Comment by mschuster91
1 month ago
The foundational problem with interoperability is that it can and will immediately be abused by bad actors as long as there is no price tag attached to every piece of communication.
Among social media, Mastodon (and anything Fediverse) has it the worst, obviously, but Telegram and Whatsapp are rife with spams and scams, Twitter back when it still had third-party apps was rife with credential and token compromises (mostly used to shill cryptocurrencies).
As for the price tag reference - we've seen that with SMS. It used to be the case that sending SMS cost real money, something like 20 ct/message. It was prohibitively expensive to run SMS campaigns. But nowadays? It's effectively free at scale if you go the legit route and practically free if you manage to get someone's account at one of the tons of bulk SMS providers compromised. Apple's iMessage similarly makes bad actors pay a lot, because access to it is tied to a legitimate or stolen Apple product serial.
But bad actors already do this, as there is a monetary incentive to implement adversarial interoperability. There is then an incentive to not scale it up too much, lest that implementation get cut off sooner. For example, I certainly don't think all of the spam ads I see on Faceboot Marketplace are from individual people manually creating accounts and typing them out.
Paywalls can have the opposite of the effect you want. Implemented incautiously, they can fail to disincentivize parties who can make profit in excess of the cost, and it can succeed at disincentivizing genuine, non-profit-motivated interaction.
Imagine how much less you would use text messages if they still had a per-message cost.
I would reply to your comment, but my 2GB data allocation for my cell phone is already spent this month.
Because some hostile entity might rat fuck the a slightly better system, we're destined to use the same current shitty system because something better might have a downside?
Do you understand that this is all literally made up? The rules can change anytime and society can exert its will to make better world rather than letting a dozen people decide how technology will shape humanity (mostly in a negative capacity if you look at the current state of things).
>Because some hostile entity might rat fuck the a slightly better system,
And make it a worse system, is what you happened to leave off.
>Do you understand that this is all literally made up
You mean the existing system that evolved from billions and billions of interactions? Explain what is 'made up' about it.
The thing is if you start 'making up' random ass laws that piss people off, they will run screaming back to the billionaires to pwn them with locked down systems. Apple is a great example here. Shit is locked down and people love it.
> Apple is a great example here. Shit is locked down and people love it.
The key thing with Apple is that Stuff Just Works. Not necessarily with non-Apple things (the compatibility ranges from almost excellent aka AirPods on Windows/Android to disastrous aka ever tried to transfer files from an Android phone to a Mac), but as long as you stay in the Apple ecosystem of macOS + Apple TV + iOS + AirPods, the user experience is generally really, really frictionless.
In contrast, with Windows, it's an unholy mess of catastrophic drivers, Windows Update, aggressive pushing of AI and advertising. And external hardware is a hit and miss, with compatibility issues being around everywhere.
And Android, oh dear god. I used to prefer Android over iOS because the hardware was cheaper and I could reasonably root it so I could do actual backups that worked... but ever since Covid, more and more apps break on detecting root and there's still no backup solution, so I bit the bullet and went second-hand Apple. At least I got backups now.
Personally, I admit, I have aged - I'm 34, I don't want to fiddle and mess around with my daily driver constantly, and frankly I don't have time to bother with ads, so that's why I went with Apple for most of my things. When I want to fiddle, I got a fleet of Raspberrys plus a decent homelab. But there, I can choose to fiddle around if I want to.
Being afraid to do things because they might possibly, but never proven, be worse is just the political machinations of enforcing the status quo where our corporate overlords get to dictate how technology shapes our lives.
I'm sorry but that's deeply undemocratic, todays generation should have a direct say in how new things effect their lives.
Failure to do this might literally condemn our species to extinction, and this only took less than 200 years to achieve. I'm sorry but they've proven their failure and it's time to make drastic changes.
Good news is many people agree with this across the electorate, so now you get to decide which people you want shaping society. The previous world order of US imperialism is going to end and I rather have the people decide what to do than those that want to continue running head first into extinction.
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This is a confusing comment. Interoperability and bad actors are separate concerns, because you get bad actors in systems of all kinds, not just in interoperable systems. Paywalling a system does not necessarily mitigate bad actors, either.