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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

#151

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

> to a VPN or web of proxies? Or more likely grandmas infected Windows XP computer?

Legislation can be changed so people are considered responsible for the abuse that comes from their network unless they can pass the buck to someone else. This will quickly cause those Windows XP machines to fall off the internet unless their owners fancy constantly being bogged down in legal trouble.

> Going to get the FBI involved for a $20 purchase?

The alternative is effectively saying that theft under 20 bucks is decriminalized?

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

#152

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

When it comes to the war on drugs there's a perverse incentive problem - said war provides endless amounts of easy to catch/prosecute crime which can be used to meet & exceed their performance targets without much effort. So there might not be too much incentive to kill this "cash cow" of low-level users/dealers by actually curtailing upstream supply.

This might not be too different from the payment anti-fraud industry (which is just varying degrees of snake oil). There are solutions that can be implemented such as actually strong two-factor authentication that could cut down on payment fraud dramatically but this would significantly reduce demand for this industry, so a lot of the field has a monetary incentive to keep the underlying primitives not so secure as to keep demand for their snake-oil.

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

#153

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

> The problem is a non-trivial political one

It's even less trivial when corporation-on-consumer fraud has been normalized (see dark patterns, or companies outright taking money for no/sub-par service). Suddenly starting to prosecute fraud would inconvenience some deep-pocketed entities.

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

#154

Post by saagarjha »

faronel wrote: post #129
bongodongobob wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the article as an example of what doesn't scale: "...He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point "Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our r…

Why not? It doesn't have to the founder on every call if you are looking to scale.

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

#155

Post by XorNot »

kombookcha wrote: post #148
jakewins wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No he's pointing out the poster hasn't defined any of their terms accurately enough to really be saying anything.

The sheer size and scale of the economy we live in, and it's benefits, is so big that people tend to make sweeping pronouncements without really understanding their impact.

The point about industrially produced cotton is exactly right: people pick some niche thing they view as "wasteful" and vastly over estimate it's importance or impact.

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

#156

Post by jakewins »

Anotheroneagain wrote: post #145
jakewins wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry I’m having a crap day; you’re totally right there’s a ton of gradients between “one mega factory makes all t-shirts” and “we all make clothes ourselves with hand made cotton thread.”

I think my argument was mostly like - don’t throw out the baby with the bath water; economies of scale are a real thing that brings us real benefits, and that should go in the scale too.

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

#157

Post by jakewins »

BrenBarn wrote: post #139
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 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…

I’m being unnecessarily confrontational because I’m having a bad day, sorry, that’s not helpful.

I would say this: I agree with you that massive faceless monopolies with no accountability are terrible, and often a direct consequence of economies of scale.

It is also, simultaneously, true that the labour saving effects - human hours spent per calorie of food or pair of socks - is a number of orders of magnitude such that modern society (ie the not starving/not freezing part of it) could not exist without it.

These two things are simultaneously true, which is what makes the problem hard; we want one effect of economies of scale and not the other.

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

#158

Post by ric2b »

BrenBarn wrote: post #139
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 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…

You're not using the common definition of "economy of scale" and that is leading to confusion. Maybe use "mega-corporations" or something like that?

Your mention of 9 companies vs 2 also tells me you're trying to describe oligopolies.

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

#159

Post by Nextgrid »

CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #54
pdonis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that the big platforms provide a much stronger incentive for fraudsters. It's that providing that stronger incentive is not a bug for the big platforms, it's a feature. It goes hand in hand with their business model, which is to sell access to as large a pool of users as possible. > The big platforms actually are radically more competent at anti-fraud / anti-spam / etc No, they're not. They are purposel…

I don't see how spam or fraud brings value to advertisers (which is what I assume you're talking about?) or any one else for that matter (other than the spammer/fraudster). Perhaps I can squint and see how an email platform like Gmail could be read as a protection racket, but I don't see it in other platforms.

> I don't see how spam or fraud brings value to advertisers

Spam and fraud still generates "engagement" (whether the bad content itself or the people getting outraged by it) which contributes to the numbers they use to attract & bill advertisers.

The modus operandi of these platforms when it comes to moderation is to quickly take down whatever will get them in trouble fast with the law (DMCA takedowns, CSAM), or what will provide ammunition for attack pieces in the media (pornography, sometimes drug- or weapon-related content). But anything else is fair game to stay and earn "engagement" even in the face of user-submitted reports.

In the unlikely event that this "anything else" does get reported on in some big media, then it'll be taken down and they'll issue an apology and how they will do better in the future, and everyone seems to buy it no matter how many times they've done this.

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

#160

Post by ric2b »

kombookcha wrote: post #148
jakewins wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The poster is against oligopolies but is using the term "economy of scale" instead, which is incorrect and causes confusion.
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