Comment by direwolf20
13 days ago
Unfortunately, the swarm is 99.99999% advertisements for penis enlargement pills. How can a P2P system filter them out? A federated system relies on each admin to filter them out. A centralised system does even better, relying on a single dictator to filter them out. A P2P system requires every user to filter every spam message, together consuming far more effort than the spammer needed to send it.
You can centralize spam lists while still having the base communication protocol decentralized - that way people have the option on making their own decisions on whether "advertisements for penis enlargement pills" are really a problem - and let's be honest that's far from the only thing that gets moderated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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.
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Should I create 1 million accounts with bots that scroll endlessly to harvest microtransactions?
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.