YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, ...
Nearly anything public is bombarded with spam. The big players are far better suited to deal with it than any newcomers, and even they can barely manage it on their own platforms.
Some things just aren't profitable, and frankly shouldn't be. Let's not forget that.
A little disingenuous. Republicans attempted to force lower government spending by causing a deficit decades ago. The strategy (for those that were good willed) was that a large deficit would politically force spending cuts across the board, obviously including USPS.
No spending cuts have ever been made and the deficit has grown exponentially instead. Congress discovered debt doesn't matter, and now neither side cares.
Welcome to the uniparty. You can continue to pretend DC Democrats and Republicans are different, but they're playing you with fake controversies that never are resolved by Congress
> A little disingenuous.
No, it's 100% true. I'm not a Democrat by any means and I'm in fact highly critical of the Democrats. But if you look at the history of laws proposed/passed with regards to the USPS, there's absolutely no ambiguity that the Republicans are trying to kill the USPS. This has nothing to do with spending, either: the USPS has not been funded by taxpayer dollars since 2006, with the exception of the 2022 bailout. After 2006, the USPS operated profitably for a few years, but Republicans have passed regulations which prevent the USPS from operating profitably, leading for the need for the 2022 bailout.
This isn't about debt or spending, and it isn't a matter where both parties are the same. I'm not a Democrat, and I don't even like Democrats, but the USPS' funding issues are unambiguously and intentionally caused by Republicans.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2022/1110-...
- Taxpayer support for the service were increased.
- Junk mail delivery were reduced.
?
I'm not sure what total junk-mail volume is, but the USPS moved 127.3 billion "units" (pieces of mail) in 2022, down from a peak of 213 billion in 2006.
First-Class mail volume was 48.9 billion in 2022, single-piece (which I presume means non-bulk) 12.9 billion.
"Marketing mail" volume, 67.1 billion.
<https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/>
First-class letter max weight is 3.5 oz (100 g).
Assuming an average weight of 100g per item, that's 6.7 million tonnes of marketing (junk) mail, give or take an order of magnitude.
A tractor-trailer rig can carry a maximum of about 45,000 lb (20 tonnes).
The junk-mail delivered in a year is roughly 400,000 such truckloads of mail. Or assuming 5-day/week delivery, about 2,000 trucks operating daily for a year.
(I'm using round numbers as the initial estimate is rough, just trying to give rough scope to the scale.)
That's basically every large industry.
Your complaint is about capitalism itself. USPS is not the cause of this.
Yes, I'm against federal subsidies in many industries. If it's a public messaging system such as USPS, why does it deliver so much spam? How about we just pay for it and stop that part? Everyone loves that with Fastmail vs Gmail - how about we do it for our national message passing?
> capitalism
How did you arrive at capitalism when I criticized federal funding? You think the idea of a federal govt and paying for stuff with public taxes is a core pillar of capitalism?
I do miss the old phone books - nice thin and absorbent paper. The old (UK) large format Yellow Pages could see you right for ages if money was tight.
This is where the US gets it wrong: over here, it's much cheaper for a company to send bulk unsolicited mail than it is for a regular person to mail a letter.
> I do miss the old phone books - nice thin and absorbent paper
Oof, if it's anything like the paper -- and, critically, ink -- used in our old phone books, well... yeah.
I very occasionally, perhaps once every year or two, get cold called in Norway but now they are always from offshore. A few years ago I got a couple of cold calls from Norwegian companies but when I pointed out that I had registered all the family's mobile numbers with Brønnøysund [1] they apologized and that was the last I heard from them.
[1] https://www.altinn.no/skjemaoversikt/bronnoysundregistrene/r...
Possibly at some point we'll be able to just blackhole calls that don't pass verification. But that won't really stop spam calls; it just means that they'll come from verified entities. I guess in that case you can go after them with complaints and get them fined in the cases where their calls violate the law, but that doesn't sound like a great solution... I have better things to do than chase down misbehaving companies.
With e-mail identifying the responsible sender is a lot harder.
<https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Refuse-unwanted-mail-and-remo...>
From the old Junkbusters site, there is a Form 1500 which can be filed against any sender:
<https://web.archive.org/web/19970713104642/http://www.junkbu...>
Form 1500, "Application for Listing and/or Prohibitory Order":
<https://about.usps.com/forms/ps1500.pdf>
Though specified as against "sexually-oriented" material, that has been deemed by courts to be at the sole judgement of the mail recipient.
You can also directly contact bulk senders through the DMA mail preference service, Valpack, RedPlum, and others. See one listing of these here:
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-stop-junk-mail_n_5b27b...>
The Form 1500 is the take-off-and-nuke-it-from-orbit option, however.
Because as a condition of the discount, it is presorted by ZIP code, eliminating a significant part of the labor cost of processing it.
Sure, some senders would then try to send their bulk mail as normal mail. Then there could be another rule that defines what "bulk mail" is, and that anything falling under that definition must be sent bulk, with the consequence being fines and refusing to deliver that mail.
Yes, this is more complicated, and I'm sure some bad actors would still be able to get through, but I expect this would greatly reduce spam.
I imagine part of the issue with something like this is that the USPS is chronically underfunded, and policing and enforcing it would be to much extra work.
Bulk email is discounted because it saves the mail company a lot of money: it comes presorted, and there is no need to mess around with stamps.
There are several categories: 500 pieces of first-class mail, 200 pieces or 50 lb as "USPS Marketing Mail", Parcel Select Ground (50-piece minimum per mailing), presorted and carrier route sourted bound matter (300 pieces), library mail (300 pieces), media mail (300 pieces).
