4 ms·
Because services don't want to be spammed with fake accounts.
by Jyaif 4y ago
Because services don't want to be spammed with fake accounts.
- amelius 4y agoCould you be more precise about what you mean by "fake" accounts?
- rvba 4y agoOne person making multiple accounts to abuse the service. For example by spamming it.
- amelius 4y agoProfessional spammers probably would know how to set up fake email addresses.
- rvba 4y agoYou underestimate the number of people who are bad and technically incompetent. Such basic things can stop a lot of idiots. I guess you still lock your house even if proffessioanal thieves can pick your locks. 99% of thieves are not proffessional.
- amelius 4y ago> I guess you still lock your house even if proffessioanal thieves can pick your locks. No. I'm hoping that lock-makers work with professionals who do pentesting on locks.
- vbezhenar 4y agoCreating fake emails is easy. Rent VPS for $5, set up postfix and you have infinite number of emails.
- Banana699 4y agoReddit, Instagram and Twitter all require emails, and they're some of the most spamful services I have seen. HN requires nothing but a unique name and associated password, and if there's a lot of bots here then I guess they're running really sophisticated NLP. Now of course, HN is more domain specific and niche than other socials so I know it's a bit unfair to compare spam because of course spammers would be more interested in the more populous and general purpose social media, and it's possible that spam and bots on those other services would be even higher if not for email registration, but there's simply no data to support that : email registration is cargo-culted by any remotely user-oriented service without thinking if it fits. And there is a very good reason to think that email registration is just a dumb lazy hack to delegate problems instead of solving them : come to think of it, email fights spam! How do they do it, by delegating to another email service? Email registration all the way down? Of course not, they just run a bunch of really simple stats on the text to reject the obvious 99% trash. Are reddit and twitter too poor to pay for markov chains running on every text submitted?