traditional approach with a bottom-up solution. I'm not sure anything else could be immune to abuse to the same extent though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname
  - yorwba 8y ago
    I think distributing the work of verifying new accounts as non-spammers to over all existing users is the only way a social network can grow without losing to the spammers or overloading their human moderators, so I like your idea. But how do you solve the problem of people wanting to join who have no existing contacts in the network to invite them? Most likely they would use some other channel to request an invitation from a stranger and hope that they'll grant them access. If that happens, then it dilutes the power of the web of trust. A spammer could manually create a bunch of accounts in the same way, and then use them to grow botnets at the edges of the web of trust. If only a few bots are used to spread spam, it would take a while to accurately determine which part of the network is controlled by the spammer.
    - naasking 8y ago
      But spamming has no power in this system. You can collect a huge list of addresses, but as soon as you abuse them once they would be revoked. One-time spamming isn't a viable business strategy. The bootstrap problem is indeed challenging with this approach. Normally you could connect with people you know in real life using an NFC or QR code exchange, but social networks have created an expectation of being able to find people by searching an open directory. That's a spammers dream. As soon as you can send a friend request that's just reintroducing open addressing. I haven't spent much time thinking about this since I rarely use social media, but my first thought is that you voluntarily join some groups and find people that way, ie. High school groups, etc. Perhaps friend recommendations by randomly asking existing members could be used to very the validity of newcomers.
empath75 8y ago
Metafilter charges a one-time $5 fee to post. It also has extensive human moderation. It’s worked well for them but they’ve never tried to scale up.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  By some informal measures, Metafilter has stupidly high S/N ratios.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    For those interested, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
- CM30 8y ago
  Yeah, that's certainly one way to improve the signal/noise ratio of a social networking site, but it simply can't scale to the size of say, Facebook or Twitter. Human moderation is simply too slow and expensive to be done on an 'industrial' scale, and charging money will always significantly limit a site or service's audience. Then again, perhaps the unfortunate truth is that something on the scale of today's mainstream social networks is simply unworkable. Perhaps at a certain size a community site simply falls apart, and nothing short of human level AI will be able to keep it intact.
amelius 8y ago
Is my spam filter allowed to push that button?
dredmorbius 8y ago
It's not so much that the problem is federation than that the solution is quite clearly not federation alone. Tools, policies, values, coordination & cooperation, and the syones to create, specify, and use these, are necessary.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Immunity, impunity, and ignorance are superpowers enabling some good, and far more harm. Costs do not have to entail financial transactions, though that's one option. Devising a hard-to-establish reputation, which can be lost on signs of clear anti-social behaviour, is one approach. Accounting for the inevitability of Sybil attacks is a challenge.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

PakG1 8y ago

I was originally thinking that putting this in monetary terms would cause the rich to have an inordinate advantage for free speech. Then I realized that the larger their speech reach, maybe the larger their financial penalty (taking the example of spam). But then in that case, it still simply becomes a case of who can afford it. It's like defending against a DDOS attack, it depends on who has the bigger pipe. Agree that getting the mechanics for social networks would be hard. Not sure if financial mechanisms are the answer (not saying you're saying that). It puts a price on speech. There has to be a better way.

pessimizer 8y ago

I'm not sure how that makes sense. Wouldn't that just mean that trolls could attack targets financially in addition to silencing them?

TheDong 8y ago
Presumably it would still require manual human moderation to ensure that a slew of reports isn't a coordinated attack. But also, presumably fewer trolls would exist if you had to put up a "$x" bond before signing up in the first place.
- ohhellno 8y ago
  So fewer trolls, but the ones who remain will be trolling the system and bankrupting people. Perfect.

Fnoord 8y ago

Yeah, Bill Gates proposed that solution to spam. Another one is having people register with proven credentials of their legal name and physical address. Yet Hacker News isn't using these. Because shadow banning, for example, works. Having someone's voice lost while they don't know about it (keep living in their bubble) works. The lesson here: don't assume that your solution is the only solution. Usenet, e-mail, and forums have taught us already that the solution to this problem is advanced, silent filtering (which have been innovated in the anti-spam arms race [1]) essentially akin to shadow banning. The enforcement of law also tends to help. [1] RBLs, Bayesian filtering, and the already mentioned shadow banning

