5 ms·
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who
by bsaul 7mo ago
I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced.
And i'm looking forward to none of them.
- basch 7mo agoHow would you overcome a local llm embedded into a keyboard?
- Invictus0 7mo agoYou could have easily said this twenty years ago when photoshopped photos were going viral on the early internet. Turns out people are completely fine with ai content and photoshop.
- csallen 7mo agoThere's a huge difference between fake content and fake authors.
- crab_galaxy 7mo agoFine in what way? What people? I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment. The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
- officeplant 7mo agoThe most common people just seem to be the elderly who don't care / don't know any better. The same ones who told us never to believe anything from the internet. They seem to be hooked on weird AI jesus facebook posts, daily AI generated motivational content, talking to the chatbot in Whatsapp, etc.
- Invictus0 7mo agoThere are probably more than 10^17 AI model executions occurring per day. I know in ye olde HN there are many Purists that are Too Good For AI, but the majority of the human race is consuming AI at a blinding rate, and if they really didn't like it, they would stop.
- girvo 7mo ago> and if they really didn't like it, they would stop. I can’t really articulate why, but this doesn’t feel true to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at scale that we don’t like, or we do that we don’t like others doing, and don’t stop
- pixl97 7mo ago>The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" refers to a scenario where individual, rational self-interest leads to a collective outcome that is disastrous for everyone. It describes competitive, zero-sum dynamics—often called a "race to the bottom"—where participants sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term gains, resulting in a loss for all involved. Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.
- pseudalopex 7mo agoWho wrote what you quoted?
- pixl97 7mo agoInstead of getting judgy about Google responses, read the original story. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
- pseudalopex 7mo agoI read the story before. Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gdulli 7mo agoYour comment doesn't make sense because the fact that "dead internet" has been coined since then (along with the popularization of "slop" and "hallucination") means there is a line and we have crossed it. Denial doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways emerging technologies would eventually be used against us. Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them. Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.
- yakattak 7mo agoHonestly the $10 barrier to SomethingAwful back in the day (and I guess now since it’s still around) definitely made a huge difference. I hate the idea of subscribing to a site like HN or Reddit… but one time $10 to post? I’d accept that if it meant less bots.
- bonesss 7mo agoA $10 one time not-an-asshole fee is totally reasonable. History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
- hinkley 7mo agoI wonder how much that functions as an age gate since kids usually don't have credit cards?
- pndy 7mo agoDidn't that fee allowed to change account names of other users or something like that?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- yakattak 7mo agoYou could pay another $10 (or maybe $15?) to change someone else's avatar.
- ryandrake 7mo agoI would probably not pay $10 to post on HN, but many spammers who expect some kind of tangible return would pay that, so the fee just makes the problem worse.
- munk-a 7mo agoThe spammers wouldn't pay it once though - the idea is that it's a good way to scale moderation. Each time an admin needs to ban a user there is a 10$ subsidy supporting that action - and if the bots come back then they get to pay 10$ to be banned again. Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
- QQ00 7mo agoSomeone, somewhere, salivating at the idea of combining both ideas. A paid for digital ID service that you can use as authentication for the web. Actually, if I'm thinking about it. Social Media platforms already started this with the paid blue badge for verification, and it's also monthly subscription. But it's for their respective platform only, not universal.
- geek_at 7mo agoWould that work though? Unless it checks your pulse every 30 minutes I don't see how that would make it better. Bots would use stolen IDs for that. It would only contain it at a smaller scale probably
- booi 7mo agoThere's definitely a price where it doesn't scale and that price is almost certainly lower than what people would be willing to pay once for themselves.
- pphysch 7mo agoIt would have to integrate with some kind of official government ID, so that there can be extremely serious criminal penalties for ID theft. But that's something for the next republic, because the current one's justice system is unlikely to be up to the task.
- roxolotl 7mo agoIsn’t this what World Coin is? Definitively not a fan of the project but I think the general goal is to get people to verify they are human and then somehow “waves hands blockchain” that can be carried with them on the internet.
