Comment on Digg Shut Down
tal@lemmy.today 2 days ago
We faced an unprecedented bot problem
When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.
This isn’t just a Digg problem. It’s an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
It’s a social media problem. It’s going to be hard to provide pseudonymity, low-cost accounts relatively freely, and counter bots spamming the system to manipulate it. The model worked well in an era before there were very human-like bots that were easy to produce.
It might be possible to build webs of trust with pseudonyms. You can make a new pseudonym, but the influence and visibility gets tied to, for example, what users or curators that you trust trust, so the pseudonym has less weight until it acquires reputation. I do not think that a single global trust “score” will work, because you can always have bot webs of trust.
Unfortunately, the tools to unmask pseudonyms are also getting better, and throwing away pseudonyms or using more of them is one of the reasonable counters, and that doesn’t play well with relying more on reputation.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 2 days ago
Im beginning to think that, as annoying for users and difficult to build a userbase for as it may be, the answer might ultimately have to be for future social sites to charge people for use in some way, be it to create accounts or as a subscription or just for the ability to post/comment/vote or whatever. If it’s no longer going to be feasible to keep bots out, and there’s a financial gain for their use, then they’re going to get used, so at that point it has to be somehow more expensive to run a bot than that bot can be expected to bring in as a result of it’s contribution to an advertising or manipulation campaign, to deter them. On the bright side, I guess it might lead to a shift away from advertising everywhere. Either you charge people and therefore dont need ads, or you dont, and have most of your ads being “seen” by bots, which advertisers probably don’t want to spend money to reach anyway.
Furbag@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I had an idea pop in my head and I don’t know if it’s feasible or not, but maybe the next nascent social media network can try it out, who knows.
Private trackers for torrenting are notoriously hard to get invitations to, specifically because the only way to get in is through joining the community early, limited time windows to register, or some sort of lottery system, but most people get in when one of their friends sends them one of their limited number of invitations - which they don’t do lightly because if you invite a leecher it harms your reputation and both you and the person you invited can get banned even if you are still maintaining a positive ratio.
So what if we implemented a similar kind of system? Bots can’t flood a system if the registration is closed access, but regular people can still get invitations from friends and family. But if you invite a bot, that bot account and the account that invited it get terminated simultaneously, taking out two bad actors for the price of just one. Heck, if you really wanted to go scorched earth, every account that was registered via an invitation from the person who initial invited the bot should also get terminated. Know who you are inviting and you won’t have any problems, but if you use your ability to invite people recklessly, your entire social network gets kicked off the platform.
This would probably never get implemented in a serious social media platform because those spaces rely on explosive growth to compete with other more established networks, and limiting the number of users is counterproductive - I think at some point investors would just start telling management to open the floodgates and let the bots in already.