Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ev1 | Hacker News Reader

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This becomes somewhat rapidly infeasible as your client is sorting through a 1:100000 signal to noise ratio.

In a past web forum I did infrastructure for, without sufficient moderation and constant updates to captchas/challenge questions, we would get over 25k signups a day (100 legitimate signups a day), and over 500k spam posts a day (<5k legit). You'd be sending every single client multiple-digit terabytes of literal spam, much of it illegal spam (CC theft dump sales, illegal online pharmacy, are common spam) and making them dig through it.

Imagine viewing a single thread, and downloading about 5GB a page of gzipped viagra ads covered in the entire text content of a Harry Potter book in a desperate attempt to get past some filter, and then having to filter through to get the one or two posts.

It's a hard problem, but I'd argue its one that's been effectively moribund for effort and research around the time of everyone dropping POP3 for their email.

My entire problem with censorship, philosophically, is some unwanted third party making demands on my information input. The goals of moderation need not be at odds with my goal to determine for myself what I wish to read. Categorization and shared filter lists could go a long way here.

> unwanted third party making demands on my information input

It seems like we want the same thing. If we don't have any kind of moderation, then that filtering is pushed out to each and every leaf node, instead of being handled centrally, and this is a huge demand on my attention for information input. Do you remember how bad email spam had gotten before we developed effective server-side spam filtering? Email had become basically unusable.

Email providers still deliver spam, they just deliver it to a spam bucket I can view for myself and decide if the classification is accurate.

The categorization is handled upstream. The decision of what to do with that information is left to me. I think that's the ideal model.

They really don't deliver a huge amount of it; quite a bit (significant amount) is straight up rejected. What you get is the trickle that vaguely passed at least a few tests in the spam box.

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