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Comment by jyrkesh | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.

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I don't think calls to regulate Twitter/FB would get much traction if all they were doing was spam filtering. To see it from a different direction: imagine the shit show that would happen if Google started "moderating" gmail content, even though it currently does very aggressive spam filtering.

Indeed. Spam filters, porn filters, swearword filters... all of those have precedents (in mainstream, non-social/internet media) and are perfectly acceptable by most of society.

In addition, notice that even GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it - it's an assistant, not arbiter of what you should see. It's more than happy for you to adjust the filters (for yourself personally).

Edit: GMail also does prioritization as of recently - but again, the purpose of that is to help users not filter content. Again, those algorithms are also adjustable for each user separately, they just have some "smart" defaults.

Kind of. You can't turn their anti-spam off, you can't exclude addresses from it and, worse for me, Gmail can hard bounce if it doesn't like something in your server/IP/content in a way that's not fully documented or reproducible.

You can now. You can create a filter matching whatever criteria you want (including from:foo@example.com or a catch all), and specify matches 'never get flagged as spam'. Its not obvious, but it is there. And the usual limitations of filters apply, such as not being able to match arbitrary headers.

Things can get flagged outside of your mailbox as so spammy that they will never arrive. This is how every spam filter works that I have seen to date and google is no exception.

That only works on mail that actually gets delivered to your mailbox. Gmail can and will:

- Reject delivery of mail from sources it has determined to be spammy (e.g. residential IPs) - this mechanism allows the sender to be aware that delivery failed.

- Accept delivery and then silently drop the message somewhere between after accepting delivery but before appearing in the end user's mailbox.

In either case, there is nothing you (the mailbox holder) can do. In the second case, there is no way for anyone to know the message hasn't been delivered.

>GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it

This is not accurate. There is a long on-going issue with GMail (and others) wholesale blocking delivery of email from domains/IPs/providers it deems to be spam or otherwise inappropriate. GMail users get no indication/notification, and generally have no idea that email sent to them was simply not delivered.

Google does censor my email to some extent. It send a number of conservative emails straight to spam.

Political emails tend to get tagged as spam in general. I have someone close to me who is involved in local Democratic Party and progressive organizations. When you go to an event or donate money (say an award banquet), they share your name and spam the crap out of you. A lot of that mail gets tagged as spam as a result.

Conservative outlets work similarly, but they seem to have bigger online operations and are hard to get out of. My in laws get barraged with this stuff, and a mail provider like GMail or Microsoft gets a lot of spam signals from it I’m sure.

I've heard people in the political world talk about buying and selling email lists, which I thought was illegal, but seems to be common practice.

In the early 90's I gave something like $20 to the Sierra Club or a similar group. After a deluge in physical mail asking for donations from around the political spectrum, I never did it again. I left no forwarding address after moving either. Pretty dumb on their part, they traded all their goodwill for a short-term dollar.

Political emails are spam. No matter from which direction they come from. So tagging them as spam seems just the right thing to do.

Political emails often are spam but not all of them. I subscribed to few newsletters from various political parties and I don't want google to block them from me.

It's only spam, if you don't want it.

If you explicitly solicit those emails, eg by signing up to a newsletter, it's not spam.

Some of the conservative emails I did not opt in, so could be considered spam. Others I did opt in and it still gets sent to spam.

On the other hand I get unsolicited email from some Democrat groups, and I never see such emails in spam.

I'm liberal, and lots of the unsolicited Democrat emails go to my spam folder.

Then it doesn't censor your email at all.

You can freely view the emails in your spam folder, with one click. You can optionally move the emails to your inbox and train Gmail ("not spam" button) not to place them there in the future.

It's going too far to call it censorship (in any manner) when an email provider places an email into a spam folder that requires one click to view/review.

A lot of overt spam (when gmail is most certain that it's spam) doesn't end up in the spam folder. A counter is incremented and the message is thrown out.

Unless you are talking about email coming from the most blacklisted of IPs, that’s not true.

It's not censorship. It's basic hygiene.

Is it doing that because they are “conservative emails” or because they violate spam rules?

If those emails are flagged because they’re “conservative” then I agree with you that needs to he corrected.

However, if those emails are flagged because they violate well known spam rules then let’s help “conservative” email senders to follow the rules. Examples include not using single or double opt-in for signup, not honoring or providing an opt-out link, using emails from a bulk list that includes known flagged emails, not including a plain text copy of the email in the message, and originating from a flagged server. Reputable email services like MailChimp go to great lengths to educate email list admins how to follow these rules & curate high value email lists.

