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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Yup. If you build a communications platform, it will be used for spam. If you build a hosting platform, it will be used for porn. If you build a linking platform, it will be used to spam links for porn.

Anything else requires a constant uphill battle of content filtering and deletion. You could call it censorship, but it's a necessary reality.

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At some point you just have to cave and build a porn site.

problem is not porn per se, problem is illegal porn, that's what I suppose OP encountered on its app's links

Which, I expect, will be used for [unlawful] extreme porn in one direction and non-porn copyright infringement in the other direction.

Mind you all roads built get used for crime. There's a point at which mitigations for advise of their services become unreasonable to expect of a company.

Waiting for the follow up article, "The day I accidentally built an open source developmennt platform."

"I made a great fast, free porn hosting site. But then these nerds showed up and started uploading their Git repos onto it."

"The day I realized my camgirl sex website was being used for business meetings"

> Anything else requires a constant uphill battle of content filtering and deletion. You could call it censorship, but it's a necessary reality.

Depends on how you structure it. If they're paying to list, then it makes things a lot easier.

I suspect that this is one reason you're seeing virtual conferences that are charging $50 or whatever. Yeah, it's a few dollars to offset costs. But it also keeps out the "riff-raff" so to speak.

Charging nominal fees are going to keep out the most casual users but I'm not sure it's a bad idea.

You can refund people who don't abuse your system too, either directly or in kind. That helps to keep things less about financial worth of users and more about behaviours.

True. I've also seen in-person volunteer events that charge some nominal amount that you can either get refunded or choose to donate if you show up. Even if it's only $10, there's a fairly large sunk cost effect that causes a lot more registered people to attend than if they only had to sign up for free. It can be a lot easier to plan that way.

I have my own hobby side-project that allows user-generated content. Do you have some tips for minimizing the ways it could be used by spammers/porn?

For example, my project is a PWA which (I assume) makes it harder for spammers to use because there are fewer direct links that could be used for spam.

What about using verified emails? Google's captcha (or similar)?

Moderate it.

Have actual (paid) humans review the content that users upload.

And please don’t fall for “algorithms are good enough”.

Google did that with YouTube Kids, and look what horror that spawned.

Do you think they "fell for" that line or peddled it. The later seems most likely to me.

Probably both.

Agreed probably both.

When banning spammer accounts, do you think it's better to return an error (i.e. 404) or shadow ban them so it looks like the call succeeded?

Shaddow banning is mostly good for individual people who are annoying other customers. They likely don't understand what shadow banning means and don't check for it.

Commercial spammers understand shadow banning and check for it.

The best option for commercial spammers is to make it expensive to post on your platform. That means shutting them down right away, so the effort to sign up doesn't get the reward of having an account available for days.

It's all a joke and it is censorship. On one hand FB is hiding behind freedom of speech but on the other hand I cannot send specific form of links even in private via messenger.

Then again what else can FB or other such platform do?

Porn and spam always take over eventually, because they're consumed by, ahem, highly motivated individuals.

use tinyurl

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