4 ms·

This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people i

This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.

echelon 8mo ago
This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
  - echelon 8mo ago
    If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it. If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network. With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring. Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      I still think that any content anyone is paying for you to see is necessarily spam.
      - anonymous908213 8mo ago
        I don't agree. I think the chief problem with advertising is that it is extremely repetitive. I'm not, in principle, opposed to being informed about new things relevant to my interests existing. In a world that is completely oversaturated with content, it is hard to gain traction on something new with word-of-mouth alone, even if it is of very high quality. There is a point to being informed about something existing for the first time (maybe I'll use it), and there is a reason why people would have to pay to make use of that informational system (the barrier to entry is necessary to make the new thing stand out in the ocean of garbage).
        tsimionescu 8mo ago
        Advertising is never going to inform you - it is by definition about persuasion, not information. An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Even a seller in a physical market telling you their tomatoes are very sweet and juicy is simply trying to get you to buy: they have no idea, and don't care, if their tomatoes really are sweet and juicy (and definitely not sweeter and juicier than all the others tomatoes in the market), they just think you're more likely to buy from them if you hear that.
        anonymous908213 8mo ago
        > An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Perhaps you could consider toning down the absolutism. This is true in many or most cases, but certainly not all cases. Let's take, for example, video games. I can afford to purchase any game that interests me, and do. However, I often go several months between new game purchases, because I am not aware of any games that interest me that I do not already own. An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further. Particularly in the modern world of hyper-specialised interests, it's quite easy to get into a niche of a hobby where you have found and already purchased all of the things you are aware of. As another example, there are hyper-specific novel genres where there are at most a couple of dozen entries in that genre and you are able to read every single entry in it. You are still interested in that genre, and will likely purchase anything else in it, should you become aware of it. Enter the benevolent advertisement, which makes you aware of its existence in a mutually beneficial way wherein you get more of the content you are interested in consuming and the creator gets money.
tux3 8mo ago
If a scammer, advertiser, or some other form of spammer can get a payout just 1% of the time, they will be willing to pay much more than the average person posting the average tweet. If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.
- echelon 8mo ago
  You have the graph of everything you follow, the graph of what they like, second order graphs ... There are so many heuristics and models you can use to filter.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Penis enlargement spam is worth like $0.00000001 per message. Any number higher than that makes them lose money. The real problem is that nobody will post on a social media network where you have to pay to post.
tsimionescu 8mo ago
Micropayments are actually a huge problem, which is a big reason why no one has ever successfully implemented what you're suggesting on any large scale. Email spam is a major problem, and has been almost since its inception, yet the only effective solutions have been the ones that increased centralization and made it harder and harder to run your own email server. And even with all of these modern solutions, a LOT of compute is burned by every single MTA to filter out the spam that goes through for their users based on content filtering. And this disregards the simple fact that the only people willing to pay to have their words seen are people who are getting more money out of this - i.e. spammers (and yes, advertising in general, including "influencers", is spam in my book).
direwolf20 8mo ago
Should I create 1 million accounts with bots that scroll endlessly to harvest microtransactions?
- robcohen 8mo ago
  Ah yes, the sybil attack. This is why establishing an identity is useful, and worthwhile. An identity with no proof is likely not a real person, and therefore has little value in being advertised to. If you're a real person, then yes, it is valuable to show you things. Want to know how I'm right? Because fingerprinting browsers and tracking people is how we establish that they are real in the current advertising world. Advertisers pay for that. Thus it has value.
bccdee 8mo ago
Twitter is thronging with blue-check spambots. This idea has been comprehensively disproven. People will pay to spam you. In fact, judging by the Exodus of non-scammers, only scammers will pay to send you their messages—which makes sense, since they're the ones who expect to turn a profit.
- robcohen 8mo ago
  You did not understand what my original post suggested. I'm not suggesting people pay to be certified. If a spammer wants to pay me $20 to see their message, I am happy to see it.
  - bccdee 8mo ago
    > If a spammer wants to pay me $20 to see their message, I am happy to see it. Yeah, but I'm not. It's spam. And the people whose messages I do want to see are overwhelmingly not going to pay $20 to show it to me. This is a system that selects exclusively for advertisements. Nobody would want this.
    - robcohen 8mo ago
      Would you be willing to see an ad for $1000? A million? Sure no one would pay it, but you can set whatever limit you want. No one would want this? Again I don't think you understand what I am proposing. It isn't a a system that selects exclusively for ads. It selects for people you know, then people they know, and so on, and fades out how often posts show up the further away you get. If someone pays more, then more people will see their message in their network as it compensates people for their attention, starting with the people who value their attention the least. No one would want this? You think people don't want to get paid for their attention? This is essentially what a job is.

echelon 8mo ago

This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks. You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions. We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.