Needs to be more specific as well. Is it intelligent conservatism in the vein of Bill Buckley or a knuckle-dragging ad hominem attacks from the lowbrow right?

Gmail thankfully sends all the republican and democratic party emails I receive straight to spam.

One year, I made a concerted effort to troll some friends by getting them bumper stickers from the opposing party that they supported (e.g. dems got republican bumper stickers, repubs got democrat bumper stickers).

Since then, despite being sure to opt out of mails at the time of purchase, and clicking 'unsubscribe' numerous times, both parties continue to spam me.

Gmail filters these emails into spam for me. Thank goodness.

I'm led to believe that if enough gmail users mark emails as spam, this will get fed across to other users that haven't. So you can probably blame people like me for marking these messages as spam, for it occurring to you.

Or y'know, they could actually honor the 'unsubscribe' request and stop spamming me, and I wouldn't have to mark it (legitimately) as spam.

It’s still not so easy. At what point does “fake news” become spam?

Its pretty obvious what’s spam and what isn’t. “Fake news” is extremely subjective, so try not to anger half the country :)

At Google the top metric used to be relevance for a long time (until Amit Singhal was kicked out) for a good reason: it's a metric that kicks out spam, but doesn't pick sides.

Times and leadership has changed since though.

All good things...

> without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam

I don't understand this argument at all. Is it so difficult for users to curate the list of accounts they follow?

Replies. It would be impossible to follow a thread. Even today it can get rough following a thread spawned from an elon musk tweet, given all the crypto-scamming.

I think there is a "I know it when I see it" type of argument to say, we will make the strongest effort possible to never censor anything that is not attempting to sell a product but we reserve the right to force advertisements to go through a specific channel.

For better or worse the types Of things which get called to be banned from a platform for being unacceptable speech rarely resemble the specific styles of advertising we classify as spam.

Another argument is let users be ther own spam control.have some idiot acquaintance from middle school who keeps spamming pyramid scheme and/or nazism? Fine, just unfriend them.

As long as you are given control over what content is pushed at you directly, there is no need to sensor the whole platform because of a specific undesirable.

That's interesting because we desperately need spam filtering on our phones right now.

Firefox on Android allows extensions. Including ad blockers.

I was referring to filtering spam phone calls.

Oh, those are annoying. I've been getting some lately, but not nearly as many as other people seem to be getting.

I think Google lets you report numbers as spam? (And, of course, caller id can be faked, but the important bit is that spam will differ statistically from legitimate calls.)

I think if there are going to be filters, then it would make sense for users to be able to opt in or out of filters. That way you can choose what you want to see, instead of having an almighty force that determines what you see. Having global filters that users can't turn off, besides to filter out illegal content, needlessly take away freedom from users.

Usenet dealt with this via killfile. There is no reason why you cannot do client-side filtering (compare /silence with /ignore in IRC). Client-side and server-side each have their pros and cons.

Usenet also had Cancelmoose and the Cabal (TINC).

Both individual and administrative filters are necessary.

Anything can be spam because spam is in the eye of the beholder, but nonetheless, politics is generally not spam. You can have a politically-neutral policy against undesirable content that passes the smell test. It does require that you a) use reasonably objective terms in the definition of "spam", and b) that you resist the inevitable pressure to reinterpret those terms to cover that which others find undesirable political content.

Actually politics generally is spam - in the sense that much of it is knowingly dishonest self-promotion of individuals and social groups.

Just because politics isn't trying to sell you a penis extension doesn't mean it isn't trying to sell you something far worse.

It doesn't even matter how political content is published. What matters is that currently voters get more protection from a faulty toaster than from lies knowingly generated by politicians and corporate PR outfits.

The creation of deliberately false "talking points", fake news, smear campaigns, organised trolling and astroturfing, fake reviews, fake feedback, and other kinds of cognitive pollution should be banned from all forms of media.

Which is not to say this is easy or straightforward. But attempts should be made - because lying to voters and consumers is absolutely toxic to genuine democracy.

There’s something fascinating when you equate penis enlargement spam with political speech.

Btw, laying in politics has happened for like forever. Is there any evidence that it’s worse than in the past?

Both are messages coming to you. Just because they have the right to metaphorically knock on your door doesn't mean both campaigners and vacuum cleaner salesmen don't get the door slammed on them and doormen won't tell both to scram if they try to visit apartments unsolicited. The difference in categort broadness seems classically strawmen as well.

Not true at all.

Spam is unwanted email that you did not sign up to receive and sent from someone who you do not know.

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