5 ms·
What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
by thinkingtoilet 5mo ago
What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
- ishouldstayaway 5mo agoWe bringing back Something Awful, now?
- wffurr 5mo agoIt never left.
- HerbManic 5mo agoNo it's Something IS awful. Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.
- quickthrowman 5mo agoJeffery of YOSPOS bought it before Lowtax overdosed on mangosteen and it’s still operating.
- RankingMember 5mo agoThe :10bux: requirement did seem to do a good job of weeding out the lowest-level trash/spammers and encouraged people to toe the (sometimes very blurry) line. I remember how absolutely godawful some of the no-signup-fee SA-offshoots were (remember TheGunOwner's spin-off site "LivingWithStyle"?), to say nothing about 4chan.
- pojntfx 5mo agoIf you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop
- solid_fuel 5mo agoI think twitter is an odd-one-out here, twitter as a whole has been heading down hill ever since the acquisition, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those blue checks are officially sanctioned bots. Especially given the way so many of them push the same narratives that Musk does at the same time he does.
- MeetingsBrowser 5mo agoI don't think so. The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice. A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.
- RealityVoid 5mo agoI think you're right. I think _merely_ paying won't deter them. But, if you couple this with banning of accounts that post AI slop, you get: 1) the cost becomes even higher for AI slop factories since they will probably get multiple accounts banned. 2) It prevents influence to accrue to any specific account. This diminishes the incentive for slop, since sufficient success means a ban. 3) It reduces the moderation effort since creating accounts is no longer a sustainable strategy.
- shevy-java 5mo agoAgreed, but I left twitter even before the right-hand-raising oligarch took over. The reason was that censorship started to kick in aka twitter staff writing me a mail that my "conduct" is not appropriate. Basically they try to reduce the "aggressiveness" in written content. Well, that's already an assumption on their part; and in any discourse with orthogonal opinions, you can not really reconcile such positions anyway, so I don't need some 20 years old from India hired by Twitter to tell me what I should or should not do (though, realistically it was a bot actually that just scanned for content). I noticed that censorship is increasing on "social" websites. Reddit as an example is a mega-censorship site - the amount of deletion by crazy mods is insane. Bots are indeed killing twitter now. I noticed more and more were leaving permanently. Musk evidently accelerated the decay here. There is something wrong with his mindset here, it's almost as if it is pathological. His perception of things is genuinely distorted, and I am not even 100% certain he is completely aware of it; he must be partially aware, but it seems there is also something wrong with the brain. No wonder he gets along with Trump - that one now has clearly dementia narcissism in the final stage.
- rgblambda 5mo agoOr applying for an account could involve sending a handwritten letter by post.
- goodmythical 5mo agoRight, because I cannot possibly purchase a thousand such letters for less than the cost of minimum wage for an hour or two.
- rgblambda 5mo agoWhere I live a 2nd class stamp costs the equivalent of $1.24. That's $1240 for a thousand. Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online. Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.
- iammjm 5mo agoThis is fucked and I hate it. Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access. I understand there are challenges that need solutions, but this ain’t it
- intended 5mo ago> was Yep. Was. This isn’t the internet you grow up on. This is an internet scoped for bots and organizations.
- shevy-java 5mo agoThis does not work, for similar reasons why captchas piss off real humans. You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.) You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.
- m-schuetz 5mo agoYeah, I tried to sign up for instagram, but at the fourth captcha I gave up and left. How does instagram have any users with such a hostile sign-up barrier?
- friendzis 5mo agoMy profile picture is old enough to open an account on instagram
- friendzis 5mo agoFun fact. There is this threads twitter clone from meta. How do I login? I "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.
- sien 5mo agoMetafilter and Something Awful both do this. Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users. A small cost does definitely work for some sites.
- slidehero 5mo agopresumably most people running these bots are doing it for some financial gain. as long gain > cost the issue won't go away. It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.
- kdheiwns 5mo agoWould be great to have some sort of bot trap that would just drain a dollar here and there from AI slopologists and shadowban their accounts to only interact with other AI accounts.
- hylaride 5mo agoOr swaying opinions on hot topics. It's interesting to see how much more often politics gets injected into forums (reddit or elsewhere) on completely unrelated topics. Sometimes it's subtle, like a "signature" promoting out of the mainstream causes that then slowly make it look more mainstream. Almost all geographic subreddits (for cities/states) are overwhelmed by rage baiting posts and comment. This got worse when reddit did the moderation changes a few years ago when they went public. To them it probably just looks like more "engagement". I have no doubt various nation state actors are backing a lot of this.
- nullc 5mo agoA lot of the "add a cost to stop bad actors" end up being a selection effect in favor of bad actors. Sure, it might stop 10% of the bad actors and lower the numbers, but it'll stop 80% of the good users who aren't experts at getting around the cost or don't have an income from using the service to just pay it as a cost of business.
- a96 5mo agoThere is still no good way to send or receive such payments that works globally. Let alone one that doesn't mean leaking personal information. This will deter a lot of good users, but not many bad actors, as others have pointed out.