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The Frustration Loop

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: The Frustration Loop

#71

Post by markx2 »

I worked inside Akismet for some 6+ years.

Akismet is very good at detecting comment spam. If it were any good at detecting signup spam then wordpress.com would not have so many spam blogs.

I also would track down spam blogs there. Sometimes manually through search engines and a curated list of known terms and sometimes with tools that one of the devs created for me.

I suspended thousands of genuine spam blogs. Sometims mistakes were made but they were rare.

Then, although some automated tools were created to try and stem the tide, that hunting and suspending was deemed not to be a priority. It was important at the start that wordpress.com was seen to be clean so it could grow but once deemed big enough, it was stopped. While I know I was using a supersoaker to put out a burning car it didn't take long and I found it satisfying

This time of year I'd be hunting hunting Halloween spam blogs and would start to see Christmas spam blogs too.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#72

Post by TeMPOraL »

Thorrez wrote: post #59
tareqak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this work for something like Twitter/X when accounting for individuals serving the US government? Someone could be flagged as a troll on the backend for unrelated reasons, but now their experience in communicating with someone in government is delayed. I understand that a delay is not the same thing as a block, but I wonder if the damage to the user’s experience is sufficiently similar for a federal judge.

Twitter/X bans people outright. Surely that's a bigger issue for communication than lag.

It isn't. When you're banned, you know you're banned. Thus, you know you can't expect to use your account for communication anymore. When you're shadow-banned, you don't know you are shadow-banned, and will continue to attempt using your account for communication, and believe it's the other people who are just ignoring you.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

austinl wrote: post #8

Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is why I think the frustration techniques, or simply account suspension aren't widely used). The field of spam-prevention is fascinating because it's essentially an arms race between companies deploying tactics to detect spam and sophisticate…

And the irony here is that the leading spam-detection teams work for spammers. Ads are spam, except when it's adtech that's paying your bills.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

jonny_eh wrote: post #57
jaggederest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, how would you build a following if none of your videos ever receives any views? I'm not someone who uses the tikity tok but it seems like an intractable problem.

Share your videos as a response to a comment on HN.

In other words: be a spammer.

Yay, incentives on social media sites are totally not perverted.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#75

Post by laserbeam »

I see people claiming that spam detection is creativity warfare between spammers and spam detectors. That may be true if you're Akismet, but when you're a website that provides a place where spammers may gather that is no longer the case.

It's a race between your blog/website and other blogs/websites. If you're better protected than your neighbor, the spammers will go and haunt your neighbor instead. Especially when it comes to protecting against click farms, not against bots. As the joke goes, you don't have to outrun the bear in a forest, you have to not be the slowest in your group.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#76

Post by Nevermark »

I came up with a simple way to eliminate spam in my email, without any third party filtering.

I have my own domain name for email. My email box accepts anything that goes the domain. I.e. a catchall email account.

However, I give a different email address to every site and service. I.e. sitea@mydomain.com, site2@mydomain.com

This lets my email reliably get auto sorted by who its from.

But I also use a consistent form to the names I hand out, so that random email that comes to my domain gets deleted instantly and I never see it.

I almost never get spam. But sometimes some service leaks my email somehow and I start getting some. So I change my email with that service (or cancel it) and add that email to a manual list of incoming addresses to block.

It's so dead simple, I feel like all email programs should have the option of working with a whole domain this way.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#77

Post by [deleted] »

inciampati wrote: post #63
petre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They even had me send a selfie of myself So they could compare it with what, the content posted?

They want to collect name:face mappings. I've had the same issue with IG but haven't got around to posting the selfie.

[deleted]

Re: The Frustration Loop

#78

Post by tofurocks »

Nevermark wrote: post #76

I came up with a simple way to eliminate spam in my email, without any third party filtering. I have my own domain name for email. My email box accepts anything that goes the domain. I.e. a catchall email account. However, I give a different email address to every site and service. I.e. sitea@mydomain.com, site2@mydomain.com This lets my email reliably get auto sorted by who its from. But I also use a consistent form…

You can do something similar with Gmail - if your email is matt@gmail.com you can receive to Matt+1@gmail.com, matt+2 etc. Although some websites reject this format.

Re: The Frustration Loop

#79

Post by tareqak »

petre wrote: post #54
tareqak wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would this work for something like Twitter/X when accounting for individuals serving the US government? Someone could be flagged as a troll on the backend for unrelated reasons, but now their experience in communicating with someone in government is delayed. I understand that a delay is not the same thing as a block, but I wonder if the damage to the user’s experience is sufficiently similar for a federal judge.

Don't use Twitter for government comms I guess? It's a private system with its own rules. They can degrade the experience as much as they like if the system flags one as a troll, regardless of their being part of an organization.

Well, here is the thing: maybe a troll can use the idea that a comments on a government official's account is a public forum and demand that the third party remove the troll flag, or demand that the troll flag be ignored for government accounts.

> U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president's account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc TWTR.N users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-twitter-idINKBN1KV...

In the above case, the block was executed by the account holder who was a government official. Having the service provider flag a user as a troll and degrading their experience might be acceptable for comments on non-government accounts, but if a federal judge "flags" government accounts as public forums in a US court of law, then the service provider is now creating additional friction for a user participating in a public forum.

We have had political candidates and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doing AMAs on Reddit, so what I am describing is not a far-fetched hypothetical: https://old.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/6ftvhu... .

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