7 ms·

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what'

by deanc 7mo ago

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that. This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots. The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

JimDabell 7mo ago
> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another. Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it." Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
  - JimDabell 7mo ago
    Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?
    - bobthepanda 7mo ago
      probably not, the problem is that spammers/scammers are looking for whales, and if you are talking about draining the retirement accounts of an American who's been saving all their life, that's quite a big payout in the six or seven figures.
      - PaulHoule 7mo ago
        In the case of the 415 scams I used to ask “who would expect $20M to fall out of the sky?” The obvious answer is “someone who already had $20M fall out of the sky”
        cindyllm 7mo ago
        [dead]
  - tlonny 7mo ago
    I’d love something like this implemented for email. Sending an unsolicited email to a random person X requires you to pay a small toll (something like 50p). Subsequent emails can then be sent for free - however person X can “revoke” your access any time necessitating a further toll payment. You would of course be able to pre-authorise friends/family/transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for. This would nuke spam economics and be minimally disruptive for other use cases of email IMO…
    - jimmydorry 7mo ago
      >transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for These are one of the main culprits of unwanted emails... and a toll system would make them all the more valuable for the even worse actors to take advantage of.
- dom96 7mo ago
  This is exactly right. The problem is the friction that this kind of system adds. Even so, I implemented this and I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
- flomo 7mo ago
  IMO this is inevitable. HN is freaking about about the end of the anonymous internet, but it's already over and we're just figuring it out. Eventually the bots will find their 90s cyberpunk cosplay IRC channel too.
  - hrimfaxi 7mo ago
    > Eventually the bots will find their 90s cyberpunk cosplay IRC channel too. How do you figure? If these bots are driven by commercial interests that seems an unlikely outcome.
    - flomo 7mo ago
      Because they can. There's no real commercial motivation for these HN bots either.
- gzread 7mo ago
  The ability to make a new account is an important defense against abusive bans. You don't want it to be possible for Google to unperson you.
- chasebank 7mo ago
  I've talked about this on here before, but we think the solution is an auth layer built on top of credit score through an intermediary like creditkarma. The score itself doesn't really matter but it does solve big problems. Plus, if you wanted to implement a filtering system for users, I personally would rather trust reviews / comments from credit scores over 650, they have less incentive to be astroturfing. But yes, I think your conclusion is correct. This is the only way.
  - taikahessu 7mo ago
    How is that creditkarma accumulated? By other "users"? Does the intermediary guarantee, the this account is a valid person now and always, and not sold the account or not stolen? I mean, we will always need some middlemen I guess?
- Balgair 7mo ago
  There is the other side of this too: Real people - fake posts. So, you have other folks on here already saying that the code their bots write is better than their own, right? How long until someone who is karma focused just uses a bot to write their comments and post their threads? I mean, it's probably already happening, right? Just like a bot doing your homework for you, but with somehow even less stakes. I imagine that non native speakers will take their posts and go to an AI to help clean them up, at the very least. At the worst, I can imagine a person having a bot interact fully under their name. So even if we have some draconian system of verification, we will still have some non-zero percentage of bot spam. My out-of-my-butt guess is somewhere near 40%.
- deanc 7mo ago
  You kinda skipped the bit I wrote alongside this about strong authentication. There are numerous ways to do this. For example, in Finland you have to physically identify yourself to open a bank account and you can then use that to authenticate. It's used for all public sector services and a few others with strict accreditation. The issue is that it solves nothing if you can't distinguish between text that is written by AI and isn't, regardless of strong authentication.
tlonny 7mo ago
Indeed - the future is RL meet-ups and small, intimate online communities. Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?
- jihadjihad 7mo ago
  > Perhaps not the worst thing in the world? Definitely not. “Terminally online” is as deleterious as it sounds.
- Waterluvian 7mo ago
  This is the optimistic take I’ve held. Bots get so good that they become indistinguishable from humans. If that’s true then it doesn’t actually matter if your community is all bots. But it does matter because authenticity matters to humans. They will seek authenticity where they can successfully sense it, which will be in-person. Human simulacrums will one day cause a repeat of this issue. Then we’ll have a whole Blade Runner 2049 issue about what exactly is authenticity?
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
  Counterpoint: https://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ https://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ People will prefer the bots that give them head pats and tell them they're so smart and that they love them
  - 0dayz 7mo ago
    I don't necessarily think that is a stop-gap against people socializing more offline/being socially productive online. Especially considering the fact that it seems more the case that the bigger stop-gap is what we already have: In asian (especially Japan) it's host(ess) clubs. Globally for friends it's influencers exploiting loneliness. Those are things I think has to go for people to embrace offline socialization or using their online time better.
- deanc 7mo ago
