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PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

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Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#141

Post by Grimblewald »

Chu4eeno wrote: post #75
alexpotato wrote: post #67

If anyone is interested in what it was like fighting spam in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that captured spam, analyzed it and then passed the analysis s on to the law firms of the big email providers for targeting under CAN-SPAM. Twitter thread about it below but happy to do a AMA here. https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296?s=20

Ironically one of the first recognizable spam campaigns was perpetrated by lawyers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

On par, a large part of that professional cohort has its entire career made by abusing rules intended to prevent abuse of rules.

It's a self-perpetuating monster that breeds attitudes and behaviours that maximise antisocial and exploitative behaviour by the system's design.

just look at what was done to copywrite, designed to protect inventors from cororates and related abuse, now unweildly for individuals and largly serves corporate interest more than the individuals it was supposed to protect. Same with patent system.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#143

Post by andix »

decimalenough wrote: post #120
VortexLain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing contributions only from big tech companies sounds ideologically questionable from free/libre software movement perspective, and it emboldens decisions which go against the user's interests, such as removing manifestv2 in Chromium.

I am genuinely baffled by how you could possibly parse my comment as suggesting we allow "only" big tech companies.

Because that's the only meaningful interpretation of your suggestion.

Big corp accounts are pre-vouched. And it will be mostly their responsibility to vouch for other accounts.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#144

Post by andix »

janalsncm wrote: post #102
VortexLain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing contributions only from big tech companies sounds ideologically questionable from free/libre software movement perspective, and it emboldens decisions which go against the user's interests, such as removing manifestv2 in Chromium.

It doesn’t have to just be companies. It could be some kind of guild with standards and application criteria. That group could vet members and kick them out for posting slop code.

I had that idea too. Maybe that's the future of OSS development.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#145

Post by cube00 »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #122
guidoiaquinti wrote: post #55

GitHub just recently added configurable PR limits for maintainers to help partially address this problem: https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request...

> At OpenClaw we get a huge volume of pull requests from the community and had to build our own bots for fighting spam. I find it ironic that the people who originate the idea of AI-code-spam are being negatively impacted by this. But all they will do is build an AI agent to review the code written by an AI agent, that probably never needed to be written to begin with.

Open source has solved harder problems before.

They're also happy to leave it to "open source" to navigate the fall out.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#146

Post by account42 »

j2kun wrote: post #26
boredatoms wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like a video/phone call?

Indeed, a request for a short video call filters out most of the people who are looking to pad their resume with LLM-automated contributions, while adding an extra layer of welcome to genuine newbies who want to join the community.

Maybe to neurotypical newbies. To others it's going to be a giant "fuck off".

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#147

Post by account42 »

benj111 wrote: post #87
nradov wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of food banks get discounted supplies. They seldom pay full retail price. In some cases I know about, distributors and retailers will sell older perishable stock to food banks when they don't think they can move it quickly enough. The trouble with food vouchers is that junkies trade them for drugs. Vouchers are more "liquid" than physical food.

No. They were paying full price, I specifically checked. I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs. I'm not entirely sure this isn't just an extension of people feeling like they're doing a good thing rather than actually doing a good thing. And that's assuming a meaningful proportion of food bank users are actually junkies.

> I mean the junkies could just use the money they didn't spend buying food to buy drugs.

With vouchers they can do that AND also spend the money they would need for food on drugs / gambling / whatever.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#148

Post by pixlmint »

user_7832 wrote: post #128
tw04 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Op said nothing about only allowing corporations. Simply stated that one path to allowing large swaths of users without having to approve every single individual user is to trust all users of certain orgs by default. Presumably you would still allow individual contributions but with restrictions unless someone has vouched for them or some other gating factor.

The thing is, it becomes a slippery slope. It's "corp accounts are pre vouched today", "non corp accounts are temporarily suspended for a few days during some downtime", to "we've decided to only allow corp accounts going forward". Where does the frog stop getting boiled?

I'm pretty sure decimalenough was talking about having the project structured in an org and only allow org members to contribute, not to automatically allow contributions from people that are members of a completely unrelated, corporate-managed org like google.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#149

Post by account42 »

edm0nd wrote: post #125
Retr0id wrote: post #2

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

as an open source project maintainer, we dont want tokens bro, we want $.

I don't even want $ really unless its enough to replace my dayjob rather than adding a second one.

Re: PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

#150

Post by wildzzz »

janalsncm wrote: post #102
VortexLain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing contributions only from big tech companies sounds ideologically questionable from free/libre software movement perspective, and it emboldens decisions which go against the user's interests, such as removing manifestv2 in Chromium.

It doesn’t have to just be companies. It could be some kind of guild with standards and application criteria. That group could vet members and kick them out for posting slop code.

That's exactly what I thought, I don't know why that's not a thing yet.
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