Musk claims the only solution to bots in 2023 is paid accounts.
I kinda agree with him. There is no captcha that's going to keep out determined spammers. Even reddit is filled with bots.
You either try to eliminate bots through paid accounts, real ID verification... Or you filter based on quality of content (ie. bots are allowed to post, as long as what they say and do is indistinguishable from a human - like reddit does).
Its the same reason Discord/Telegram kind of works, the same reason small niche subreddits (and Hacker News) are still OK, the same reason dedicated game servers are so much nicer than public matchmaking in video games... They have a hierarchy of users who are motivated and empowered to police their own reasonably sized niche space.
Twitter can't do this, but maybe Twitter should not exist as it does now.
Reddit the company wouldn't really like this either, as they would have rather have mainstream mega-subreddits over collectively smaller niche subs.
I think explicit & transitive trust is a strategy worth exploring. If you trust accounts made by people that you know personally, and you transitively trust the people that they trust (say... five hops). That's going to be a significant portion of humanity.
If you start getting a little spam, you explicitly revoke trust in the spammers. If you get a lot of spam, revoke trust in whoever you trusted that trusted the spammers, etc. A little bit of social graph hygiene ought to go a long way against spam, so long as we're trusting people and not platforms. We're practiced at one of those and not the other.
the community owner must configure some challenge exchange between his node and the users publishing to his node. the challenge is completely arbitrary, it can be a whitelist, a password, a super complex interactive game, sending a picture of your passport, account age, minimum karma, a combination of all these things, etc. Since it is arbitrary, it will evolve with time. Any method (already invented or invented in the future) that centralized platforms use to filter AI spam can also be used, but over P2P.
I think a solution to bot accounts could be a referal system. Everyone who signs up needs to be referred by another person. If the new user has negative impact on the platform, all parent users on the referal chain lose some sort of trust.
Users can set a "trust" threshold and all content they see is filtered through that lens. It's like an automatic twitter block based on an algorithm.
Also people would ask the people they refer to the platform to please not do bad things so they can preserve their "trust" rating.
> What's stopping a determined spammer paying for accounts?
Paid accounts adds a significant overhead to the spamming.
Spammers just don't spam for the sake of it, they want to sell people something, legal or not.
It's one thing to buy millions of spam accounts for $100 on the dark web. It's another to have to spend $5 bucks a month per account on millions of accounts...
I kinda agree with him. There is no captcha that's going to keep out determined spammers. Even reddit is filled with bots.
You either try to eliminate bots through paid accounts, real ID verification... Or you filter based on quality of content (ie. bots are allowed to post, as long as what they say and do is indistinguishable from a human - like reddit does).
Whats the anti-spam plan?