3 ms·

Perhaps rather then filtering per se, focus on the economic equation of moderation. Fundamentally moderation is about the time/resource cost of the moderator(s)

by xoa 6y ago

Perhaps rather then filtering per se, focus on the economic equation of moderation. Fundamentally moderation is about the time/resource cost of the moderator(s) vs the time/resource cost of evasion. Good moderation is probably an AI-complete problem, so it's hard to automate right now. Most efforts at improving that seem to either use broad brush measures and heuristics on the mod side, or so-so proxy measures for the evasion side. From captchas to money to asking for ID, all at the end of the day are about trying to make it more 'expensive' to evade bans. If the expense is really high, then even a small bit of moderation can keep up. But instead of any of that why not just do a time token directly and with full pseudonomyity? Matrix.org could ask people to do something like brute force RSA, choosing key lengths based on how much time they want to represent, and then sign a "Time Level" certificate result. Community operators could then dynamically adjust how much "time investment" they wanted to require in order to participate, and would have a mechanism to ban independent of IP or anything else. And this could be expected to increase over time as people let their systems run a day or two a month. If in a few years it requires a token equivalent to a month of computation time that would be a high bar to evasion. It would not require any money, identity, or knowledge of behavior elsewhere, but people would have strong incentives not to burn their Time Level tokens, or at least to comply with non-permanent bans. You could further tweak things by having per-community tokens which can only be issued once per cert, so identity can't be as easily tracked across communities while still stopping evasion. This should all be near completely automatable as well. Anyway, just some musing. I guess the question is if communities had effective cryptographicly guaranteed rate controls and moderation stickiness, would they really need more in practice to keep up?

Reelin 6y ago
Don't measures based on computational difficulty have the effect of erecting an impossibly high barrier for those with limited access to such resources? (The poor, anyone using a mobile device, etc). Any system with a reasonably low bar can probably be worked around by a spammer at a low enough cost per account that it's unlikely to be of much use. Some services (many subreddits, for example) use account age as a metric. That's easy to work around with mass registrations of zombie accounts though. Some services (again many subreddits) use overall network reputation as a metric. That makes life difficult for new users though in addition to all the privacy issues surrounding centralized reputation and identity. Some services use a phone number as a unique identifier that's more difficult to come by than an email or IP address. That still poses an accessibility issue and also introduces a privacy one. Sorry, I don't actually have a solution here. Just a bunch of problems.
- xoa 6y ago
  >* Don't measures based on computational difficulty have the effect of erecting an impossibly high barrier for those with limited access to such resources?* I don't think this is true so much with the flattening of computational growth. These days a 10-15% general gain year over year is quite good, and we've seen gens with less. Order of magnitude is close enough in this case, there isn't that much practical difference between a week vs two weeks. >(The poor, anyone using a mobile device, etc). Case in point, for much of the population their mobile devices may well be their most powerful ones. A 7 year old PC can still be extremely capable, etc. Also again, this is just another tool idea. A community can use it to whatever degree they deem appropriate, and that can vary dynamically. So in regular times a low volume community might set a very low level, just a few minutes worth say. But if there was a sudden influx, they could temporarily ramp it up for new joiners.

by xoa 6y ago

Reelin 6y ago

Don't measures based on computational difficulty have the effect of erecting an impossibly high barrier for those with limited access to such resources? (The poor, anyone using a mobile device, etc). Any system with a reasonably low bar can probably be worked around by a spammer at a low enough cost per account that it's unlikely to be of much use. Some services (many subreddits, for example) use account age as a metric. That's easy to work around with mass registrations of zombie accounts though. Some services (again many subreddits) use overall network reputation as a metric. That makes life difficult for new users though in addition to all the privacy issues surrounding centralized reputation and identity. Some services use a phone number as a unique identifier that's more difficult to come by than an email or IP address. That still poses an accessibility issue and also introduces a privacy one. Sorry, I don't actually have a solution here. Just a bunch of problems.

xoa 6y ago
>* Don't measures based on computational difficulty have the effect of erecting an impossibly high barrier for those with limited access to such resources?* I don't think this is true so much with the flattening of computational growth. These days a 10-15% general gain year over year is quite good, and we've seen gens with less. Order of magnitude is close enough in this case, there isn't that much practical difference between a week vs two weeks. >(The poor, anyone using a mobile device, etc). Case in point, for much of the population their mobile devices may well be their most powerful ones. A 7 year old PC can still be extremely capable, etc. Also again, this is just another tool idea. A community can use it to whatever degree they deem appropriate, and that can vary dynamically. So in regular times a low volume community might set a very low level, just a few minutes worth say. But if there was a sudden influx, they could temporarily ramp it up for new joiners.