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Spam is killing tons of services beyond just Email. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, ... Nearly anything public is bombarded with spam. The big players
by gibolt 3y ago
Spam is killing tons of services beyond just Email.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, ...
Nearly anything public is bombarded with spam. The big players are far better suited to deal with it than any newcomers, and even they can barely manage it on their own platforms.
- foobarian 3y agoMakes me want to found a vigilante spam elimination society. Legal methods don't seem to work /mutter
- warning26 3y agoHow would that work? Track down spammers and murder them? Could make for an interesting movie plot.
- bregma 3y ago[flagged]
- mattkevan 3y agoCheck out Rule 34 by Charlie Stross, which is based on exactly that idea. Spoilers, but the basic gist is that an advanced anti-spam AI decides to tackle the problem at the source, so to speak. Recommended reading.
- tyingq 3y agoThere's plenty of collateral damage in existing efforts. Makes the false positive black list entries a little more high-stakes.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"Could make for an interesting movie plot." One that probably leads very quickly to WW3, as the protagonists will find out, that most of the scammers are in countries not on friendly terms with the west (and therefore they tolerate cybercrime against the west). There are also plenty of scammer operating from the west, though, so that anti spam foundation would not run out of work even if they just limit their activities to the west.
- dehrmann 3y agoImagine the penalty for murdering a Nigerian price.
- Cyphase 3y agoThis was a minor plot point in Freedom™, the sequel to Daemon by Daniel Suarez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom%E2%84%A2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom%E2%84%A2
- LinuxBender 3y agoThere are middle grounds. I have a myriad of servers that accept email for any domain as fast as the spam bots can send it, meaning the bots will detect them as open relays. Some bots use tracking codes back to themselves to confirm the relay is indeed open but many do not. The SMTP prompt even says not to use it. Some spammers eventually catch on and start trying poorly to attack my nodes which leads me to believe most of the spammers are not very technical.
- twiddling 3y agoStart with the green card lawyers that kicked it off...
- Groxx 3y agoThey also have no real incentive to make it easier to combat, because that's part of their competitive advantage over self-hosting. As long as it works well enough that people realize the benefit they are providing (note that this does not mean that it's best for it to work perfectly, as that would be invisible), doing more risks worsening their position.
- yafbum 3y agoAnd it's not even limited to online or free. My snail mail is 90% spam even though people have to pay for it to be printed and delivered physically to my door. I wish I had spam filtering for USPS.
- rootusrootus 3y agoYou can reduce some of that. Try this advice: https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoWow, PAY them to stop sending junk mail, what a brilliant scam.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI'd guess that the value they normally get from junk mail over 10 years is more than the $4 processing fee, so I don't think it's a brilliant scam.
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoIt is brilliant. Create a nuisance, then charge to remove the artificial nuisance.
- celim307 3y agoSomething something junk mail funds a large part of usps
- burkaman 3y agoFortunately there's no need for the USPS to be profitable, so we don't need to worry about this
- treeman79 3y agoTwitter now requires a paid subscription to show up in your feed. Anything else is a losing battle. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/change-coming-only-paid-subscribers-will-show-up-in-your-twitter-feed/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/change-coming-only-pa...
- bmarquez 3y agoThe algorithmic "for you" section requires a paid subscription to be included, unless the user is already following an account. Following someone on Twitter is now the email equivalent of "double opt-in" for mailing lists.
- edgyquant 3y agoBots have also made using nearly any dating app a chore. All apps are ruined by it, what we need is some regulations and jail (or some equivalent) to end this.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> Nearly anything public is bombarded with spam. The death throes of a doomed industry. Be it steel, horseshoes or advertisements, as profit margins drop production rates will increase to compensate. Then as the machine is running as fast an as efficiently as it ever has, suddenly the margin becomes zero and there isn't any more room to optimize. The entire industry suddenly stops overnight. I await that day.
- gibolt 3y agoThat is a slightly different issue. This would be like counterfeit steel being sold as of it were the real thing. Or direct-to-consumer horseshoes that will never arrive. Much of this spam is actively out to trick you, as opposed to legitimate players who have no margin left to give.
- jollyllama 3y agoSpam's been a huge industry for twenty years. Those are some long death throes.
