Social sites should have all have a tree-based invite system. This would allow wiping out spammers and their enablers in a single hit. It would allow vetting of good actors too.
Thankfully bsky is not that good, so I don't get hooked by it at all. But i miss it
Actual users actually curating cool things they found is a way more sustainable manner of interaction with your fellow humans.
1. get some people who trust you to vouch for you when you join (similar to requiring an invite to join but maybe more flexible?)
2. some kind of induction process, maybe the algorithm surfaces your stuff and gets feedback, like the 'new' queue on HN
3. same as before but the AI tries to do it (scary though)
4. use the same account as on other sites, or otherwise tie it to a global reputation or something you had to invest a fair amount to build. Not great for privacy but I think it has to happen eventually; otherwise new accounts are too cheap to make.
Regardless, once you're in the system your credibility is only as good as your contributions, so you should be filtered out again if you're nefarious.
A system which looks more at the content that is posted (probably using AI) and tries to decide whether it is spam feels fairer to me than effectively pulling up the ladder on new users.
If people are distinguishable from bots then you should be able to easily distinguish yourself. If they're not, then you need personal vouching to establish who the people are anyway.
New User problem has been around for a minute though - wikipedia and stack overflow both faced it, as does every social media platform nowadays.
Reality is, though, new visitors are getting the same blast radius as early adopters got when they started, just that the early adopters now have blast radiuses that are much bigger
For small platforms it makes a lot of sense, for larger the potential for abuse is still there in different forms.
- You can't vouch for downstream invites, so the tree aspect isn't useful.
- It's not your fault if someone's account gets taken over by a spammer.
- Just because you vouched for someone once doesn't mean you vouch for them in the future.
- What should the punishment be if you accidentally invite a bad actor?
- Your community has to be large and desirable enough for people to bother. The vast majority of sites will die before anyone cares about jumping through hoops.
Addressing issues like these ends up kinda defeating the ideals of the proposal and regresses it into a mechanic that simply makes it harder to register. Which might be useful wrt anti-spam, but it has its own issues, like people having to constantly grovel for invites, shutting out earnest contributors, etc.
We know that people who are on our outer orbits should not be shared with in certain ways.
Our communities are in fact lots of overlapping bubbles, x knows y, and y knows z, but x sees them as a stranger.
The internet changes that dynamic, and we don't yet know how to manage it - we cannot all live in the town square, and we know to be very careful there, pickpockets, thieves, and robbers abound - and we have no idea who is who
Again our historical approach has been places like universities, where we have "trusted" advisors (teachers) who guide us on subjects being discussed openly - but who also ensure that we avoid pitfalls, like heated debates where people abandon logic and instead use rhetoric or violence, and who ensure that commercial interests are managed - that is, some advertisements are allowed, but unauthorised advertising is forbidden
That approach (moderation) has its own set of problems
I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in
It raises the bar at least somewhat though!
Lobste.rs has an invite based system however.