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I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially sai

I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially said nearly the opposite. The graph is the shape of a tree due to the patterns of invitation fanning out, but there is no such thing as a branch that has more priority over others in a structural or modeling sense. The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot. Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users. I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score. After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.

withinboredom 3y ago
> The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever. And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees. Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > informing them of how spam networks work You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority. The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community. I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    All that means that I can’t spell it out for you, I don’t know how you can be here and not understand contractual obligations. You have to come to the conclusions yourself. All I can kinda do is act as an oracle and say “yeah that might work” or “that sounds like a false sense of security.” Everyone here thus far has had zero curiosity or willingness to debate things on actual merits despite me dropping a few big hints and would rather either attack me personally for being willing to debate something I can’t go into details about (but could probably talk what-ifs), or tell me it is impossible because of a magic tree and I must not know what I’m talking about. So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions. At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.

withinboredom 3y ago

> The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever. And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees. Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
> informing them of how spam networks work You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority. The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community. I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  All that means that I can’t spell it out for you, I don’t know how you can be here and not understand contractual obligations. You have to come to the conclusions yourself. All I can kinda do is act as an oracle and say “yeah that might work” or “that sounds like a false sense of security.” Everyone here thus far has had zero curiosity or willingness to debate things on actual merits despite me dropping a few big hints and would rather either attack me personally for being willing to debate something I can’t go into details about (but could probably talk what-ifs), or tell me it is impossible because of a magic tree and I must not know what I’m talking about. So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions. At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.