- sandworm101 3y agoThanks. Yet another thing I hate about my work machine: window edge spellcheck. It autocorrects without asking me. So I don't notice that I have misspelled something. It just gets corrected to some other word.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoFor automatically dealing with the type of spam that is frequently seen in YouTube comments, I can't help but wonder if perhaps a continuously trained LLM would be well suited. Youtube spam comments tend to have highly atypical patterns, using things like unicode characters to avoid triggering keyword and URL filters. Something along the lines of GPT should pick up on these things pretty easily, and could similarly pick up on the actions these comments are requesting of users "message me on telegram", etc. It could also probably detect when spammers are trying to impersonate youtubers. It's not really the kind of thing that spammers can use LLMs themselves to work around, either. Any attempt to get past the anti-spam LLM is going to look quite unusual compared to the typical comment which would tip it off. Strangely Google seems reticent to try something in this vein though…
- schrodinger 3y agoSpammers will just use LLMs to write spam, an eventual arms race!
- moonchrome 3y agoYou're overestimating spammers, if it raises the floor.
- NavinF 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- ThunderSizzle 3y agoI already believe most of reddit are LLM bots created by reddit I especially in the highly political/moderated boards.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoI'd be curious to hear what gives you this impression. I've read that shadowbanned users on Reddit get banished to a sort of "heaven" echo chamber where they can see only bots replying to and agreeing with them, but I've not seen anything suggesting that happens for unbanned users. There are loads of comment-copier/remixer karma farmer bots but reddit users are becoming better at recognizing and flagging those.
- soupfordummies 3y agoAnd of course the phone call.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI can imagine a situation where someone creates a walled garden that people will willingly pay to be part of. Costs money, involves actual proof of identity (but you could still be broadly anonymous within the garden), with the value proposition being an elimination of all advertising. Web ads, spam, all of it. There is probably some critical mass where this would work. Some people would pay to be able to just not have to do combat with the whole world simply to enjoy the Internet.
- ryan29 3y agoI would like to see this done using domain validated identities. It might not work for everything, but, if I can prove I own a domain, it's a globally unique handle that can be used to build online reputation and trust. It would also make is possible for larger companies to attest to purchases made and / or the quality of participation within their community. Imagine a scenario where I donate $50 to an open source project using GitHub Sponsors with my domain as the identity and GitHub attests to me spending that $50. Over time, it would be possible to demonstrate a significant "investment" in your domain validated identity and it would be done by spending money online like you normally would without any additional cost. The attestation that you spent the money is simply a side effect of something you're already doing, but it's a really good indicator (over time) that you're a normal participant. At the very least, I think having a domain as a globally usable handle would help to reduce impersonation which is a serious, difficult to solve problem right now.
- dotancohen 3y agoDomains can be lost - this idea would exacerbate that problem. In fact, it would give yet another reason to hijack a domain.
- dotancohen 3y agoFigure out how to keep sites hosted off the platform available without advertising, say by a monetary agreement with either them or their ad platform, and I'll be the first in line.
- contravariant 3y ago
- simplotek 3y ago> Spam is killing tons of services beyond just Email. Google Drive is infamous for its spam problem.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoAdd Google search and Amazon listings to the list. Maybe spammers have superpowers, nothing can stop them.
- emodendroket 3y agoI notice that as operations like Twitter and Facebook attempt to get leaner and meaner the spam problem gets worse. I've never seen so many spambots on Twitter advertising porn and guns, and every third comment I get on Facebook gets replies from a supposed scantily clad woman who wants me to DM her.
- ZhadruOmjar 3y agoI run a business Instagram account and my routine is: Make a post, add hashtags, refresh page, delete the spam comments. Its always similar accounts with similar messages and they don't seem to follow the post after it is initially shared.
- usefulcat 3y ago> YouTube Meh. I've watched in the hundreds of hours of YouTube videos without ever seeing or receiving any spam. I guess you must be referring to the comments? If so, perhaps I'm missing out but I've never gone to YouTube for the comments.
- dehrmann 3y agoThat was my thought, unless they meant that the "spam" is 10-minute videos conveying 30 seconds of information.
- thwarted 3y agoTragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.