And i'm looking forward to none of them.
Or if I want, I can verify that I'm myself, and eschew anonymity, and certain platforms should only accept contributions from people who don't hide their identity.
Everyone knows who you are in the town square.
What we're missing is a way to have cryptographically secure pseudonymity: you log in to a website, you don't give any information whatsoever, but you cannot make two different accounts.
Even if it's some kind of government encoded key, governments cannot be trusted to create imaginary people and hand them out to companies like palantir for large scale population manipulation.
In any case, it is still better than the status quo where even foreign authoritarian states can do that in countries where the local government wouldn't.
And indeed, it is to be expected that some countries be banned from most of the internet, or at least get a read-only version of it, because their digital credentials aren't deemed trustworthy enough. Not unlike how the travel visa system works nowadays.
Many years ago I left a small town and moved to a big city for this exact reason.
Applied ZKPs are being actively worked on in the blockchain sphere.
We're scratching our heads wondering why there's no forward motion when it's simply that no one is pushing it.
They haven't added or really changed anything since the acquisition AFAICT, it's just trucking along exactly as it was the day Zoom bought them out. Twitter account proofs were broken by the API changes years ago and nobody is at the wheel to fix or even just deprecate them.
Did you miss “Zoom”?
If you make the price high enough sure, but I'm unsure you can find the right price to simultaneously 1) deter bot traffic and 2) be appealing to actual users.
the individual user is now priced out and cannot speak candidly and anonymously, while large, wealthy orgs simply price that into their market-capture and consensus-building techniques
Dead internet is the prequel to dead world, let's seize the opportunity to learn how to coexist with synthetics and develop the code that will make life with a higher intelligence species possible on Earth. And remember, we humans vary widely, and just like there are people happy to share LinkedIn slop today, there will be humans gladly living surrounded exclusively by overpowering synthetics. So lower your expectations for universal solutions and focus on niche.
But plenty has worked on a smaller scale. Raph Levien's Advogato worked fine.
There's also a reason most new social networks start up as invite only - it works great for cutting down on spam accounts. But once they pivot to prioritizing growth at all costs, it goes out the window.
The corporate internet was never good to begin with, it was just forced on the masses.
Actually, if I'm thinking about it. Social Media platforms already started this with the paid blue badge for verification, and it's also monthly subscription. But it's for their respective platform only, not universal.
The issue, as I understand it, is literally a new Eternal November, just that instead of “noobs” there are “clankers” this time.
Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck about things like gender, organs (like skin or genitalia) or absence thereof, or anything alike when someone posts something online, unless posted content is strongly related to one of those topics. Ideas matter no matter who or what produces them. Species fit into the same aspects-I-don’t-care-about list just fine - on the Internet nobody knows^W cares you’re a dog. Or a bunch of matrices in a trench coat. As long as you behave socially appropriate.
The problem with bots is that they’re not just noobs - unlike us meatbags they don’t just do wrong and stupid things but can’t possibly learn to stop (because models are static). Solving that, I think, is the true solution, bringing Internet back to life. Anything else seems to be just addressing the correlations to the symptoms.
(Yea, I’m leaning towards technooptimist and transhumanist views - I was raised in culture that had a lot of those, and was sold a dream of a progress that transcends worlds, and haven’t found a reason to denounce that. Your mileage may vary.)
There, sadly, needs to be some gatekeeping and then it can work.
For example I'm member, since years, of a petrolhead forum where it works like that: a fancy car brand, with lots of "tifosi" (and you don't necessarily want all these would-be owners on the forum). To be part of the forum you must be introduced by some other members who have met you in real-life and who confirm that you did show up with a car of that brand.
If you're not a "confirmed owner", you can only access the forum in read-only mode.
It's not 100% foolproof but it does greatly raise the bar.
It's international too: people do travel and they organize meetups / see each others at cars and coffee, etc.
Or take a real extreme, maybe the most expensive social network: the Bloomberg terminal. People/companies paying $30K/year or so per seat each year probably won't be going to let employees hook a LLM to chat for them and risk screwing their reputation. Although I take it you never know.
It is the way it is but gatekeeping does exist and it does work.
All it takes is one invited user to open the door to bots.
Also, if the bots are smart, they'll add real people too and take them down with them.
How far up the tree do you kick? Going too far up makes it so malicious people can "sabotage" by botting to get huge swatch of legitimate users banned.