- bakugo 7mo agoThis 3-year old meme video is becoming more and more relevant by the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY
- jacquesm 7mo agoFriend of a friend verification could side-step that, if there is a good way to penalize bad actors willing to violate the principle.
- rpcope1 7mo agoI guess we're coming full circle back to red offbrand Hacker News
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo agoI don't think any web-of-trust systems ever worked. It might be a bad example but PGP tried to make it a thing for over 30 years.
- jacquesm 7mo agoPGP is niche. This would be far more mainstream. If you applied it to HN I could probably verify > 50 people already. For PGP I wouldn't know anybody...
- vintermann 7mo agoIf by worked you mean "worked so well they replaced all the big actors" then sure, nothing has worked. But plenty has worked on a smaller scale. Raph Levien's Advogato worked fine. There's also a reason most new social networks start up as invite only - it works great for cutting down on spam accounts. But once they pivot to prioritizing growth at all costs, it goes out the window.
- kubb 7mo agoI want cool cryptography where I can, e.g. verify where I'm writing from and what my age is without giving away any other information. Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity. Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
- retrocog 7mo agoIMHO, this is the exact instinct and there's a way to verify identity, location, and age without even having to share those directly.
- soco 7mo agoSwitzerland just voted recently to officially implement Selective Disclosure JWT, which does exactly all that. Social network registration can ask "are you 18?" and run with that - and only that. Or the club entrance. Or whatever, because it's all controlled by yourself in your app.
- retrocog 7mo agoThat seems like a good idea. The question is how the JWT is generated. A standard one would be more akin to a traditional crypto keypair. That is a "signal" key insomuch as it tells us who controls an account. It can't tell us the owner is the controller and that is the current weakness of crypto right now. To know the owner, we need another type of keypair to go alongside the traditional kind. That would be a "tone key" and is generated by a refreshing seed derived from the entropy of long-running, unfakeable conversations. The same way a friend might recognize us as being ourselves.
- soco 7mo agoBut you don't need to prove to all others that you are yourself, do you? You are only asked whether you're 18, the bouncer doesn't care about your name. So you can still hold the phone (like last summer the ID) of someone else and fake their answer.
- gr8tyeah 7mo agoI pay for my ISP and the financial institution the money comes from has age verification Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go broke I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring in the same way Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear, not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't care back.
- hinkley 7mo agoVerified entities defecting by using AI to generate their content for them will break this.
- Pigalowda 7mo agoWe can use verification mountain dew cans. No big deal.
- hinkley 7mo agoI can't recall the last time I did the Dew. Should I turn myself in to a reeducation camp?
- rpcope1 7mo agoI recall a WSJ article during the 2024 election that was about the fact that Tim Walz and JD Vance were both big consumers of Diet Mountain Dew, and how basically America ran across the board on various types of Mountain Dew. Can you really call yourself "American" if you're not doing the dew?
- hinkley 7mo agoI drank enough for three people in college. My lifetime average is probably still in the margin of error.
- armchairhacker 7mo agoThere's a third option: web-of-trust. https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ has some problems but not bot spam.
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo agoDon't they have an literal bot account that reposts top HN links?
- dehsge 7mo agoMembers only comment blogs. Where you need an invite to comment also solves the problem. You need to know a real human to get access.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoThat might raise the initial barrier, but it assumes every user behaves appropriately. All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
- Bombthecat 7mo agoThen we go back to torrent sites. Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so
- throwaway94275 7mo agoBlog admin sees who invited the bots and recursively kicks that account and any invited by it.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoI invite myself multiple times in addition to other real humans. Then I use my duplicate accounts to invite bots.
- throwaway94275 7mo agoI'm assuming there's tracking on the invites. So a recursive kick on X and all who X invited would still do the trick. If an IP address appears more than 5 times in an invite tree, ban the /24 or ASN if not from a friendly country for 10 minutes or other reasonable timeframe.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoGetting unique IPs in any country you want is trivial for anyone but people building toy bots. How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned. Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
- hackingonempty 7mo ago> an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card) That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under verified identities.