  Yeah, you're completely right. Maybe this will be the impetus a lot of people need to detach from online.
gzread 7mo ago
"content creators" https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/
- echelon 7mo ago
  The word "content" is gross. "Creator", on the other hand, is beautiful. It means you don't have to pick a lane. Anything can be creative. Documentary filmmaking, stop motion, dance, costume work, historical reenactment, indie animation, economics essays, game dev... The problem is we don't have a nice word that holistically captures the output of creators. They're not all making films or illustrations. So what do you call it? "Art" is awkward. "Content" works, but it sounds like slop. We need a better alternative word that elevates creative output.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    Since it's OnlyFans, I'd think something like "porn stars" or "online girlfriends" If it were YouTube, "YouTuber" is a start, but you could also be a "YouTube science communicator" or something
    - echelon 7mo ago
      Creator is a fine word to use in place of YouTuber. And vice versa. But what do you call their output? What do you call an illustrator's output? A photographer? What about when all of that shows up on your feed collectively? Content is a gross word.
      - gzread 7mo ago
        You can call it video essays, Let's Plays, news reports, slop videos, and so on. To repeat fgiesen/ryg: to a content plumber, it's all content, just like the mail system delivers packages and doesn't really care what's in them. The video engineers at YouTube don't care whether it's a news report or a slop video, as long as the frames get on your screen. However the sender and receiver had better care what's in the package or something's gone horribly wrong.
IAmGraydon 7mo ago
The bot problem can easily be solved. It’s just that no one likes the cure. Think about this for a minute: what would happen if you had a country where all its citizens could act anonymously with no consequences, no reputation, no repercussions, and no trace? Would you want to go there? Live there? No, because it would be a lawless wasteland dominated by the worst of the worst. Yet people act like the internet is somehow different. The internet is a massive society. Social networks are very much like virtual countries, or even continents. We’ve all enjoyed the benefits of living in this society of zero consequence, but it’s now been overrun by the very worst people, just like the imaginary country above. You claim we can’t solve this problem, but we already have solved it here in the physical world with identities, laws, and consequences. The real problem is that most people don’t want to let go of the very thing that is the problem: anonymity. Unfortunately, there won’t be a choice for much longer. The internet will certainly be dead without a system that ties IP addresses and online identities to real people. No, it’s not the internet we all wanted, but humanity has ruined the one we have.
- dandaka 7mo ago
  I can imagine a "anonymity" or "reputation" filter attached to every interaction in the internet. Enabled by default, but you can disable safe mode and see bots having fun. Also for me problem is not in the anonymity itself, but in the lack of reputation. If I have a signal that entity can be trusted, I don't care much about its real identity.
  - davedigerati 7mo ago
    I think this is a great way to frame the conversation and possible solution: reputation. things like accumulated karma or credits and IRL connections (big data will love this) all begin to feel dystopian whereas reputation I believe is something that everybody can get behind. It can absolutely remain anonymous, while still benefiting from IRL meetups for big reputation bumps (just use your handle). We all hang out in lots of places online, let that rep build and be used everywhere. Pretty sure they were trying to do something like this in the fedverse but haven't touched base on it in a long time ...
- 7mo ago
abetusk 7mo ago
The bot problem can be solved. Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another. In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated. Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money. [0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
- deanc 7mo ago
  I don't see how Anubis solves anything. If a human lets the bot control a completely vanilla computer (which there is now a lot of tooling for), then how is it going to stop that?
  - clouedoc 7mo ago
    At most, PoW makes it a bit annoying to scale: you need to add some form of RPC that delegates solving to a beefy+cheap Hetzner server. If you're really scaling and it's getting expensive, you can rent a GPU to do batch solves. PoW systems like Anubis are self-soothing.
  - abetusk 7mo ago
    My apologies for the late reply. You're right. My proposed solution only addressed AI at scale (web crawlers, mass spam campaigns, etc.) and doesn't address low bandwidth, "high friction" events like PRs, code reviews, blog posts, etc. I don't want to dismiss the concerns outright and I'm not sure I have a concise response but my feeling is that, in some sense, it doesn't really matter. If AI is used to create a high quality output, then it should be accepted. If AI is creating low quality output, then it should be easy to verify, maybe with better (AI) tooling. In other words, the bot problem cannot be solved, in that we might never know whether the source is from human or machine, but it won't matter as that's not the core of the problem, quality content is. My opinion is that DIT is overstated and, where it isn't, we'll see much better technology evolve to separate the signal from the noise. As an analogy, in the late 1990s, internet search engines were abysmal, raking by document keyword searches and so were easily game-able by content that had nothing to do with the search intent. Google came along with page rank and, almost overnight, made the internet usable. From the bad Yahoo search results, one might be tempted to think that the entirety of the internet looked like what Yahoo was serving, but this was the wrong impression as there were plenty of interesting things on the internet, it just took page rank to provide the necessary filter to make the internet usable.

