4 ms·

Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leav

Imo there's two factors at play only one of which seems to get much attention. There's the legality (and burden of compliance even when abiding the law) of leaving your children unsupervised but there's also the complete lack of penalty for being wrong. A person reporting abuse incorrectly is for all intents and purposes, an attacker. Why is attacking someone else with only a brief observation of the situation cost free? Sure there's a balance to be maintained so that people still report actual abuse but why is there no burden upon the attacker to be correct or defensibly confused when the stakes are so high for the defender? If this was a game the imbalance would be an obvious point of dialogue.

devtul 4y ago
Charge $5 bucks for some type of reports, it's a small annoyance which should be nothing for someone truly concerned.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email. Making something free definitely has its costs.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think. Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Well, it would have combated spam effectively, which would have directly decreased the power of Gmail. But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising. Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.
      - makeitdouble 4y ago
        This doesn’t compute to me… On spam: we’ve been receiving physical direct spam mail from the dawn of the modern postal service, and the delivery is paid by the sender. Same way on linkedin for instance, recruiters pay to reach inboxes. Same for many other platforms where spamming and shoving content in users’ feed is monetized by the platform itself. And that’s the bulk of the alternate business models and revenue streams we’re talking about. Not everything needs to be free, but raising paywalls at the wrong place can have devastating effects on platforms.
        ethbr0 4y ago
        Did you use email ~2000? It was a nightmare in sheer spam volume. Zero cost of copying + zero cost of sending = send worldwide all by default, or as close to it as they could get. I'm sure the amount of email that isn't even seen in modern webmail services would still boggle our minds. And as far as I see it, platforms are part of the problem. Marketplaces are better for the customer in the long run. That is to say, shared infrastructure/basic utilities with many different independent vendors on top, each offering goods and services.
        makeitdouble 4y ago
        Sure, the not so early days were rough, everybody and their dog could run a self hosted email server, a lot of us actually did, and the spammer jumped on the bandwagon x1000. But trying to solve these kind of situation with marketplaces only solve them monkey paw style. Marketplaces are for discoverability and supply and demand issues. Fundamentally I don’t want my personal communication to be supply and demand regulated. Instead I want strong enough penalties on entities that flood my inbox. As you point out spam filters help a lot, but to me regulation was the biggest move: having a one click link to unsubscribe from ads and companies actually respect it reduced my inbox manyfold. Businesses I actually have transactions with were the hardest to filter out, and finally some progress was made in that front. In general I feel believing marketplace are more than financial systems only leads disappointment. AppStores are the poster child marketplaces, and they’re sure full of scam and predatory content. Online ads are also marketplaces, facebook made user feeds a marketplace etc.
lolinder 4y ago
I was reading Hammurabi's code the other day and was struck by the fact that the very first thing the code does is establish the consequences for bearing false witness. There's not even an allowance for "well, I thought it was true", if you are accusing another in court then you are running the risk of the same penalty that you are hoping to impose on the other person, whatever penalty that may be. There are lots of problems with Hammurabi's code and I wouldn't suggest emulating this particular implementation, but it's interesting to note just how far back this concern of false accusations goes and how our legal system seems to have backslid a bit in this regard. http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ryandrake 4y ago
Of course, the solution is criminal and/or civil penalties for people making false police reports. If you call to complain about your neighbor and it turns out there was nothing wrong going on, the neighbor should be able to 1. discover who made the complaint and 2. sue for damages. People need to mind their own business unless they are 100% sure there's abuse/crime happening.

devtul 4y ago

Charge $5 bucks for some type of reports, it's a small annoyance which should be nothing for someone truly concerned.

ethbr0 4y ago
I'm convinced the internet would have been better if we had charged $0.05 per email. Making something free definitely has its costs.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I get your point, and it was a pretty serious discussion in the early days I think. Now, introducing micro-transactions into people‘s communication looks like a straight ticket to hell to me. Reminds me of the early days of SMS when only porn sites, scams and businesses that made you pay for their SMS bills would send you messages.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Well, it would have combated spam effectively, which would have directly decreased the power of Gmail. But it would also have, more importantly, created a revenue stream and normalized microtransactions, which would have created an alternate business model to attention/advertising. Nobody likes paying for things... but I think the "free" future we're living in is pretty shitty compared to the way things were before.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      This doesn’t compute to me… On spam: we’ve been receiving physical direct spam mail from the dawn of the modern postal service, and the delivery is paid by the sender. Same way on linkedin for instance, recruiters pay to reach inboxes. Same for many other platforms where spamming and shoving content in users’ feed is monetized by the platform itself. And that’s the bulk of the alternate business models and revenue streams we’re talking about. Not everything needs to be free, but raising paywalls at the wrong place can have devastating effects on platforms.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Did you use email ~2000? It was a nightmare in sheer spam volume. Zero cost of copying + zero cost of sending = send worldwide all by default, or as close to it as they could get. I'm sure the amount of email that isn't even seen in modern webmail services would still boggle our minds. And as far as I see it, platforms are part of the problem. Marketplaces are better for the customer in the long run. That is to say, shared infrastructure/basic utilities with many different independent vendors on top, each offering goods and services.
        makeitdouble 4y ago
        Sure, the not so early days were rough, everybody and their dog could run a self hosted email server, a lot of us actually did, and the spammer jumped on the bandwagon x1000. But trying to solve these kind of situation with marketplaces only solve them monkey paw style. Marketplaces are for discoverability and supply and demand issues. Fundamentally I don’t want my personal communication to be supply and demand regulated. Instead I want strong enough penalties on entities that flood my inbox. As you point out spam filters help a lot, but to me regulation was the biggest move: having a one click link to unsubscribe from ads and companies actually respect it reduced my inbox manyfold. Businesses I actually have transactions with were the hardest to filter out, and finally some progress was made in that front. In general I feel believing marketplace are more than financial systems only leads disappointment. AppStores are the poster child marketplaces, and they’re sure full of scam and predatory content. Online ads are also marketplaces, facebook made user feeds a marketplace etc.

lolinder 4y ago

I was reading Hammurabi's code the other day and was struck by the fact that the very first thing the code does is establish the consequences for bearing false witness. There's not even an allowance for "well, I thought it was true", if you are accusing another in court then you are running the risk of the same penalty that you are hoping to impose on the other person, whatever penalty that may be. There are lots of problems with Hammurabi's code and I wouldn't suggest emulating this particular implementation, but it's interesting to note just how far back this concern of false accusations goes and how our legal system seems to have backslid a bit in this regard. http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Hamm.htm

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ryandrake 4y ago

Of course, the solution is criminal and/or civil penalties for people making false police reports. If you call to complain about your neighbor and it turns out there was nothing wrong going on, the neighbor should be able to 1. discover who made the complaint and 2. sue for damages. People need to mind their own business unless they are 100% sure there's abuse/crime happening.