The Frustration Loop
herman.bearblog.dev
The Frustration Loop
1–10 of 158 posts
Re: The Frustration Loop
#2There used to be a plug in for bulletin that would do something similar to users you hellbanned; it would render the site much more slowly, would show errors frequently, and in general made the forum a frustrating experience. (In addition to hiding anything they posted from others!)
Re: The Frustration Loop
#3This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006.
Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the Newsvine backend. If the troll flag was set to true, Newsvine would add a random 10-60 second delay to every page load for the troll's account. IIRC it solved the problem pretty effectively.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#4Calm down, Satan. Go back to your job writing healthcare UI/UX.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#5This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006. Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the New…
I loved Newsvine. It seemed so innovative and inviting.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#6Amazing, this is better than a shadow ban even.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#7Instantly reminds me of the creative piracy protection from the early days of video games. Nice video about how Atari frustrated people with purposeful memory corruption while making it look like software bugs: https://youtu.be/ewoDLDDgHkI?si=aY29WK_lrZ4jR3bt
Re: The Frustration Loop
#8Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is why I think the frustration techniques, or simply account suspension aren't widely used).
The field of spam-prevention is fascinating because it's essentially an arms race between companies deploying tactics to detect spam and sophisticated spammers using increasingly complex methods to avoid detection.
So there's an advantage gained by companies if spammers believe they don't need to evolve their methods.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#9I guess, yes, seems the best way if we don’t count centralized remote attestation.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#10I'm missing the part on how op determines valid users for the frustration loop.
> Enter Akismet... Blocking spam on signup worked somewhat, but was easily circumventable
> some spammers found ways to parade as legitimate blogs... which I would have to manually sniff out and flag.
> This lead me to an idea: The Frustration Loop... When spam is detected... Waste their time and make them give up.
> "Now hold up there Herman! Won't this be triggered by valid users?"... it's been running in production for the past 3 months and I've only had one user report this as an issue.
imo that would be the most interesting part of the article. It's cool that the action that's being taken is to frustrate the spammer but I wished there was more info on separating spammers from real users, figuring out false positives and false negatives and the like. I understand that giving details on detection is probably not a good idea and that the article is about The Frustration Loop, though.