by deanc 7mo ago

JimDabell 7mo ago

> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.

Terr_ 7mo ago
I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another. Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it." Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
- JimDabell 7mo ago
  Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?
  - bobthepanda 7mo ago
    probably not, the problem is that spammers/scammers are looking for whales, and if you are talking about draining the retirement accounts of an American who's been saving all their life, that's quite a big payout in the six or seven figures.
    - PaulHoule 7mo ago
      In the case of the 415 scams I used to ask “who would expect $20M to fall out of the sky?” The obvious answer is “someone who already had $20M fall out of the sky”
      - cindyllm 7mo ago
        [dead]
- tlonny 7mo ago
  I’d love something like this implemented for email. Sending an unsolicited email to a random person X requires you to pay a small toll (something like 50p). Subsequent emails can then be sent for free - however person X can “revoke” your access any time necessitating a further toll payment. You would of course be able to pre-authorise friends/family/transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for. This would nuke spam economics and be minimally disruptive for other use cases of email IMO…
  - jimmydorry 7mo ago
    >transactional emails from various services that you’ve signed up for These are one of the main culprits of unwanted emails... and a toll system would make them all the more valuable for the even worse actors to take advantage of.
dom96 7mo ago
This is exactly right. The problem is the friction that this kind of system adds. Even so, I implemented this and I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-human/ https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
flomo 7mo ago
IMO this is inevitable. HN is freaking about about the end of the anonymous internet, but it's already over and we're just figuring it out. Eventually the bots will find their 90s cyberpunk cosplay IRC channel too.
- hrimfaxi 7mo ago
  > Eventually the bots will find their 90s cyberpunk cosplay IRC channel too. How do you figure? If these bots are driven by commercial interests that seems an unlikely outcome.
  - flomo 7mo ago
    Because they can. There's no real commercial motivation for these HN bots either.
gzread 7mo ago
The ability to make a new account is an important defense against abusive bans. You don't want it to be possible for Google to unperson you.
chasebank 7mo ago
I've talked about this on here before, but we think the solution is an auth layer built on top of credit score through an intermediary like creditkarma. The score itself doesn't really matter but it does solve big problems. Plus, if you wanted to implement a filtering system for users, I personally would rather trust reviews / comments from credit scores over 650, they have less incentive to be astroturfing. But yes, I think your conclusion is correct. This is the only way.
- taikahessu 7mo ago
  How is that creditkarma accumulated? By other "users"? Does the intermediary guarantee, the this account is a valid person now and always, and not sold the account or not stolen? I mean, we will always need some middlemen I guess?
Balgair 7mo ago
There is the other side of this too: Real people - fake posts. So, you have other folks on here already saying that the code their bots write is better than their own, right? How long until someone who is karma focused just uses a bot to write their comments and post their threads? I mean, it's probably already happening, right? Just like a bot doing your homework for you, but with somehow even less stakes. I imagine that non native speakers will take their posts and go to an AI to help clean them up, at the very least. At the worst, I can imagine a person having a bot interact fully under their name. So even if we have some draconian system of verification, we will still have some non-zero percentage of bot spam. My out-of-my-butt guess is somewhere near 40%.
deanc 7mo ago
You kinda skipped the bit I wrote alongside this about strong authentication. There are numerous ways to do this. For example, in Finland you have to physically identify yourself to open a bank account and you can then use that to authenticate. It's used for all public sector services and a few others with strict accreditation. The issue is that it solves nothing if you can't distinguish between text that is written by AI and isn't, regardless of strong authentication.