m1573rp34130dy 8y ago
whats kinda usefull is to let the shadow banned all talk to each other, so they can keep each other company, it seems less likely they will realize the gig is up and try to make another sock puppet...
repolfx 8y ago
Shadow banning doesn't work against any adversary that's more sophisticated than an annoying person on the internet. As you observe, email spam filters are basically just "shadow bans" and spammers aren't confused by them at all, they just send themselves test messages. Spam filters work for lots of reasons but not because spammers can't figure out if they're caught or not.
mschuster91 8y ago
> Because shadow banning, for example, works. Having someone's voice lost while they don't know about it (keep living in their bubble) works. Shadow banning is evil and intransparent. It may work, but at what cost?
- csydas 8y ago
  Why evil? Or more specifically, why any more evil than any other form of punishment with regards to online communication? If one bans a user as opposed to just shadow ban, the end result is the user either gives up or just makes another account. In rare instances they reform, but usually it's not a reform, it's a change in methodology to avoid whatever condition got them banned in the first place. This isn't rehabilitation, it's learning not to get caught. In either case, straight up ban or Shadow ban, someone is silenced as a punishment. In either case, the user likely isn't learning their lesson. In either case, the tools are ripe for abuse. What is the exceptional cost of shadow bans besides them being opaque?

CJefferson 8y ago

The quantity of physical spam I get through my letterbox suggests charging doesn't cure spam -- although I admit it reduces it.

erpellan 8y ago

Every solution needs to be robust in the presence of an adversary who is more technically savvy, motivated, organised, numerous and dedicated than an average user. That's why it's really hard. Any tool you give an individual to protect themselves can be turned against them by an army.

naasking 8y ago
That's why white/blacklisting and similar measures will never work. What you need is proper delegation with an incrementally built web of trust. Instead of your email address being a human-readable public address, it should be a revokable cryptographically unguessable address that's unique to each person to whom you're introduced. Introductions happen via a protocol which generates a new address given to that person, and you then assign a purely local pet name you use to refer to them [1]. Given any generated address, you can trace back the history of introductions that led to it. This very clearly solves spam problems since it completely upends the traditional approach with a bottom-up solution. I'm not sure anything else could be immune to abuse to the same extent though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petname
- yorwba 8y ago
  I think distributing the work of verifying new accounts as non-spammers to over all existing users is the only way a social network can grow without losing to the spammers or overloading their human moderators, so I like your idea. But how do you solve the problem of people wanting to join who have no existing contacts in the network to invite them? Most likely they would use some other channel to request an invitation from a stranger and hope that they'll grant them access. If that happens, then it dilutes the power of the web of trust. A spammer could manually create a bunch of accounts in the same way, and then use them to grow botnets at the edges of the web of trust. If only a few bots are used to spread spam, it would take a while to accurately determine which part of the network is controlled by the spammer.
  - naasking 8y ago
    But spamming has no power in this system. You can collect a huge list of addresses, but as soon as you abuse them once they would be revoked. One-time spamming isn't a viable business strategy. The bootstrap problem is indeed challenging with this approach. Normally you could connect with people you know in real life using an NFC or QR code exchange, but social networks have created an expectation of being able to find people by searching an open directory. That's a spammers dream. As soon as you can send a friend request that's just reintroducing open addressing. I haven't spent much time thinking about this since I rarely use social media, but my first thought is that you voluntarily join some groups and find people that way, ie. High school groups, etc. Perhaps friend recommendations by randomly asking existing members could be used to very the validity of newcomers.

empath75 8y ago

Metafilter charges a one-time $5 fee to post. It also has extensive human moderation. It’s worked well for them but they’ve never tried to scale up.

dredmorbius 8y ago
By some informal measures, Metafilter has stupidly high S/N ratios.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  For those interested, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
CM30 8y ago
Yeah, that's certainly one way to improve the signal/noise ratio of a social networking site, but it simply can't scale to the size of say, Facebook or Twitter. Human moderation is simply too slow and expensive to be done on an 'industrial' scale, and charging money will always significantly limit a site or service's audience. Then again, perhaps the unfortunate truth is that something on the scale of today's mainstream social networks is simply unworkable. Perhaps at a certain size a community site simply falls apart, and nothing short of human level AI will be able to keep it intact.

amelius 8y ago

Is my spam filter allowed to push that button?

dredmorbius 8y ago

It's not so much that the problem is federation than that the solution is quite clearly not federation alone. Tools, policies, values, coordination & cooperation, and the syones to create, specify, and use these, are necessary.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Immunity, impunity, and ignorance are superpowers enabling some good, and far more harm. Costs do not have to entail financial transactions, though that's one option. Devising a hard-to-establish reputation, which can be lost on signs of clear anti-social behaviour, is one approach. Accounting for the inevitability of Sybil attacks is a challenge.