I think issues like these will continue along the path you describe until we tie authorship to real humans and their reputation, or perhaps something else they care about, in one way or another.
I'm not saying that we should give up on the idea of anonymity on the internet, at least not completely. But real humans have to put something at stake when they use space on any part of the internet that other humans should care about.
I've participated in plenty of communities without spam problems where I have no idea of the real identity of the other participants, and neither does anyone else.
I can't help but note that neither of us attach our real identity to our participation here.
I think a better solution might be structural. In this GitHub example, why can someone tag people who they're not collaborating with to begin with? Why are identities so easily discoverable and contactable? The value seems to far outweigh the risk.
I hope there are other ways. Although I suspect that the communities you're thinking about are somewhat niche? I guess that would only motivate a small amount of investment for setting up spambots and a little resistance is enough to move on. If this explanation is not enough I also wonder what the explanation would be?
I also suspect that the barrier for spamming absolutely everywhere is going to get lowered as soon as somebody figures out how to make LLM:s configure spambots for arbitrary domains?
I don't understand your comment; if reddit is part of the dead internet then it is full of spam bots no? Or are you saying that users perceive that most other users are bot when they are not?
I think issues like these will continue along the path you describe until we tie authorship to real humans and their reputation, or perhaps something else they care about, in one way or another.
I think this is attacking the problem from the wrong end. This is just increasing the penalty for spamming. (Real reputational damage.)
Why not shift the other end—increase the difficulty of spamming in the first place.
Could be as simple as charging for account creation (even if just a deposit that’s refunded after some amount of non-spam activity).
But without getting into all the baggage payments bring—don’t allow people to ping others until they’ve reached a certain “reputation” by hitting some threshold of non-spam activity? Rate limit how many people you can ping based on reputation? Limit to only users associated with the repo you’re making the MR on? Rate limit how quickly you can create MRs and comments based on reputation?
Seems like there are a lot of levers to pull here that could curtail the problem without jumping straight to tying accounts to real life IDs.
A one time administration fee for account creations would make most of these spam tactics unprofitable. People are probably too used to having everything for free online (paid for by ads) for anyone to try this right now.
Comments
I think issues like these will continue along the path you describe until we tie authorship to real humans and their reputation, or perhaps something else they care about, in one way or another.
I'm not saying that we should give up on the idea of anonymity on the internet, at least not completely. But real humans have to put something at stake when they use space on any part of the internet that other humans should care about.
I've participated in plenty of communities without spam problems where I have no idea of the real identity of the other participants, and neither does anyone else.
I can't help but note that neither of us attach our real identity to our participation here.
I think a better solution might be structural. In this GitHub example, why can someone tag people who they're not collaborating with to begin with? Why are identities so easily discoverable and contactable? The value seems to far outweigh the risk.
I hope there are other ways. Although I suspect that the communities you're thinking about are somewhat niche? I guess that would only motivate a small amount of investment for setting up spambots and a little resistance is enough to move on. If this explanation is not enough I also wonder what the explanation would be?
I also suspect that the barrier for spamming absolutely everywhere is going to get lowered as soon as somebody figures out how to make LLM:s configure spambots for arbitrary domains?
Reddit, for instance, in my experience, has been remarkably spam bot free, though the dead internet theory is very prevalent in culture there
I don't understand your comment; if reddit is part of the dead internet then it is full of spam bots no? Or are you saying that users perceive that most other users are bot when they are not?
I think this is attacking the problem from the wrong end. This is just increasing the penalty for spamming. (Real reputational damage.)
Why not shift the other end—increase the difficulty of spamming in the first place.
Could be as simple as charging for account creation (even if just a deposit that’s refunded after some amount of non-spam activity).
But without getting into all the baggage payments bring—don’t allow people to ping others until they’ve reached a certain “reputation” by hitting some threshold of non-spam activity? Rate limit how many people you can ping based on reputation? Limit to only users associated with the repo you’re making the MR on? Rate limit how quickly you can create MRs and comments based on reputation?
Seems like there are a lot of levers to pull here that could curtail the problem without jumping straight to tying accounts to real life IDs.
A one time administration fee for account creations would make most of these spam tactics unprofitable. People are probably too used to having everything for free online (paid for by ads) for anyone to try this right now.