Comment on Are We Watching The Internet Die?

skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Part of what makes Twitter, Reddit, etc. such easy targets for bot spammers is that they’re single-point-of-entry. You join, you have access to everyone, and then you exhaust an account before spinning up 10 more.

  The Fediverse has some advantages and disadvantages here. One significant advantage is that – particularly if, when the dust finally settles, it’s a big network of a large number of small sites – it’s relatively easy to cut off nodes that aren’t keeping the bots out. One disadvantage, though, is that it can create a ton of parallel work if spam botters target a large number of sites to sign up on.

  A big advantage, though, is that most Fediverse sites are manually moderated and administered. By and large, sites aren’t looking to offload this responsibility to automated systems, so what needs to get beaten is not some algorithmic puzzle, but human intuition. Though, the downside to this is that mods and admins can become burned out dealing with an unending stream of scammers.

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  • skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.

      The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.

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    • Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s true that the toolset isn’t here now, and the network is actually very fragile at the moment.

      It’s also true that platform builders don’t seem to want to deal with these kinds of tools, for raisins.

      But it’s also true that temporary blocks are both effective and not that big of a deal.

      I’m not sure why you’d think that manual moderation will lead to small instances getting barred, though. Unless you’re predicting that federation will move to whitelisting, rather than blacklisting? That’s historically been the tool of corporate services, not personal or community ones.

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  • explodicle@local106.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If it really ramps up, we could share block lists too, like with ad blockers. So if a friend (or nth-degree friend) blocks someone, then you would block them automatically.

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    • frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That work has already started with Fediseer. It’s not automatic, but it’s really easy, which is probably the best we’ll get for a while.

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• Rottcodd@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

  I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I've turned around, for the past thirty years now, I've seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

  Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

  When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I'll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

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• OneRedFox@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.

  I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.

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  • skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • Penguincoder@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      where there’s a tree of people you’ve invited And that is how you get singular point of view echo chamber.

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      • Robin_net@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Most of the internet is made up of echo chambers now even though anyone and everyone can access a majority of it. I don’t think being selective in who we allow into communities worsens the pre-existing echo chamber issue. If anything it may help to be more selective. It can sometimes be impossible to tell the difference between trolls, bots, and real people, so I feel like we assume every person we disagree with is a troll or bot. The issue with that is that we may be outright dismissing real opinions. In theory, everyone in a selective community is a real person who is expressing their true thoughts and feelings.

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    • flashgnash@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I don’t think that’s a perfect system anyway though, spammers could create a massive tree of fake accounts and just only use a small proportion of them for spam

      Use a number of compromised user accounts to set this up and it becomes a nightmare

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    • OneRedFox@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.

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• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Instead of being this gen’s September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they’re reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.

  also to an “every company that doesn’t get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind” economy.

  That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].

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