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

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

#131

Post by otterley »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #117
Animats wrote: post #82

This is easy to fix. Make Amazon responsible for warranting all sales on their platform. Amazon claims they are not the seller, some anonymous party running an ad on their platform is the seller. That was litigated in Pennsylvania, and when it got to the level that Amazon was looking at a major lose, Amazon settled to avoid a precedent. On the ad front, anyone who runs an ad for a third party should have to be able t…

> Amazon settled to avoid a precedent Maybe that's the true problem. At some point courts should stop settlements from happening due to the value of precedents to society as a whole.

While I get your point about precedential value, most disputes won’t result in new law even if litigated. Settlements are more economically efficient than having every dispute adjudicated. There is pretty much universal agreement among economists about this and many papers have analyzed the question. And the court system is definitely not an economy of scale.

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

#132

Post by jakewins »

BrenBarn wrote: post #128

I think the post underestimates the scope of these problems. It touches on it briefly, but I've mostly come to believe that it is in general bad for companies to become extremely large. It's not just an issue of content moderation. One reason that the article does touch on is the detachment from support. Large companies no longer need to care about the individual consumer, so they stop doing so. A sort of corollary f…

> In the sense of benefit to the overall economy, to the society in which that economy sits, or to humanity in general, virtually all economies of scale are actually harmful

You had me until here.

Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :)

There’s truth in both sides there - we want nail production to not be done by hand, but also real humans with power to change things to answer the phone when we call support.

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

#133

Post by Anotheroneagain »

jakewins wrote: post #132
BrenBarn wrote: post #128

I think the post underestimates the scope of these problems. It touches on it briefly, but I've mostly come to believe that it is in general bad for companies to become extremely large. It's not just an issue of content moderation. One reason that the article does touch on is the detachment from support. Large companies no longer need to care about the individual consumer, so they stop doing so. A sort of corollary f…

> In the sense of benefit to the overall economy, to the society in which that economy sits, or to humanity in general, virtually all economies of scale are actually harmful You had me until here. Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :) There’s truth in both sides there - we want nail production to not be done…

I'm not sure about that though. Ready to wear clothing is obviously inferior to tailored clothes, and it's not clear to what extent it's actually cheaper, and how much it abuses cheap labor. There may be an optimal scale for everything, and you start losing once you exceed it.

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

#134

Post by Anotheroneagain »

godelski wrote: post #122
jonathanlydall wrote: post #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 wer…

This is why I have a problem with a lot of the legal structure and incentives. If you measure in number of arrests you aren't solving the problems. I'm not sure there's any good metric to measure that. To take an analogy I'll mention the drug war. The main target was always low level drug dealers and users. They're easy to arrest and easy to say you're doing something. But they are fairly inconsequential to the busin…

I don't think so, on the contrary, they ignore the dealers in vain hope to catch some "big fish", but there are no big fishes there.

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

#135

Post by jakewins »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133
jakewins wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the sense of benefit to the overall economy, to the society in which that economy sits, or to humanity in general, virtually all economies of scale are actually harmful You had me until here. Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :) There’s truth in both sides there - we want nail production to not be done…

I'm not sure about that though. Ready to wear clothing is obviously inferior to tailored clothes, and it's not clear to what extent it's actually cheaper, and how much it abuses cheap labor. There may be an optimal scale for everything, and you start losing once you exceed it.

Tailored vs ready-made is a rounding error in the economies of scale involved in making clothes - both will use factory made fabric, dyed with factory dyes, woven from factory thread, made from factory farm cotton, grown from factory fertilizer, made from massive scale fracked natural gas, produced with millions of tonnes of factory steel, mined from factory mines..

The economies of scale that put food on your table and mine and clothe our kids - for all the horrors - will not be replaced by artisans doing small batch t-shirts from yard-grown cotton using hand made tools.

