There are a lot of cases where smaller is better. This article, for example, is way too long (although basically on target).
Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
81–90 of 216 posts
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#82This 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 to produce the actual name and address of the advertiser on request, or accept responsibility for the contents of the ad. Businesses have no right to be anonymous. That is existing law in the EU and California.
Fraud is a problem because the major platforms get a free pass on supporting it. Not because it's hard.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#83Amazon selling obviously fake SD cards / flash disks is baffling. It’s super easy to spot and fake disks cost users data, so you’d think they’d take that seriously. https://a.co/d/auXcxrZ ($29 for 1TB as their “overall pick”)
I only purchase solid state storage, in person, from big-box stores. They have providence , maintaining custody from manufacturer to store shelf. Unlike (e.g.) Amazon, where all vendors' have "identical" items thrown into one big "for sale" bin.
> They have providence, maintaining custody from manufacturer to store shelf.
That's called provenance, not providence.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#84This is partly just economy of scale for the scammers. Every additional platform you target costs money, so naturally they tend to target Facebook, Google, and friends.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse, spammers are better at their 'professional job' (getting mail past other people's spam filters and inane preferences) than your tiny mail server or small group of employees who don't understand how to not look spammy. Like not having annoying email 'signatures' and other anti-patterns commonly found in corporations.
> Like not having annoying email 'signatures' What?
I used to work IT helpdesk and once spent weeks trying to find out why my company’s emails were getting bounced all of the sudden. We had just switched to Microsoft’s hosted exchange (office 365) so we figured that must be it. I escalated the issue until I got some very technical folks on the phone, but all they could say was that everything looked 100% fine and that something we were sending was tripping the spam filters. I thought about it and realized we recently changed our email signatures to include a bit.ly shortened link. I guess spammers also use that to obfuscate their links so we were indeed sending out sketchy email
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse, spammers are better at their 'professional job' (getting mail past other people's spam filters and inane preferences) than your tiny mail server or small group of employees who don't understand how to not look spammy. Like not having annoying email 'signatures' and other anti-patterns commonly found in corporations.
> Like not having annoying email 'signatures' What?
Things like additional inline images, hyperlinks to a bunch of places, etc non-text data. It's probably only a couple fractions of a point more spam score per message, but spammers and typical employee end user communication can look annoyingly similar.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#87Earlier 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
It doesn't; that's not the point. The point is, as I said, that the big platforms make money by selling access to as large a pool of users as possible, and that requires them to not crack down on spammers and fraudsters--because at their scale, it is impossible for them to reliably distinguish the spammers and fraudsters from the rest of their users. So they can't crack down on spammers and fraudsters without also reducing the size of their user pool and thereby killing their business model.
The article explicitly talks about this:
Either you have to back off and only ban users in cases where you're extremely confident, or you ban all your users after not too long and, as companies like to handle support, appealing means that you'll get a response saying that "your case was carefully reviewed and we have determined that you've violated our policies. This is final", even for cases where any sort of cursory review would cause a reversal of the ban, like when you ban a user for impersonating themselves. And then at FB's scale, it's even worse and you'll ban all of your users even more quickly, so then you back off and we end up with things like 100k minors a day being exposed to "photos of adult genitalia or other sexually abusive content".
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#88I largely agree, although i think the author misses on some of the examples. Reddit is not an example of being bad due to this affect, but an example of being good because of it. Reddit is not one huge platform but a combination of thousands of subreddits independently moderated. That is how reddit remains good, because small subreddits have small scale. Running your own email server isn't a counterexample, but is le…
My experience running my email server is exactly what danluu says. Receiving emails and classifying spam is not a problem at all, but my outgoing mail is often blocked. It's not that I struggle to moderate the whole world, but the whole world is moderating me.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can they make their customer whole 100% of the time? They do make their customers (i.e., the companies who pay them for access to their users) whole. But their users (at least the vast majority of them) are not their customers; they don't pay for the service. (It's true, as the article points out, that even paid support at the big platforms is very poor, but that's because the money involved is still not even round…
Those who have run meaningful amounts of ads in The Platforms will know quite well that they are very frequently defrauded and almost never made whole. There is a fair (but tolerable) amount of click-fraud, etc that you basically factor as a cost of doing busines. I'm quite skeptical of the ad model myself, but I'm relatively sure that "you are not the customer" is not altogether the most salient argument to make in…
> Those who have run meaningful amounts of ads in The Platforms will know quite well that they are very frequently defrauded and almost never made whole.
"Meaningful amounts" to most ad customers is not the same as "meaningful amounts" to the platforms.
Re: Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation
#90This 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.