Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
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Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they’re single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.
The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that – particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it’s a big network of a large number of small sites – it’s relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren’t keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.
A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren’t looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.
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The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.
It’s true that the toolset isn’t here now, and the network is actually very fragile at the moment.
It’s also true that platform builders don’t seem to want to deal with these kinds of tools, for raisins.
But it’s also true that temporary blocks are both effective and not that big of a deal.
I’m not sure why you’d think that manual moderation will lead to small instances getting barred, though. Unless you’re predicting that federation will move to whitelisting, rather than blacklisting? That’s historically been the tool of corporate services, not personal or community ones.
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If it really ramps up, we could share block lists too, like with ad blockers. So if a friend (or nth-degree friend) blocks someone, then you would block them automatically.
That work has already started with Fediseer. It’s not automatic, but it’s really easy, which is probably the best we’ll get for a while.
I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.
Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.
When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.
These companies collect investment money from either investors or other parts of the company that do make money. They give away their product for free to create a user base, and figure out proper monetization later.
When the economy takes a dive and borrowing money costs money again (for years, banks had negative interests for huge loans, which means they paid you to take their money) the funds of venture capitalists suddenly dry up and companies like Netflix and Uber suddenly need to raise prices
Nine figure salaries are nothing compared to how much training AI costs. The same goes for most services, to be honest.
I don’t get where the entitlement comes from, to be honest. Why should companies keep giving away shit for free? They’re neither governments nor charities. These companies are flushing billions down the drain giving away free stuff to get marker share and attract more money they can put into free services, until they can grow no more. That’s unsustainable and impossible to compete with fairly.
It’s good for the internet to cost money. If customers need to pay for the stuff they’re using, we maintain the possibility for fair competition. Without competition, billionaires and hedge funds control the internet. If you demand everything to come for free, you’re only playing into Google’s/Facebook’s/Microsoft’s/Apple’s hands.
What “entitlement?”
I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.
I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.
If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
The downside of that approach is that AI can pretend to be humans wanting to join quite well. It’s possible to set up a lobster.rs like system where there’s a tree of people you’ve invited so admins can cull entire spam groups at once, but that also has its downsides (i.e. it’s impossible to join if none of your friends have already joined, or if you don’t want to attach your online socials to your friends).
I don’t think that’s a perfect system anyway though, spammers could create a massive tree of fake accounts and just only use a small proportion of them for spam
Use a number of compromised user accounts to set this up and it becomes a nightmare
And that is how you get singular point of view echo chamber.
Most of the internet is made up of echo chambers now even though anyone and everyone can access a majority of it. I don’t think being selective in who we allow into communities worsens the pre-existing echo chamber issue. If anything it may help to be more selective. It can sometimes be impossible to tell the difference between trolls, bots, and real people, so I feel like we assume every person we disagree with is a troll or bot. The issue with that is that we may be outright dismissing real opinions. In theory, everyone in a selective community is a real person who is expressing their true thoughts and feelings.
It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.
Instead of being this gen’s September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they’re reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.
That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].