Live data from Hacker News

Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

danluu.com

101–110 of 216 posts

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services…

Uber was needed to give cab companies in a lot of places a proper kick in the pants, but it is now usually worse in my experience.

> but it is now usually worse

so why not go back to taxis?

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#102
post #101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber was needed to give cab companies in a lot of places a proper kick in the pants, but it is now usually worse in my experience.

> but it is now usually worse so why not go back to taxis?

I largely have. The local cab company is far from perfect but they now actually show up most of the time, unlike Uber drivers.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#103
Its almost like if you have a diverse ecosystem its harder to spam everyone. When there is just the bug three, you only have to crack their algorithms to get spam everyone. Spam takes advantage of the same economies of scale and does it better.

Seems like it works exactly opposite of how Zuckerberg describes it. Not surprised.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm pretty confident in my memories because it wasn't too long ago. The thing fell apart only around 2016 with the rise of apps and the inflection point was a complete misery hard to forget: drivers taking your order and not moving, drivers calling you to ask about the destination point and then refusing to go there, drivers telling you that you should've put the destination point into comments, driver asking yo…

Did you report these drivers to the app owner? Did they do anything?

Not OP, but I've reported many drivers to the app owner with zero [0] results.

[0] Not quite zero. I always got an immediate computer-generated email telling me I'm important and that my complaint is of utmost importance. Drivers never had repercussions from the companies though; every once in awhile if I had concrete evidence of running over a pedestrian's foot or something I could get law enforcement to care, but the companies DGAF.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#105

There's a lot to unpack in this article, but the key idea is the "myth of big" and that small is beautiful. It should be no surprise that Big-Tech succeeds in part by creating its own powerful mythology. All giant organisations, nations states too, build myths of unique competence, infallibility, and exceptionalism. At the same time it hardly needs saying that scale brings inefficiency, corruption, sluggishness, and…

"the key idea is the "myth of big" and that small is beautiful"

Based on a cmd-f, I don't see the words "myth" or "beautiful" in the article, and Luu writes:

It's easy to name ways in which economies of scale benefit the user, but this doesn't mean that we should assume that economies of scale dominate diseconomies of scale in all areas. Although it's beyond the scope of this post, if we're going to talk about whether or not users are better off if companies are larger or smaller, we should look at what gets better when companies get bigger and what gets worse, not just assume that everything will get better just because some things get better (or vice versa).

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#107
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're essentially opining about the difference between governance systems. Facebook (like most corporations) operates an autocracy. However, unlike most corporations Facebook generates 100B+ in revenue per year (more than most countries), is worth $1T+ (again, more than most countries), and home to 3B+ users daily lives (trifecta, more than all countries). It's time to acknowledge the company that walks like a duck a…

> It's time to acknowledge the company that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is a duck. Are you trying to imply that Facebook is a country? Because this doesn’t make any sense. Countries have an entirely different set of obligations, duties, and jobs to be done than a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment.

I'm directly stating that maybe it's time for Facebook to consider a different governance model than autocracy because their resources and integration within humanity-at-large has scaled beyond that which a single person can reasonably govern. The examples of such failures to govern are so numerous I don't have time to cite them all.

And no, I'm not advocating for Facebook to be nationalized or broken up. I'm specifically pointing out the thought that Facebook could innovate here; they have an opportunity to establish the first truly global self-governing internet-based company in history.

> a website dedicated to light communication and entertainment

This statement is deliberately obtuse. Facebook is a communal space used by 3B people every day to mediate conversations, transactions, news consumption, business, events, etc. I'd hardly say people building their livelihood off of Facebook is "light communication" or "entertainment". Again, look no farther than HN to find examples of Facebook's governance policies harming their users with no explanation or due process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29614629.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#108
post #7

The real "economy of scale" in these platforms is not actually providing any support , moderation, fraud prevention. It's not that they scale it better, it's just that they don't do it and get away with it through market power. If I provide Andy's small town taxi service and have a customer service issue, I deal with it personally and properly or I go out of business. If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to d…

> If I'm uber I just ignore it. It has nothing to do with efficiency, it's just getting the monopoly power to treat your customers badly and get away with it. People don’t use Uber because they’re a monopoly. They use it because it’s convenient, it’s a known quantity, it’s mostly predictable, and they can use it almost anywhere they go. People like to complain about Uber, but my pre-Uber experience with taxi services…

Taxis sucked outside of parts of major cities and airports. Even in NYC, the taxi system only worked well in Manhattan.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#109
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine having latents on posters, poster-persona-moods, posts, raters, rater-persona-moods, ratings, latent space curations, and user preferences and moods. User: "AI, what's my current reading status?" AI:"We're on your EveningSurfMood2, emphasizing StuffFromFriends, and your EclecticTopicsLarge (with Dang's HighQ Discussion v3, Alice12's Clueful Author Making Coherent Argument Filter, and hugging's UnusuallyInsigh…

I can't for the life of me figure out what you're trying to say

One builds systems out of humans, ML, and other computation. Ideally integrating the strengths of each, and doing fine-grained mutual compensation for the weaknesses of each. For instance, automated task management which delegates easy cases to ML, and orchestrates humans for harder cases.

When a post is rated, a system ideally learns about the post, the poster, the rater, and the rating question. The candy machine which bribed undergrads to redundantly grade CS exams, the responses giving insight into the grader, the gradee, the exam, and the instruction.

People are multifaceted. I'm interested in someone's apps, but not their cat. In when they are writing about their research focus, not on their gone-full-nutter . It would be nice to be able to stream one's own diverse interests, without burdening people who wish to follow only one of them.

Sites, group moderation, and thumb ratings, are units of very very very course grain selection. Imagine tiktoc or netflix with everyone sees the same thing, one size fits all, and if you want something else, go somewhere else. I don't even want the same thing from hn comments at different times of day. Our capabilities are oddly impoverished - even last-century usenet had "I don't want to see any more comments from this person". Skimming hn comments for ones which match my preferences of the moment, when feasible to delegate to personalized automation, the system design could facilitate that.

User customization could be open, transparent, and collaborative. Not "you looked at this once weeks ago, so here's more, and you can't stop me". Composably collaborative - not a swamp of manually-viewed isolated playlists, but accessibly searchable/queryable - intersect playlists which include this video. Beyond "this person does good videos", to "this person does good video ratings", to "these people are good raters", to "these people do good ratings of raters"... for your personalized interests of the moment.

It's late, but hopefully those are clarified highlights.

Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

#110
The problem with internet fraud is that no one is really trying to make the fraudsters accountable for their actions, instead what they’re doing is essentially “shoo’ing them away”, and fraudsters after being shoo’ed away simply try again until they, almost invariably, eventually do succeed.

Subsequently, the industry of fraud is generally lucrative and is thus constantly growing.

When I worked at Blizzard, there were many mechanisms in place to spot fraudulent credit card transactions and cancel them before they actually billed the card holder, but there was no process for reporting the fraudsters to prevent them doing the same thing again tomorrow.

This is probably the same strategy that every company does, because there is no practical action any company can do to try make fraudsters accountable and thus discourage them from simply trying again.

So the problem of fraud is getting ever bigger and increasingly unmanageable and out of control.

The problem is a non-trivial political one, governments need to create task forces to work to reduce the size of the fraud industry, perhaps by catching fraudsters and making them accountable.

The problem is even harder than simple political will though, because it’s cross jurisdictional, meaning governments of different countries all need to work together on this.

This may seem impossible at the moment, but I believe until it is achieved fraud is only going to get increasingly worse.

Post reply on HN