Going to shallow means I just need to create N+1 distance between myself and my bot accounts
Your tree could for instance be pruned - you can still invite people, but the people you invited can no longer invite people.
There are not a lot of sites which have tried this and failed. Those which have tried to be even a little bit clever about it, have succeeded pretty well (Advogato was a really early example).
What there have been, are sites which rejected such restrictions after a while, because they would rather have a big number to show to investors than real people. Many have even run the fake accounts themselves (e.g. Reddit).
Invite only. You get a number of invites per year etc. And once a year an open door or so
Bittorrent trackers, as absolute retarded as they are, have performed this experiment for us and the lesson we're supposed to learn is that this does not work. Someone, somewhere, has an incentive to invite the wrong sort eventually, which because of the social network graph math stuff, eventually means "soon". Once that happens, that bot will invite 10 trillion other bots.
Unlike most public trackers which are either dead or on a life-support, member-only and invite-only sites are still kicking.
And you are personally responsible for your invitee
The few I'm part of all have a real community (like in the net of old), civil conversation, and verified, quality materials being shared. Almost everybody behaves and doesn't abuse the invite system, because nobody wants to lose their access to such a wonderful oasis among the slop web. It's a great motivator to stay decent and follow the rules. When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice, but because someone got their account stolen. Prune the invitee tree and things are mostly under control again.
Entire trees of invitees, going back months and years, are pruned. Mercilessly, indiscriminately, and self-servingly for the few people privileged enough that they are above suspicion. And if you're unlucky to be on the wrong side of it, there's nothing like an appeals process.
>and doesn't abuse the invite system
That's wild.
>When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice,
I never said it was malice. It's because the system itself is pathologically flawed and there's no way to make it work.
The bots exist for a reason, usually to covertly advertise a product, and by themselves already cost money to run. Someone looking to astroturf their AI B2B SaaS would probably be more willing to pay $10 to post than a random user from a less wealthy country who just wants to leave a comment on an interesting discussion.
History also shows you can take a $10 fee and maintain quality on SomethingAwful for quite some time.
Assuming the money isn't wasted and is actually used to fund moderation 10$ is probably comfortably above the cost to detect and ban most malicious users.
There are large swaths of spammers that indeed would not pay it. There are on the other hand plenty of NGO's that would pay it without a second thought to promote specific topics and dogpile on others. Those are the movements I would expect AI to take over if not already. AI does not sleep, humans do. AI won't miss the comments that groups believe need to be amplified or squelched.
TLDR: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility. The message isn't copied to the receiver. All the receiver needs is a brief notification that a message is available.
"my2cents"
0.02 to post or send a message
Could we just add complex and varied captcha to the comment & posting forms?
There's just the pesky problem of incentives on the other side of the coin - who gets the $? The spammee? But there would be enshitification issues like:
1. Those who are incentivized to take as big a cut as possible.
2. Those who would put it in their EULA that you must accept their spam and not chargeback or else you lose access to something you value like their services (EULA Ransom... not much different to today "accept our EULA or lose access to what you've already paid for!")
I'm sure there are many other perverse incentives which would creep in..
I have not seen or heard of a single person who is excited about AI generated blog posts, or TikToks, or commercials, or images. In fact it’s the opposite, the internet coined the term AI slop, and my non-internet addicted friends hate the fact that chatGPT is killing the environment.
The only people I’ve ever seen champion AI are the few who are excited by the bleeding edge, and the many many peddlers
I can’t really articulate why, but this doesn’t feel true to me. There are plenty of things humans do especially at scale that we don’t like, or we do that we don’t like others doing, and don’t stop
Hence why we have to keep feeding the orphan crushing machine.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
It's too bad we weren't more skeptical about the ways emerging technologies would eventually be used against us. Some warned about it but many (including me) ignored them. Perhaps we could be forgiven for that naivete, but there's no excuse to be ignorant of what's going on now.
Social media, HN and the rest of internet first business can go broke
I don't see anyone out there propping me up directly. Why would I give crap if some open source hacker or etsy dealer doesn't have a home next month? Yeah I don't because they're not caring in the same way
Thoughts and prayers everyone else but your effort is clear, not going to be 1984'd into caring for people who clearly don't care back.
That is Facebook. I hear it is full of bots posting under verified identities.
In that case, I will certainly embrace the slop net. Perhaps this is even good because many don't dare to venture beyond the black wall.