5 ms·

It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the ave

It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.

amelius 5y ago
Wouldn't that provide more data on who are the scammers?
- djohnston 5y ago
  Not really. In these areas there's a general principle that the moment you start using a signal to enforce on bad actors that signal's value decays. It's sad, I actually think web3 could help curb abuse at scale by making it too expensive to scale horizontally. Imagine paying a "stamp" to send an email on the blockchain, spam email would dramatically drop. Maybe similar mechanics could be in play for other things but then you lose democratization of information.
  - kgonza 5y ago
    What is web3? What exactly is it? And how could it be used in this case?
    - djohnston 5y ago
      The idea is you'd have an email client but all data is stored encrypted on chain and you'd have to pay tx costs to send things. By having this sort of stamp tax spammer wouldn't be able to scale mass messaging as it would bankrupt them.
      - jspiral 5y ago
        in meatspace though, my real mailbox is mostly filled with spam that the sender paid to have delivered. granted, it would at least act as a limiting factor.
        Schroedingersat 5y ago
        If you have an auditable tx history, then mixers/exchanges/wallets etc can be marked as sources of the money used by spammers
machiaweliczny 5y ago
What if they took only votes from people that pay and have account for X time? Also what’s the problem with adding revert per user? With some events architekture it should be trivial. They could even train AI on this data to automatically sugest suspects.
- mcv 5y ago
  It's totally fine if they only use my own votes to modify my results. In fact, if we're going to do that, I'd really like to block some sites from my search results entirely. Though ideally, I would also like to include the votes from people I trust.
- lbriner 5y ago
  People sell good accounts for lots of money to the spammers.
  - mcv 5y ago
    And when those accounts suddenly start behaving like bad accounts, their votes get treated as such. There will be a window of confusion, but it might not be that big. And there would be an economic incentive for people to establish trusted accounts with high-quality voting behaviour.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Here's an easy thought experiment: for any propose of the type "what if they had a system that did X?", imagine that someone tells you they'll give you 10 million dollars if you can figure out a way to game that system that can't be detected by Google. If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
  - eru 5y ago
    Google might not be able to 'win', but they can stay ahead. Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.
wruza 5y ago
They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.
- amelius 5y ago
  I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
  - mcv 5y ago
    Well, every social media network tries to capture and monetize this, of course. But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
    - amelius 5y ago
      If the group of trusted people in a bubble is large enough (say 1000s of people), then it wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
      - eru 5y ago
        Anonymization is actually really, really hard.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
Their entire business (advertising) is clustering. They've already done the hard bit. Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.

It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.

amelius 5y ago

Wouldn't that provide more data on who are the scammers?

djohnston 5y ago
Not really. In these areas there's a general principle that the moment you start using a signal to enforce on bad actors that signal's value decays. It's sad, I actually think web3 could help curb abuse at scale by making it too expensive to scale horizontally. Imagine paying a "stamp" to send an email on the blockchain, spam email would dramatically drop. Maybe similar mechanics could be in play for other things but then you lose democratization of information.
- kgonza 5y ago
  What is web3? What exactly is it? And how could it be used in this case?
  - djohnston 5y ago
    The idea is you'd have an email client but all data is stored encrypted on chain and you'd have to pay tx costs to send things. By having this sort of stamp tax spammer wouldn't be able to scale mass messaging as it would bankrupt them.
    - jspiral 5y ago
      in meatspace though, my real mailbox is mostly filled with spam that the sender paid to have delivered. granted, it would at least act as a limiting factor.
      - Schroedingersat 5y ago
        If you have an auditable tx history, then mixers/exchanges/wallets etc can be marked as sources of the money used by spammers

machiaweliczny 5y ago

What if they took only votes from people that pay and have account for X time? Also what’s the problem with adding revert per user? With some events architekture it should be trivial. They could even train AI on this data to automatically sugest suspects.

mcv 5y ago
It's totally fine if they only use my own votes to modify my results. In fact, if we're going to do that, I'd really like to block some sites from my search results entirely. Though ideally, I would also like to include the votes from people I trust.
lbriner 5y ago
People sell good accounts for lots of money to the spammers.
- mcv 5y ago
  And when those accounts suddenly start behaving like bad accounts, their votes get treated as such. There will be a window of confusion, but it might not be that big. And there would be an economic incentive for people to establish trusted accounts with high-quality voting behaviour.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
Here's an easy thought experiment: for any propose of the type "what if they had a system that did X?", imagine that someone tells you they'll give you 10 million dollars if you can figure out a way to game that system that can't be detected by Google. If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
- eru 5y ago
  Google might not be able to 'win', but they can stay ahead. Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.

wruza 5y ago

They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.

amelius 5y ago
I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
- mcv 5y ago
  Well, every social media network tries to capture and monetize this, of course. But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
  - amelius 5y ago
    If the group of trusted people in a bubble is large enough (say 1000s of people), then it wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
    - eru 5y ago
      Anonymization is actually really, really hard.

Schroedingersat 5y ago

Their entire business (advertising) is clustering. They've already done the hard bit. Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.