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I’ve been on the internet since the 80s and the bad actors were still around back then. USENET was made unusable at one point by people spamming, mass cross pos

I’ve been on the internet since the 80s and the bad actors were still around back then. USENET was made unusable at one point by people spamming, mass cross posting, and playing cancel wars. This was well before ads or profit existed on the net.

acdha 5y ago
This is all true but Google and later Facebook made it easier to monetize spam and were clearly unconcerned about the impact on communities unless advertisers stopped buying. An unethical immigration law firm still needed to sign up clients but a teenager in Moldova could scrape someone else’s content, SEO it, and make a decent income without knowing who the money came from. I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  Anything that facilitates commerce makes it easier to monetize spam, just as it makes it easier to monetize porn, or even illegal activity (eg bitcoin). You can't really fault Google or Facebook for this, as soon as the internet moved away from hobbyists, academia, and scientists towards the general public, it was absolutely inevitable. The only way to have prevented something like that would have been to make the internet a giant closed-garden AOL like system with total control over users, identity, and content. Fundamentally, if you make something frictionless to join, you end up with parasites. If you impose a cost to join, you end up hurting average users, because it's hard to raise the price high enough to keep out bad actors, especially if the expected value is positive and high. (If I need to spend $5000 in order to get one sucker for a MAKE MONEY FAST scheme, it's still worth it) Part of Apple's value proposition is a tightly controlled walled garden with a high cost to entry. If you're willing to pay those costs, you're protected from a lot of spam, at the cost of a lot of friction to enter the ecosystem, and the lost of full autonomy over your devices.

acdha 5y ago

This is all true but Google and later Facebook made it easier to monetize spam and were clearly unconcerned about the impact on communities unless advertisers stopped buying. An unethical immigration law firm still needed to sign up clients but a teenager in Moldova could scrape someone else’s content, SEO it, and make a decent income without knowing who the money came from. I think pjc’s point is extremely important: micropayments could dramatically change things but it’s quite hard to set values which will deter enough spam to be effective without excluding innocent people or simply increasing the damages when someone is compromised. That was what killed proof-of-work email spam concepts decades ago: even if you could get adoption, it wouldn’t have hurt the people using botnets to spam as much as many legitimate users.

cromwellian 5y ago
Anything that facilitates commerce makes it easier to monetize spam, just as it makes it easier to monetize porn, or even illegal activity (eg bitcoin). You can't really fault Google or Facebook for this, as soon as the internet moved away from hobbyists, academia, and scientists towards the general public, it was absolutely inevitable. The only way to have prevented something like that would have been to make the internet a giant closed-garden AOL like system with total control over users, identity, and content. Fundamentally, if you make something frictionless to join, you end up with parasites. If you impose a cost to join, you end up hurting average users, because it's hard to raise the price high enough to keep out bad actors, especially if the expected value is positive and high. (If I need to spend $5000 in order to get one sucker for a MAKE MONEY FAST scheme, it's still worth it) Part of Apple's value proposition is a tightly controlled walled garden with a high cost to entry. If you're willing to pay those costs, you're protected from a lot of spam, at the cost of a lot of friction to enter the ecosystem, and the lost of full autonomy over your devices.