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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

#141

Post by antoniojtorres »

infogulch wrote: post #10

Way back in 2014 when Jeff Atwood (aka codinghorror) switched from Stack Overflow to creating Discourse, he gave a talk about it (see notes [1], sadly I can't find a live link to the recording anymore). He gave a pithy little explanation of why they built the Discourse trust levels system the way they did that stood out to me: > The only thing that scales with the community is the community. The point being, you have…

Didn’t this present it’s own set of issues for StackOverflow? I remember there being some large events surrounding very powerful community moderators

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

#142

Post by Animats »

kurthr wrote: post #90
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…

KYC or you're liable. Interesting solution. It's kinda amazing it's not already that way (since advertisers need to get paid). I guess it would make it harder to advertise, if you're not already big so that could hurt little guys, but so is scamming customers.

That's for ads. For online retail, the site that takes the money is the retailer. Period. The platform and the sellers can fight out who pays for returns and warranty problems. After the customer gets paid.

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

#143

Post by graton »

rossdavidh wrote: post #81

There are a lot of cases where smaller is better. This article, for example, is way too long (although basically on target).

Agreed. I wonder if anyone read the entire article. Firefox reader mode says 293–372 minutes to read the article. Which is 4 hours 53 minutes - 6 hours 12 minutes.

Though I do think reader mode can overestimate by a lot. Still a 53,000+ word article is going to take a long time to read.

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

#144

Post by Anotheroneagain »

exe34 wrote: post #140
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. How big do you need to go for that? When will the cost of transport and distribution overtake any gains? What is there to gain after all that gets big enough to produce a reasonable assortment of fabrics?

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

#145

Post by Anotheroneagain »

jakewins wrote: post #135
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"will not be replaced by artisans doing small batch t-shirts from yard-grown cotton using hand made tools."

That isn't what I'm talking about. There is a lot between that and transporting everything multiple times across the globe just for the sake of making it as large scale as possible. What is the gain after you can reliably feed a few looms?

There are no better tools by the way. It's people sitting behind sewing machines, just on the other side of the planet.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

jakewins wrote: post #135
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by tsimionescu »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #45
Aurornis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used plenty of small-town taxi services, yes. If you’re only remembering the gold standard small-town service that did everything perfectly, you’re looking back with rose colored glasses. The typical experience back then was not good.

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…

I think this varied greatly between different places. In my own country&city, Uber came in as a premium-ish option initially (regular taxis were already dirt cheap), with nicer cars and excellent service. Of course over time things normalized back down to the same sorts of cars and the same drivers, but the first few years it was beautiful, not a race to the bottom.

Still, even today (and with Uber mostly having lost the market to Bolt), the average ride is much, much better than the average taxi ride ever was (and I was a regular user of both). The cars are still cleaner, and it's virtually unheard of to have drivers try to overcharge or otherwise scam you - which were both regular occurrences with taxis.

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

#148

Post by kombookcha »

jakewins wrote: post #135
Anotheroneagain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're framing the above poster as an anarcho-primitivist for saying that we would be better off with 5 global conglomerates controlling t-shirt production than 2.

I don't think obfuscating "there is a dropoff point in size where economies of scale stop being better for humanity and start getting worse" with "we must switch to artisinal backyard t-shirt making" is really steelmanning here.

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

#149

Post by godelski »

golergka wrote: post #130
godelski wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase? Sure, why not? And if you're at the scale is Blizzard I'm sure it's a lot more than $20. We're collecting all kinds of information these days. Surveillance capitalism is a common term for it. Data is gold they say. So why not give that data to people that can use it to stop crime?

Because they're in Russia or North Korea, and their bosses bosses are good friends of local police and secret services. What exactly can FBI do about them?

Well I guess to be fair it would be a matter of Homeland Security. Either way, there are agencies who's directives are about dealing with international fraud. Global commerce comes with global agreements.

1) There's certainly cards coming from non completely sanctioned countries. This means legal pathways.

2) If fraud is prevalent and these numbers can be tracked it makes for better policy decisions. It's not uncommon knowledge that we don't have the best privacy and security. This is at least ammo to do something about it.

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

#150

Post by godelski »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #134
godelski wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find that a strange comparison. Certainly there are bigger fish to fry. In both drugs and credit cards there is a whole ecosystem. Cards probably more straight forward as these are typically being sold on websites and you thus have a clear marketplace. Which I'd differentiate a marketplace from a dealer on a corner. Go after the people who are the generators. That's people making the drugs or people stealing the cards in the first place. What do you mean there's no "big fish." If we're going to use a fish analogy it's not the size I care about, but the type.
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