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

#136

Post by dandy23 »

Aurornis wrote: post #13
andy99 wrote: 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…

You miss the parent's point. Uber might care about their customers, but they don't give a toss about other aspects such as fraud, the local labor rules or local laws etc. They try to dodge it as much as possible. And that is a problem if they are a near monopoly and market leader because they are the market.

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

#137

Post by jph00 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #119
jonathanlydall wrote: post #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 wer…

Well what can you do? Trace their IP back to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer? Then what? Start kicking doors down? Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase? Reminds me of Lebowski asking the cops about his Credence tape.

When I was at FastMail I did a lot of very manual work to not just block spammers and other abusers, but to make their life as difficult as possible. That included figuring out how to notify the people running the servers they used (including sometimes finding the IRC chat for the folks on that server and telling them they had an intruder). One of my favorite things was to redirect bounce messages that were targeted at innocent FastMail customers to the actual spammer's email address -- which I found stopped the spam from them very quickly, once their inbox filled up with thousands of bounce messages!

Personally, I think it's reasonable to care about such things, and to try to do something about it. If no-one cares or tries, then sucky people will just suck even more.

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

#138

Post by Nursie »

jseliger wrote: post #43

Well, I received a keychron keyboard a few days ago. I ordered a used K1 v5 (Keychron does small, infrequent production runs so it was out of stock everywhere). After some examination, I've received a v4. It's the previous gen mechanical switch instead of the current optical switch. Someone apparently peeled off the sticker with the model and serial number and one key stabilizer is broken from wear, which strongly im…

I bought one recently, a K8. I was also confused, I think I had to find a reddit thread explaining what the ranges were ...

IIRC Q is the full-fat, fully programmable, hot-swappable top of the range. V is like Q but a bit more budget-friendly, may have plastic cases etc. K is their 'standard' range, some have hot-swappable switches, some don't, generally not programmable. C is budget K, wired only.

But then there's various pro, max, god knows what variants. It's a ludicrously wide product range.

All I can say for sure is I really like my K8.

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

#139

Post by BrenBarn »

jakewins wrote: post #132
BrenBarn wrote: post #128

I think the post underestimates the scope of these problems. It touches on it briefly, but I've mostly come to believe that it is in general bad for companies to become extremely large. It's not just an issue of content moderation. One reason that the article does touch on is the detachment from support. Large companies no longer need to care about the individual consumer, so they stop doing so. A sort of corollary f…

> In the sense of benefit to the overall economy, to the society in which that economy sits, or to humanity in general, virtually all economies of scale are actually harmful You had me until here. Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :) There’s truth in both sides there - we want nail production to not be done…

I guess I forgot to repeat the part about "extremely large" there. But I mean like "all economies of scale beyond a certain point".

In any case, I'm not sure I agree that economies of scale are the thing keeping food on the table. Like, yes, we want nails to be made in some efficient way, but that's not what I mean by "economies of scale". What I'm talking about is the size of the companies involved. If there are 10 factories making nails, I'd rather have them be run by 10 different companies than one. And you might be able to convince me that 9 or 8 or even 5 companies is reasonable, but not one or two.

The process that the companies use can involve something that you might call an "economy of scale" in the sense that you need to be making X number of nails before it becomes feasible to shift from artisans to factories. But you have to make sure that the economies of scale are facilitating the making of nails rather than the making of money for the nail companies.

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

#140

Post by exe34 »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133
jakewins wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the sense of benefit to the overall economy, to the society in which that economy sits, or to humanity in general, virtually all economies of scale are actually harmful You had me until here. Economies of scale in commodities is the thing that makes it so we don’t have to do sustenance farming and everyone gets to have sewn clothes on :) There’s truth in both sides there - we want nail production to not be done…

I'm not sure about that though. Ready to wear clothing is obviously inferior to tailored clothes, and it's not clear to what extent it's actually cheaper, and how much it abuses cheap labor. There may be an optimal scale for everything, and you start losing once you exceed it.

Why stop at tailoring? How about the loom? Or spinning? Or collecting the cotton? Or growing it?
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