<https://www.usps.com/business/business-shipping.htm>
The tradition of discounting certain mailings, especially publications (e.g., newspapers) and books dates to the very beginning of the US postal service and was established by Benjamin Franklin.
<https://www.history.com/news/us-post-office-benjamin-frankli...>
I've nearly done the same several times in this thread myself. "Mail" really doesn't roll off my fingertips so readily these days.
This is never going to be perfect, of course, but anything that reduces the amount of crap I get in my mailbox every day isn't just great for my levels of annoyance, but also great for the environment. 95% of what shows up in my mailbox ends up in the recycling bin. Creating, printing, shipping, and recycling that material is a huge waste.
Because those are their customers, and they treat their customers well. The hundreds of millions of USPS mail recipients, on the other hand, are the product. USPS works for their customers, not for the rest of us.
https://insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office...
>‘You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”’
-- Patrick Donahoe, US Postmaster General
This is of course an evil fascist talking point though, because the USPS has a large union that consistently votes Democrat, and how could we do wonderful mail-in ballots without the wonderful US Postal Service? Don't be a fascist, mindlessly cheer for USPS.
But once they have to worry about revenue and income statements and all that, an organization is going to care more about the interests of the people who pay them the most money, rather than the people they're actually there to serve.
Oh, wow. Look at this, never actually privatized.
> The USPS should exist to serve regular-Joe recipients of mail,
Can we get a federal telegraph agency too, just in case I need to receive some telegrams? You have no idea how horrible it is having to pay exorbitant sums of cash on private telegraph service.
The trouble is that the USPS has a union which is a reliable voting bloc for the Democrats. That makes it sacred. Even if it performs a service no one has given a shit about since the 1970s, everyone will gush on about how "what if I need to receive some mail" and pretend that mail service belongs somewhere other than a museum exhibit. I predict that every 10 years or so, it will be necessary to invent a new reason why we couldn't ever get rid of it.
Youtube spam comments tend to have highly atypical patterns, using things like unicode characters to avoid triggering keyword and URL filters. Something along the lines of GPT should pick up on these things pretty easily, and could similarly pick up on the actions these comments are requesting of users "message me on telegram", etc. It could also probably detect when spammers are trying to impersonate youtubers.
It's not really the kind of thing that spammers can use LLMs themselves to work around, either. Any attempt to get past the anti-spam LLM is going to look quite unusual compared to the typical comment which would tip it off.
Strangely Google seems reticent to try something in this vein though…
There are loads of comment-copier/remixer karma farmer bots but reddit users are becoming better at recognizing and flagging those.
Obviously this has a selection bias because I had to choose the inputs but there were some that said things like "I ate a ghost pepper on my channel" and stuff that were clearly spam but, to someone not aware that kind of thing is trying to bait you into looking at their channel, it'd appear as possibly just genuine. Heck it may have been typed by a human who owns the channel but is still spam. GPT got it.
I tested this after the video came out a while back from one of the larger channels pleading for Google/YouTube to do something about all the spam comments and the general consensus seemed to be there was "just nothing they could do". Testing this lead me to believe they just don't want to do anything because if it's simple enough that some rando in his house can craft a prompt and get some examples to test in an hour or 2 then a multi-billion dollar company should be able to do SOMETHING.
There is probably some critical mass where this would work. Some people would pay to be able to just not have to do combat with the whole world simply to enjoy the Internet.
It would also make is possible for larger companies to attest to purchases made and / or the quality of participation within their community. Imagine a scenario where I donate $50 to an open source project using GitHub Sponsors with my domain as the identity and GitHub attests to me spending that $50.
Over time, it would be possible to demonstrate a significant "investment" in your domain validated identity and it would be done by spending money online like you normally would without any additional cost. The attestation that you spent the money is simply a side effect of something you're already doing, but it's a really good indicator (over time) that you're a normal participant.
At the very least, I think having a domain as a globally usable handle would help to reduce impersonation which is a serious, difficult to solve problem right now.
In fact, it would give yet another reason to hijack a domain.
In fact there might be significant overlap between something that can support a monetary system and something that supports trustworthy communication. The best you could hope for by solely focussing on communication is that it doesn't collapse under the pressure of having to keep financial transactions secure. Except any secure form of communication is probably going to be used for transactions of some kind at some point.
I can imagine using levels of its trust model to handle the levels of email I receive e.g. this domain has X validations and my friends haven’t blocked it.
Spoilers, but the basic gist is that an advanced anti-spam AI decides to tackle the problem at the source, so to speak. Recommended reading.
One that probably leads very quickly to WW3, as the protagonists will find out, that most of the scammers are in countries not on friendly terms with the west (and therefore they tolerate cybercrime against the west).
There are also plenty of scammer operating from the west, though, so that anti spam foundation would not run out of work even if they just limit their activities to the west.
The death throes of a doomed industry. Be it steel, horseshoes or advertisements, as profit margins drop production rates will increase to compensate. Then as the machine is running as fast an as efficiently as it ever has, suddenly the margin becomes zero and there isn't any more room to optimize. The entire industry suddenly stops overnight. I await that day.
Much of this spam is actively out to trick you, as opposed to legitimate players who have no margin left to give.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/miami/news/change-coming-only-pa...
Following someone on Twitter is now the email equivalent of "double opt-in" for mailing lists.
Meh. I've watched in the hundreds of hours of YouTube videos without ever seeing or receiving any spam.
I guess you must be referring to the comments? If so, perhaps I'm missing out but I've never gone to YouTube for the comments.
Google Drive is infamous for its spam problem.