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The internet might not be dead, but we sure as hell don't have good ways of navigating the oceans of spam and clickbait.

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I've been thinking about that. Can we leverage proof of work to sign meaningful content? I'm thinking of a voluntary HTML tag, containing a cryptographic signature, that has to match the page content, to be eligible for placement in a "spam-free" search engine.

For an actual creator, a few seconds of publishing delay is nothing. To an army of spam bots, having to waste time and energy calculating hashes could be crippling.

What if we apply this to every link on the page?

I'm trying to imagine how that could work, would we need to encode the English language to a has or something?

All it is is a standardized signature that means "my computer spent time publishing this data packet", encoding agnostic. Given such proof, we at least know it cost something to put on the web.

Why not skip the 'proof of resource expenditure' abstraction and just have a platform where posting requires a deposit of 0.1usd or crypto equivalent for low friction, retrievable after 6 months of no spam reports? It would at least limit to the more dedicated spammers.

Because that requires centralization and payment processing. You're describing a search engine it costs money to appear on. Proof of expenditure is the low friction crypto equivalent.

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