tlonny 7mo ago

Indeed - the future is RL meet-ups and small, intimate online communities. Perhaps not the worst thing in the world?

jihadjihad 7mo ago
> Perhaps not the worst thing in the world? Definitely not. “Terminally online” is as deleterious as it sounds.
Waterluvian 7mo ago
This is the optimistic take I’ve held. Bots get so good that they become indistinguishable from humans. If that’s true then it doesn’t actually matter if your community is all bots. But it does matter because authenticity matters to humans. They will seek authenticity where they can successfully sense it, which will be in-person. Human simulacrums will one day cause a repeat of this issue. Then we’ll have a whole Blade Runner 2049 issue about what exactly is authenticity?
heavyset_go 7mo ago
Counterpoint: https://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ https://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ People will prefer the bots that give them head pats and tell them they're so smart and that they love them
- 0dayz 7mo ago
  I don't necessarily think that is a stop-gap against people socializing more offline/being socially productive online. Especially considering the fact that it seems more the case that the bigger stop-gap is what we already have: In asian (especially Japan) it's host(ess) clubs. Globally for friends it's influencers exploiting loneliness. Those are things I think has to go for people to embrace offline socialization or using their online time better.
deanc 7mo ago
Yeah, you're completely right. Maybe this will be the impetus a lot of people need to detach from online.

gzread 7mo ago

"content creators" https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2025/07/06/content-creator/

echelon 7mo ago
The word "content" is gross. "Creator", on the other hand, is beautiful. It means you don't have to pick a lane. Anything can be creative. Documentary filmmaking, stop motion, dance, costume work, historical reenactment, indie animation, economics essays, game dev... The problem is we don't have a nice word that holistically captures the output of creators. They're not all making films or illustrations. So what do you call it? "Art" is awkward. "Content" works, but it sounds like slop. We need a better alternative word that elevates creative output.
- gzread 7mo ago
  Since it's OnlyFans, I'd think something like "porn stars" or "online girlfriends" If it were YouTube, "YouTuber" is a start, but you could also be a "YouTube science communicator" or something
  - echelon 7mo ago
    Creator is a fine word to use in place of YouTuber. And vice versa. But what do you call their output? What do you call an illustrator's output? A photographer? What about when all of that shows up on your feed collectively? Content is a gross word.
    - gzread 7mo ago
      You can call it video essays, Let's Plays, news reports, slop videos, and so on. To repeat fgiesen/ryg: to a content plumber, it's all content, just like the mail system delivers packages and doesn't really care what's in them. The video engineers at YouTube don't care whether it's a news report or a slop video, as long as the frames get on your screen. However the sender and receiver had better care what's in the package or something's gone horribly wrong.

