The indieweb already has an answer for this: Web of Trust. Part of everyone social graph should include a list of accounts that they trust and that they do not trust. With this you can easily create some form of ranking system where bots get silenced or ignored.
Yeah, the up/down system is what prompted lots of bots to get created in the first place. because it leads to super easy post manipulation.
Get rid of it and go back to how web forums used to be. No upvotes, No downvotes, no stickers, no coins, no awards. Just the content of your post and nothing more. So people have to actually think and reply, rather than joining the mindless mob and feeling like they did something.
As a forum user I agree, but would like to add that many forums do have a kind of “demerit point” system for incivility. Where racking up enough points gets you temporarily muted or banned.
I was thinking about something like this but I think it’s ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:
you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.
you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots…) so that wouldn’t work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.
i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.
you are right - it doesn’t have to be one or the other… I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don’t know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.
The way I imagine it working is if I notice a bot in my web, I flag it, and then everyone involved in approving the bot loses some credibility. So a bad actor will get flushed out. And so will your idiot friend that keeps trusting bots, so their recommendations are then mostly ignored.
that is an interesting idea. still… you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts… you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn’t help much.
Ok, which part of “multiple metrics” is not clear here?
Every risk analysis will have multiple factors. The idea is not to always have an absolute perfect ranking system, but to build a classifier that is accurate enough to filter most of the crap.
Email spam filters are not perfect, but no one inbox is drowning in useless crap like we used to have 20 years ago. Social media bots are presenting the same type of challenge, why can’t we solve it in the same way?
Automated filters will just drive determined botters to play the system and perfect their craft until they can no longer be automatically identified, in my opinion. I’m more of the stance that accounts should be reviewed manually so that a leap into convincing bot accounts will need to be much more dramatic, and therefore difficult. If it’s done the hard way from the start with staff who know how to identify these accounts, it may keep it from growing into an issue to begin with.
Any threshold to be automatically flagged for review should be relatively low, but the process should also be quick and efficient. Adding more metrics to the flagging process only means botters will have a narrower gaze to avoid. Once they start crunching the numbers and streamline mimicking real user accounts it’s game over.
Every time I see this implemented, it always seems like screwing over the end user who is trying to join for the first time. Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.
Imagine how challenging it is for someone joining Lemmy for the first time and suddenly having to provide trust elements like answering a few questions, or getting someone to vouch for them.
Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.
Even on Reddit new accounts are often barred from participating in discussion, or even shadowbanned in some subs, until they’ve grinded enough karma elsewhere (and consequently, that’s why you have karmafarming bots).
When I moderated a sub on Reddit I think I implemented a requirement that a poster must have at least positive three karma.
Was amazing how many scammers couldn’t even be bothered to do that little effort. Seriously they could have just upvoted each other but they couldn’t even do that.
All you have to do is introduce the smallest barrier to entry and it cuts bots admissions by about 95% as most of them out there are only looking for the lowest common denominator. They are unwilling to put in any effort at all.
I think you’d work your way in naturally, same as any community throughout all of history.
I suppose an outsider might not be able to tell a web of trust that’s only bots trusting eachother, so you still have to think critically about what you read
Eh. You’re allowed to disagree, and I wasn’t even born when those movies came out so I didn’t really experince it as a cultural moment.But personally I don’t find 'em that fun or interesting. I’ve watched primer at least half a dozen times, but I’ll never choose to watch Back again.
It’s a very tight script. There’s a lot going on, but everything goes together neatly. On the surface it’s a simple flick, but if you pay attention there are so many little pieces that slip into place. If you watch it a second time knowing everything, and pay particular attention to the little details and seemingly innocuous dialogue, it’s hard to ignore how elegantly the film comes together.
While right now that may not be the case, but as someone who looked into the topic I can definitely say that it has similar potential. It’s just that a lot of companies just duct-tape AI onto their product and the result they get is usually shitty. But if you ignore all those “projects” that are obviously meant to fail, there are some promising projects and applications for AI that are actually made by people who understand what they are doing, the limitations and the upsides of the technology and they may just make products that are indeed useful.
Sorry for the undecipherable wall of text, it’s early in the morning for me.
I’ve tried to get my friends consolidated in one app in the past, but have given up. I prefer Discord, but use a combo of that and Slack, Signal, GroupMe, IG, FB Messenger, SMS, email, and probably some others I’m forgetting about. Discord is the only one I directly open, the others I’ll just rely on notifications.
Currently I have WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Viber, a Matrix client (Fluffy), Discord, Slack, SMS, email.
I try to use Signal whenever I can, but convincing people to install yet another messaging app is hard. I don’t see the situation getting better, none of the major players is close to going out of business.
Had to do these to view some Twitter/X post a friend sent me: I don’t have an account and visiting the link redirects directly to login. So I created a new account with a temp mail. Then I had to solve 10 of these riddles. After the 10th there was an error message that I cannot use this email or so. I asked my friend for a screenshot afterwards. I had a loooong day and it was very late in the evening. I never ever do this again. Shitty SM.
There would be less talking over each other due to word definitions if the music industry had not convicted people that murder and stealing on boats was good way to describe unauthorized copying.
German has the term raubkopieren for piracy which translated literally means theft-copying. I kind of find that term funny because somehow it makes it sound even worse than just piracy, since with pirates we at least have the pop fiction image of the pirate, and because it has a paradoxical sound to it (“how can you steal something by copying?”).
I’ll be open and honest knowing whenever bringing the subject up generates anger. “Normies” aren’t gonna join somewhere where 99% of the conversations revolve around using Linux. Jump into any thread and someone’s talking about it. Doesn’t even need to be a tech thread. As soon as someone goes against the grain immediate backlash. It’s not welcoming at all.
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