Comment by direwolf20
5 hours 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.
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.
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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