IAmGraydon 7mo ago

The bot problem can easily be solved. It’s just that no one likes the cure. Think about this for a minute: what would happen if you had a country where all its citizens could act anonymously with no consequences, no reputation, no repercussions, and no trace? Would you want to go there? Live there? No, because it would be a lawless wasteland dominated by the worst of the worst. Yet people act like the internet is somehow different. The internet is a massive society. Social networks are very much like virtual countries, or even continents. We’ve all enjoyed the benefits of living in this society of zero consequence, but it’s now been overrun by the very worst people, just like the imaginary country above. You claim we can’t solve this problem, but we already have solved it here in the physical world with identities, laws, and consequences. The real problem is that most people don’t want to let go of the very thing that is the problem: anonymity. Unfortunately, there won’t be a choice for much longer. The internet will certainly be dead without a system that ties IP addresses and online identities to real people. No, it’s not the internet we all wanted, but humanity has ruined the one we have.

dandaka 7mo ago
I can imagine a "anonymity" or "reputation" filter attached to every interaction in the internet. Enabled by default, but you can disable safe mode and see bots having fun. Also for me problem is not in the anonymity itself, but in the lack of reputation. If I have a signal that entity can be trusted, I don't care much about its real identity.
- davedigerati 7mo ago
  I think this is a great way to frame the conversation and possible solution: reputation. things like accumulated karma or credits and IRL connections (big data will love this) all begin to feel dystopian whereas reputation I believe is something that everybody can get behind. It can absolutely remain anonymous, while still benefiting from IRL meetups for big reputation bumps (just use your handle). We all hang out in lots of places online, let that rep build and be used everywhere. Pretty sure they were trying to do something like this in the fedverse but haven't touched base on it in a long time ...
7mo ago

abetusk 7mo ago

The bot problem can be solved. Anubis is one such answer [0]. Cryptocurrency and micro transactions are another. In the last few decades, spam was a problem because the marginal transaction costs of information exchange were orders of magnitude lower than they had been. Note that physical mail spam was, and still, is an issue. Focusing on perceptual or fuzzy computation as the limiting factor, through captchas and other 'human tests', allowed for most spam to be effectively mitigated. Now that intelligence is becoming orders of magnitude cheaper, perceptual computation challenges no longer work, but we can still do computation challenges in the form of proof of work or proxies thereof. Spam will never wholly go away but we can at least cause more friction by charging bot networks to execute in the form of energy or money. [0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

deanc 7mo ago
I don't see how Anubis solves anything. If a human lets the bot control a completely vanilla computer (which there is now a lot of tooling for), then how is it going to stop that?
- clouedoc 7mo ago
  At most, PoW makes it a bit annoying to scale: you need to add some form of RPC that delegates solving to a beefy+cheap Hetzner server. If you're really scaling and it's getting expensive, you can rent a GPU to do batch solves. PoW systems like Anubis are self-soothing.
- abetusk 7mo ago
  My apologies for the late reply. You're right. My proposed solution only addressed AI at scale (web crawlers, mass spam campaigns, etc.) and doesn't address low bandwidth, "high friction" events like PRs, code reviews, blog posts, etc. I don't want to dismiss the concerns outright and I'm not sure I have a concise response but my feeling is that, in some sense, it doesn't really matter. If AI is used to create a high quality output, then it should be accepted. If AI is creating low quality output, then it should be easy to verify, maybe with better (AI) tooling. In other words, the bot problem cannot be solved, in that we might never know whether the source is from human or machine, but it won't matter as that's not the core of the problem, quality content is. My opinion is that DIT is overstated and, where it isn't, we'll see much better technology evolve to separate the signal from the noise. As an analogy, in the late 1990s, internet search engines were abysmal, raking by document keyword searches and so were easily game-able by content that had nothing to do with the search intent. Google came along with page rank and, almost overnight, made the internet usable. From the bad Yahoo search results, one might be tempted to think that the entirety of the internet looked like what Yahoo was serving, but this was the wrong impression as there were plenty of interesting things on the internet, it just took page rank to provide the necessary filter to make the internet usable.