Back when I had a Wordpress blog before I switched to a static website, when I got these spam comments, I’d just edit the positive sounding ones to remove the spam link and post them. It made me like people were reading my blog and caring.
I truly wonder at what the solution is. As LLM generated text gets to the point of being not just visually but statistically indistinguishable from legitimate traffic we won’t be able to rely on mass scanning like we have.
Perhaps an architectural problem? I imagine smaller social communities with human vetting for entrance? Am I just describing the fediverse?
I’m expecting someone to come up with some sort of distributed trust system. I’m imagining being able to tag user content or websites you trust to be human-made and high quality, and being able to view tags by other people you trust.
Basically CA but for guaranteeing a human made something? The hard part would be filtering bots for the same reason its hard now. Unless the signing keys were a scarce resource.
Maybe people have a mathematically limited number of signatures they can make over a given amount of time? If someone wants to vouch for something being human made then they have to weigh losing a scarce resource?
I don’t like scarcity as a mechanism. I think it should be easy to mark something as human/nonhuman. The filtering is done by you when you decide whose list to subscribe to. Of course this idea allows for CA-type organizations to exist, but not just them. You could also subscribe to your buddy, a crowd-sourced list, etc.
For websites, it’s not hard to imagine how it can be implemented. We already have communities and individuals who maintain trusted blacklists for advertising and for scams. It’s not hard to imagine the same mechanisms for blocking slop sites. Conversely, you could have a browser extension that shows a green mark or something next to websites based on a whitelist.
Users are harder, because there’s a lot of them and the same person might use several online platforms. It would be more practical if more websites used some form of universal ID or other mechanism to prove you are the same user across platforms. I don’t think its unsolvable, but it definitely needs some thought.
This is actually a really good use case for blockchain technology
https://www.infisign.ai/blog/blockchain-identity-management-a-complete-guide
To me you’re describing either the Fediverse or at least those aspects of it which drove me to switch
I sometimes fantasize about having resources to take down fuckers that make internet worse for everybody else. Like a botnet to DDOS companies that contract spammers.
Be extremely careful not to mistype ‘nigher.’
