Hacker News Reader

Comment by tumsfestival | Hacker News Reader

I can only imagine how much worse they'll make the captcha after stuff like this picks up speed with the users all the while being ineffective against the bots.

View on HN

I really doubt that they're the first to do this.

captchas are broken, forever. There is no way to prevent bots without also preventing a bottom tier of human users (visually impaired people, old people, or just impatient people). Like this xkcd [1] comic suggests, we need to just focus on rewarding and punishing specific behavior, regardless of whether the agent is human or not

[1] https://xkcd.com/810/

I think a better approach is to make account creation frictionful (eg. charge money, set karma thresholds, require an invite, etc.), score each account, and ban or time out accounts when they break community rules.

But an even better approach would be to go fully P2P and leave the scoring and ranking and filtering at the end nodes, with the possibility of friendly networks of interest group peers assisting with the task. BitTorrent for social media, pgp signed accounts, fully flexible annotation and ingestion. It's also less subject to cabal-based censorship.

Jokes aside, we don't want any bots at all. Even if they're posting constructive comments, we should interact with humans, not machines

That doesn’t mean that webcrawlers have no legitimate value (think: search indexers) or illegitimate value (think: intellectual property theft via data scraping for AI purposes), and bots which communicate while they have no place, aren’t going to go away.

In the interest of provoking discussion: why?

If a bot can meaningfully pass and act as a productive member of the community, what does it matter?

Because some of us go to sites like 4chan in order to learn what people really think. We want to see how they react and what they say when they are protected from consequences by the anonymous nature of the forum. We want the full spectrum of humanity, good and bad.

The opinions of bots are not just irrelevant, they are a form of consensus creation attack. They make it seem like a lot of people have an opinion when the reality might be the opposite. We are not interested in the made up realities that people pay bot operators to create. We want the truth, and the truth comes from real humans expressing their real unfiltered thoughts.

It's nice to want things. The people paying expensive programmers for bot armies to parrot their thoughts are currently paying cheaper humans sitting at a bank of beheaded cellphones to parrot amplify their thoughts instead. You're being lied to, regardless, the only difference is if it's a shell script to do the lying or a paycheck to a human to do the lying.

Who's driving phone farm?

https://www.some3c.com/blogs/news/unified-control-20-pcs-pho...

I'm aware of the risk. I try to mitigate it by also browsing smaller sites which are hopefully too small to be targeted by people with vested interests. And I know I'm being lied to. That's why I want to see every lie, every extreme. I'm especially interested in witnessing them try to debunk each other's lies. In the chaos, a synthesis is bound to emerge.

Because in the end it's up to us. We're the ones who have to draw the conclusions. At some point we're gonna have to decide whether some idea is right or wrong. This is much harder compared to just blindly taking a side at face value and just believing them and repeating what they say. I suppose it's possible that most people would prefer to be told what to think and what to say. I for one can't live like that. Things gotta make sense before I'll believe in them.

It's important to witness every possible argument and to see every single one of them viciously attacked on the proverbial ideological battleground. Then you can figure out which points remain convincing. Declaring oneself right, unwillingness to engage in debate, attempts to suppress opposing viewpoints, emotional appeals, these are all signs of authoritarianism. This is reason enough to cast everything they say into doubt. Good ideas don't need to be forced in this manner in order to convince.

Because I'm interested in what people have to say, not what machines have to say.

PoW like hashcash (not a cryptocurrency thing) might be a better solution. Users could even delegate solving the PoW puzzles to a 3rd party for low power devices like phones. But it imposes a cost on spammers that's inescapable.

That assumes spammers are using their own hardware to post. If they're using a botnet, they don't care about CPU cycles. Botnets would probably become even more profitable in that model.

I mean at some point ... the average visitor is dumber than the AI and your now just blocking dumb people

yes, we're creating websites that are gated by IQ tests. This isn't the way

I’d like to believe I have at least an average IQ and I can’t pass half the google captchas.

Whether or not a square is part of the motorbike when it’s either the rider or a few pixels of the wheel is subjective and fuzzy. Fuck google for not making these questions clear cut enough that answers aren’t disputable.

*you're

Reply on news.ycombinator.com