There's a kind of musical chairs or hot potato game being played with online trust. Nobody wants to pay to post; nobody wants to pay for moderation; nobody want

There's a kind of musical chairs or hot potato game being played with online trust. Nobody wants to pay to post; nobody wants to pay for moderation; nobody wants to moderate uncompensated for a long period; and nobody wants to stay somewhere that's unmoderated(even if the moderation is a bare minimum no-spambots rule.) The reason why the internet was functioning on trust was because it had economic arrangements powering it in a more invisible sense: the market demand was for more access to content, not higher quality of content. But we're really facing down the final conclusion of that with AI-generated spam. It can be encoded as hours of 8k video with the photorealistic likenesses of multiple celebrities, your spouse, parents and children all speaking to you: it will still be spam. Either the content has some kind of market price or carrying cost on it or we are willing to be elaborately lied to forever. This isn't even a new issue to economics - the transition from free to regulated markets tends to be precipitated on the demand side by a desire for quality(safe food, air, water etc.) even if the regulation itself is ineffectual. Blockchains are expensive in terms of data quantity, but they do get at certain parts of the issue; someone who elects to post content through one is signalling way above the noise floor, and it's only biased in that it self-selects to people who own some of that token(which does not necessarily lead to a one-to-rule-them-all billionaire's dystopia - precisely the opposite, it's relatively easy in a technical sense to spin up a small and short-lived chain and hand out some free tokens if you only need a little bit of security for a limited period of time, but that's not a framing we've normalized).