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Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: wi
by jyrkesh 7y ago
Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.
- rayiner 7y agoI don't think calls to regulate Twitter/FB would get much traction if all they were doing was spam filtering. To see it from a different direction: imagine the shit show that would happen if Google started "moderating" gmail content, even though it currently does very aggressive spam filtering.
- tomp 7y agoIndeed. Spam filters, porn filters, swearword filters... all of those have precedents (in mainstream, non-social/internet media) and are perfectly acceptable by most of society. In addition, notice that even GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it - it's an assistant, not arbiter of what you should see. It's more than happy for you to adjust the filters (for yourself personally). Edit: GMail also does prioritization as of recently - but again, the purpose of that is to help users not filter content. Again, those algorithms are also adjustable for each user separately, they just have some "smart" defaults.
- tambourine_man 7y agoKind of. You can't turn their anti-spam off, you can't exclude addresses from it and, worse for me, Gmail can hard bounce if it doesn't like something in your server/IP/content in a way that's not fully documented or reproducible.
- stubish 7y agoYou can now. You can create a filter matching whatever criteria you want (including from:foo@example.com or a catch all), and specify matches 'never get flagged as spam'. Its not obvious, but it is there. And the usual limitations of filters apply, such as not being able to match arbitrary headers.
- krageon 7y agoThings can get flagged outside of your mailbox as so spammy that they will never arrive. This is how every spam filter works that I have seen to date and google is no exception.
- oarsinsync 7y agoThat only works on mail that actually gets delivered to your mailbox. Gmail can and will: - Reject delivery of mail from sources it has determined to be spammy (e.g. residential IPs) - this mechanism allows the sender to be aware that delivery failed. - Accept delivery and then silently drop the message somewhere between after accepting delivery but before appearing in the end user's mailbox. In either case, there is nothing you (the mailbox holder) can do. In the second case, there is no way for anyone to know the message hasn't been delivered.
- spiraldancing 7y ago>GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it This is not accurate. There is a long on-going issue with GMail (and others) wholesale blocking delivery of email from domains/IPs/providers it deems to be spam or otherwise inappropriate. GMail users get no indication/notification, and generally have no idea that email sent to them was simply not delivered.
- yters 7y agoGoogle does censor my email to some extent. It send a number of conservative emails straight to spam.
- Spooky23 7y agoPolitical emails tend to get tagged as spam in general. I have someone close to me who is involved in local Democratic Party and progressive organizations. When you go to an event or donate money (say an award banquet), they share your name and spam the crap out of you. A lot of that mail gets tagged as spam as a result. Conservative outlets work similarly, but they seem to have bigger online operations and are hard to get out of. My in laws get barraged with this stuff, and a mail provider like GMail or Microsoft gets a lot of spam signals from it I’m sure.
- QualityReboot 7y agoI've heard people in the political world talk about buying and selling email lists, which I thought was illegal, but seems to be common practice.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoIn the early 90's I gave something like $20 to the Sierra Club or a similar group. After a deluge in physical mail asking for donations from around the political spectrum, I never did it again. I left no forwarding address after moving either. Pretty dumb on their part, they traded all their goodwill for a short-term dollar.
- mlang23 7y agoPolitical emails are spam. No matter from which direction they come from. So tagging them as spam seems just the right thing to do.
- Errancer 7y agoPolitical emails often are spam but not all of them. I subscribed to few newsletters from various political parties and I don't want google to block them from me.
- throwaway1777 7y agoIt’s still not so easy. At what point does “fake news” become spam?
- eanzenberg 7y agoIts pretty obvious what’s spam and what isn’t. “Fake news” is extremely subjective, so try not to anger half the country :)
- cryptonector 7y agoAnything can be spam because spam is in the eye of the beholder, but nonetheless, politics is generally not spam. You can have a politically-neutral policy against undesirable content that passes the smell test. It does require that you a) use reasonably objective terms in the definition of "spam", and b) that you resist the inevitable pressure to reinterpret those terms to cover that which others find undesirable political content.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoActually politics generally is spam - in the sense that much of it is knowingly dishonest self-promotion of individuals and social groups. Just because politics isn't trying to sell you a penis extension doesn't mean it isn't trying to sell you something far worse. It doesn't even matter how political content is published. What matters is that currently voters get more protection from a faulty toaster than from lies knowingly generated by politicians and corporate PR outfits. The creation of deliberately false "talking points", fake news, smear campaigns, organised trolling and astroturfing, fake reviews, fake feedback, and other kinds of cognitive pollution should be banned from all forms of media. Which is not to say this is easy or straightforward. But attempts should be made - because lying to voters and consumers is absolutely toxic to genuine democracy.
- eanzenberg 7y agoThere’s something fascinating when you equate penis enlargement spam with political speech. Btw, laying in politics has happened for like forever. Is there any evidence that it’s worse than in the past?
- Nasrudith 7y agoBoth are messages coming to you. Just because they have the right to metaphorically knock on your door doesn't mean both campaigners and vacuum cleaner salesmen don't get the door slammed on them and doormen won't tell both to scram if they try to visit apartments unsolicited. The difference in categort broadness seems classically strawmen as well.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xiphias2 7y agoAt Google the top metric used to be relevance for a long time (until Amit Singhal was kicked out) for a good reason: it's a metric that kicks out spam, but doesn't pick sides. Times and leadership has changed since though.
- magduf 7y agoAll good things...
- bmc7505 7y ago> without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam I don't understand this argument at all. Is it so difficult for users to curate the list of accounts they follow?
- Domenic_S 7y agoReplies. It would be impossible to follow a thread. Even today it can get rough following a thread spawned from an elon musk tweet, given all the crypto-scamming.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoThat's interesting because we desperately need spam filtering on our phones right now.
- eru 7y agoFirefox on Android allows extensions. Including ad blockers.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoI was referring to filtering spam phone calls.
- eru 7y agoOh, those are annoying. I've been getting some lately, but not nearly as many as other people seem to be getting. I think Google lets you report numbers as spam? (And, of course, caller id can be faked, but the important bit is that spam will differ statistically from legitimate calls.)
- hamhock666 7y agoI think if there are going to be filters, then it would make sense for users to be able to opt in or out of filters. That way you can choose what you want to see, instead of having an almighty force that determines what you see. Having global filters that users can't turn off, besides to filter out illegal content, needlessly take away freedom from users.
- anm89 7y agoI think there is a "I know it when I see it" type of argument to say, we will make the strongest effort possible to never censor anything that is not attempting to sell a product but we reserve the right to force advertisements to go through a specific channel. For better or worse the types Of things which get called to be banned from a platform for being unacceptable speech rarely resemble the specific styles of advertising we classify as spam. Another argument is let users be ther own spam control.have some idiot acquaintance from middle school who keeps spamming pyramid scheme and/or nazism? Fine, just unfriend them. As long as you are given control over what content is pushed at you directly, there is no need to sensor the whole platform because of a specific undesirable.
- Fnoord 7y agoUsenet dealt with this via killfile. There is no reason why you cannot do client-side filtering (compare /silence with /ignore in IRC). Client-side and server-side each have their pros and cons.
- dredmorbius 7y agoUsenet also had Cancelmoose and the Cabal (TINC). Both individual and administrative filters are necessary.