direwolf20 8mo ago
Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions? And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.
- echelon 8mo ago
  If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone. If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it. If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network. With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring. Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    I still think that any content anyone is paying for you to see is necessarily spam.
    - anonymous908213 8mo ago
      I don't agree. I think the chief problem with advertising is that it is extremely repetitive. I'm not, in principle, opposed to being informed about new things relevant to my interests existing. In a world that is completely oversaturated with content, it is hard to gain traction on something new with word-of-mouth alone, even if it is of very high quality. There is a point to being informed about something existing for the first time (maybe I'll use it), and there is a reason why people would have to pay to make use of that informational system (the barrier to entry is necessary to make the new thing stand out in the ocean of garbage).
      - tsimionescu 8mo ago
        Advertising is never going to inform you - it is by definition about persuasion, not information. An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Even a seller in a physical market telling you their tomatoes are very sweet and juicy is simply trying to get you to buy: they have no idea, and don't care, if their tomatoes really are sweet and juicy (and definitely not sweeter and juicier than all the others tomatoes in the market), they just think you're more likely to buy from them if you hear that.
        anonymous908213 8mo ago
        > An advertisement is always designed to try to convince you to buy a different product than you would rationally choose yourself. Perhaps you could consider toning down the absolutism. This is true in many or most cases, but certainly not all cases. Let's take, for example, video games. I can afford to purchase any game that interests me, and do. However, I often go several months between new game purchases, because I am not aware of any games that interest me that I do not already own. An advertisement for a game does not need to convince me to purchase it over an alternative product, it simply needs to make me aware of its existence and broadly convey what the game is about so that I will know whether it matches my specific game interests closely enough to investigate further. Particularly in the modern world of hyper-specialised interests, it's quite easy to get into a niche of a hobby where you have found and already purchased all of the things you are aware of. As another example, there are hyper-specific novel genres where there are at most a couple of dozen entries in that genre and you are able to read every single entry in it. You are still interested in that genre, and will likely purchase anything else in it, should you become aware of it. Enter the benevolent advertisement, which makes you aware of its existence in a mutually beneficial way wherein you get more of the content you are interested in consuming and the creator gets money.

tux3 8mo ago

If a scammer, advertiser, or some other form of spammer can get a payout just 1% of the time, they will be willing to pay much more than the average person posting the average tweet. If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.

echelon 8mo ago
You have the graph of everything you follow, the graph of what they like, second order graphs ... There are so many heuristics and models you can use to filter.
direwolf20 8mo ago
Penis enlargement spam is worth like $0.00000001 per message. Any number higher than that makes them lose money. The real problem is that nobody will post on a social media network where you have to pay to post.

tsimionescu 8mo ago

Micropayments are actually a huge problem, which is a big reason why no one has ever successfully implemented what you're suggesting on any large scale. Email spam is a major problem, and has been almost since its inception, yet the only effective solutions have been the ones that increased centralization and made it harder and harder to run your own email server. And even with all of these modern solutions, a LOT of compute is burned by every single MTA to filter out the spam that goes through for their users based on content filtering. And this disregards the simple fact that the only people willing to pay to have their words seen are people who are getting more money out of this - i.e. spammers (and yes, advertising in general, including "influencers", is spam in my book).

direwolf20 8mo ago

Should I create 1 million accounts with bots that scroll endlessly to harvest microtransactions?

robcohen 8mo ago
Ah yes, the sybil attack. This is why establishing an identity is useful, and worthwhile. An identity with no proof is likely not a real person, and therefore has little value in being advertised to. If you're a real person, then yes, it is valuable to show you things. Want to know how I'm right? Because fingerprinting browsers and tracking people is how we establish that they are real in the current advertising world. Advertisers pay for that. Thus it has value.

bccdee 8mo ago

Twitter is thronging with blue-check spambots. This idea has been comprehensively disproven. People will pay to spam you. In fact, judging by the Exodus of non-scammers, only scammers will pay to send you their messages—which makes sense, since they're the ones who expect to turn a profit.

robcohen 8mo ago
You did not understand what my original post suggested. I'm not suggesting people pay to be certified. If a spammer wants to pay me $20 to see their message, I am happy to see it.
- bccdee 8mo ago
  > If a spammer wants to pay me $20 to see their message, I am happy to see it. Yeah, but I'm not. It's spam. And the people whose messages I do want to see are overwhelmingly not going to pay $20 to show it to me. This is a system that selects exclusively for advertisements. Nobody would want this.
  - robcohen 8mo ago
    Would you be willing to see an ad for $1000? A million? Sure no one would pay it, but you can set whatever limit you want. No one would want this? Again I don't think you understand what I am proposing. It isn't a a system that selects exclusively for ads. It selects for people you know, then people they know, and so on, and fades out how often posts show up the further away you get. If someone pays more, then more people will see their message in their network as it compensates people for their attention, starting with the people who value their attention the least. No one would want this? You think people don't want to get paid for their attention? This is essentially what a job is.