- apitman 7mo agoPeople can also move to smaller communities
- drdaeman 7mo agoNeither of those solves it, just tries to conserve the status quo. The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal November, just that instead of “noobs” there are “clankers” this time. Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about things like gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or anything alike when someone posts something online, unless posted content is strongly related to one of those topics. Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit into the same aspects-I-don’t-care-about list just fine - on the Internet nobody knows^W cares you’re a dog. Or a bunch of matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially appropriate. The problem with bots is that they’re not just noobs - unlike us meatbags they don’t just do wrong and stupid things but can’t possibly learn to stop (because models are static). Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the correlations to the symptoms. (Yea, I’m leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those, and was sold a dream of a progress that transcends worlds, and haven’t found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may vary.)
- raincole 7mo agoIt turns out that Twitter selling the blue marks is the correct direction, but no one would admit it.
- agumonkey 7mo agoI wonder what would be the effect of a minuscule tax (0,01c) on network use. Could reuse addiction, abuse, create a fund to finance other things.
- JohnMakin 7mo agoPaid option doesn't really deter this behavior, it encourages it - a botter will see a price tag on a "real" account (see what happened to twitter's blue checkmark sub) and go oh goody, I can pay for people to think I'm real. If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and 2) be appealing to actual users.
- ojosilva 7mo agoI'm trying to imagine this new paid app in different angles and versions, ie a new Reddit... Pay to be in there, get paid for being in there, only humans can be in there, ads pay for humans being there, humans use some govt on-line ID system, karma systems improve so that only humans are rewarded, Voight-Kampf captchas, humans mail the app their dna to verify their identity, humans login on a street 24/7 login post (think phone booths).... I just don't see any good, unbreakable, viable and/or sustainable way. We just need to get used to coexist with bots everywhere while we adjust our expectations and social codes. Fast forward until AI is massively on the streets and indistinguishable from us physically (or very distinct and fascinating), and all supposing that we can keep them in control... Dead internet is the prequel to dead world, let's seize the opportunity to learn how to coexist with synthetics and develop the code that will make life with a higher intelligence species possible on Earth. And remember, we humans vary widely, and just like there are people happy to share LinkedIn slop today, there will be humans gladly living surrounded exclusively by overpowering synthetics. So lower your expectations for universal solutions and focus on niche.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agoin other words, it just becomes the cost of doing business. the individual user is now priced out and cannot speak candidly and anonymously, while large, wealthy orgs simply price that into their market-capture and consensus-building techniques
- grigio 7mo agoYeah, me too
- taintlord 7mo ago[dead]
- pllbnk 7mo agoMaybe some proof-of-work scheme where uploading content would require the uploader to solve a cryptographic puzzle, hence reducing overall number of posts? The PoW difficulty should somehow be correlated to economics where it wouldn't be too expensive but also wouldn't make sense to do mass uploading via bot farms?
- looselygoosy 7mo agoLike a CAPTCHA?
- pllbnk 7mo agoGood one, honestly didn't think about it. But visual or other kind of human-accessible captchas can be solved by bots. My suggested PoW would be computational.
- sarbanharble 7mo agoI actually look forward to the era of social media companies paying humans to use their platforms.
- raxxorraxor 7mo agoMe neither. A paid internet isn't anonymous either, your ID is as verified as the verified net. In that case, I will certainly embrace the slop net. Perhaps this is even good because many don't dare to venture beyond the black wall.
- jMyles 7mo agoThird option: a web-of-trust that allows you to see the vectors required to connect you to a given commenter, and which of your known friends and friends-of-friends has already attested their humanity.
- shimman 7mo agoI see a simpler outcome, smaller communities where you can verify humans are human. I've already started doing this, and mostly with people that already live in my community. The corporate internet was never good to begin with, it was just forced on the masses.
- rcxdude 7mo agoI think this is the trend, and it's probably a good one for most involved, except probably advertisers.