Lately I've been pondering how one might create a "probably a human"/skin-in-the-game system. For example, imagine visiting an "attestor" site where you can make a one-time donation of $5 to a charity of your choice, and in exchange it gives you some proof-you-spent-money tokens. Those tokens can be spent (burned) by some collaborating site (e.g. HN) to mark your account there as likely a human, or at least a bot whose owner will feel pain if it is banned.

This would be far more privacy-preserving that dozens of national-ID lookup systems, and despite the appearance of "money for speech" it could actually be _cheaper_ than whatever mix of time and bus-fare and paperwork in a "free" system.

____________

I imagine the big problems would be things like:

* How to handle fraudulent payments, e.g. someone buying tokens with a stolen credit card. Easiest fix would be some long waiting-period before the token becomes usable.

* How to protect against a fraudulent attestor site that just takes your money, or one whose tokens are value-less.

* How to protect against a fraudulent destination site that secretly harvests your proof-token for its own use, as opposed to testing/burning it properly. Possible social fix: Put in a fake token, if the site "accepts" then you know it's misbehaving.

* Handling decentralization, where multiple donation sites may be issuing their own tokens and multiple account-sites that may only want to support/trust a subset of those tokens.

Thanks Siri! Yep back to normal work now.

> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.

I have been thinking about this as well. It's exactly the kind of infrastructure that governments should invest in to enable new opportunities for commerce. Imagine all the things you could build if you could verify that someone is a real human somehow with good accuracy (without necessarily verifying their identity).

> It would wipe out their revenue.

Disagree. YouTube's revenue comes from large advertisers who can measure real impact of ads. If you wiped out all of the bots, the actual user actions ("sign up" / "buy") would remain about the same. Advertisers will happily pay the same amount of money to get 20% of the traffic and 100% of the sales. In fact, they'd likely pay more because then they could reduce investment in detecting bots.

Bots don't generate revenue, and the marketplace is somewhat efficient.

Well you're about to find out, because YouTube is doing a massive bot/unofficial client crackdown right now. YTDL, Invidious etc are all being banned. Perhaps Google got tired of AI competitors scraping YouTube.

In reality, as others have pointed out, Google has always fought bots on their ad networks. I did a bit of it when I worked there. Advertisers aren't stupid, if they pay money for no results they stop spending.

> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.

Granting the premise for argument's sake, why should governments do this? Why can't private companies do it?

That said, I've long thought that the U.S. Postal Service (and similarly outside the U.S.) is the perfect entity for providing useful user certificates and attribute certificates (to get some anonymity, at least relative to peers, if not relative to the government).

The USPS has:

  - lots of brick and mortar locations
  - staffed with human beings
  - who are trained and able to validate
    various forms of identity documents
    for passport applications

Now back to the premise. I want for anonymity to be possible to some degree. Perhaps AI bots make it impossible, or perhaps anonymous commenters have to be segregated / marked as anonymous so as to help everyone who wants to filter out bots.

I think on the same lines. Digital identity is the hardest problem we’ve been procrastinating in solving since forever, because it has the most controversial trade offs, which no two persons can agree on. Despite the well known risks, it’s something only a State can do.

This still breaks some parts of the internet, where you wouldn't want to associate your identity with your thoughts or image

What's best practice for preventing bot abuse, for mere mortal developers? Would requiring a non-voip phone number at registration be effective?

I think that's also part of Facebook's strategy of being as open with llama as possible – they can carve out the niche as the "okay if we're going to dive head first into the dead internet timeline, advertisers will be comforted by the fact that we're a big contributor to the conversation on the harms of AI – by openly providing models for study."

You would assume that Advertising companies with quality ad space would be able to show higher click through rates and higher impression to purchase rates -- overall cost per conversion -- by removing bots that won't have a business outcome from the top of the funnel.

But attribution is hard, so showing larger numbers of impressions looks more impressive.

I've been thinking about how AI will affect ad-supported "content" platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, porn sites, etc. My prediction is that as AI-generated content improves in quality, or at least believability, they will not prohibit AI-generated content, they will embrace it whole-heartedly. Maybe not at first. But definitely gradually and definitely eventually.

We know that these sites' growth and stability depends on attracting human eyeballs to their property and KEEPING them there. Today, that manifests as algorithms that analyze each person's individual behavior and level of engagement and uses that data to tweak that user's experience to keep them latched (some might say addicted, via dopamine) to their app on the user's device for as long as possible.

Dating sites have already had this down to a science for a long time. There, bots are just part of the business model and have been for two decades. It's really easy: you promise users that you will match them with real people, but instead show them only bots and ads. The bots are programmed to interact with the users realistically over the site and say/do everything short of actually letting two real people meet up. Because whenever a dating site successfully matches up real people, they lose customers.

I hope I'm wrong, but I feel that social content sites will head down the same path. The sites will determine that users who enjoy watching Reels of women in swimsuits jump on trampolines can simply generate as many as they need, and tweak the parameters of the generated video based on the user's (perceived) preferences: age, size, swimsuit color, height of bounce, etc. But will still provide JUST enough variety to keep the user from getting bored enough to go somewhere else.

It won't just be passive content that is generated, all those political flamewars and outrage threads (the meat and potatoes of social media) could VERY well ALREADY be LLM-generated for the sole purpose of inciting people to reply. Imagine happily scrolling along and then reading the most ill-informed, brain-dead comment you've ever seen. You know well enough that they're just an idiot and you'll never change their mind, but you feel driven to reply anyway, so that you can at LEAST point out to OTHERS that this line of thinking is dangerous, then maybe you can save a soul. Or whatever. So you click Reply but before you can type in your comment, you first have to watch a 13-second ad for a European car.

But of course the comment was never real, but you, the car, and your money definitely are.

What do governments need to implement? They already give you a passport which can be used as a digital ID.

> This trusted identity should be something governments need to implement.

I rather live with dead-internet than this oppressive trash.

On the other hand I think the best social media out there today is 4chan. Entirely anonymous. Also, the crass humor and nsfw boards act as a great filter to keep out advertising bot networks from polluting the site like it did with reddit. No one one wants to advertise on 4chan or have their brand associated with it, which is great for quality discussion on technical topics and niche interests.

> For example, what happens if Google cracks down hard on this and suddenly 60-80% of YouTube traffic (or even ad-traffic) evaporates because it was done by bots? It would wipe out their revenue.

Nonsense. Advertisers measure results. CPM rates would simply increase to match the increased value of a click.

See the history of Reddit. It was manually curated sock puppets before bots were viable, and now that bots are viable, I strongly believe the bulk of comments and posts in the popular subreddits are bots (and many are run by reddit themselves).

I agree with the other commenters that you'll face a lot of challenges, but personally I hope you succeed. Sounds like an idea worth pursuing.

>I’m currently building a social network that only allows upvote/downvote and comments from real humans.

And how exactly do you do that? At the end of the day there is no such thing as a comment/vote from a real human, it's all mediated by digital devices. At the point the signal is digitized a bot can take over the process.

Good bot (/s)

I don't know that "real humans" is good enough. You can do plenty of manipulation on social networks by hiring lots of real humans to upvote/downvote/post what you want. It's not even expensive.

I expect if you chat to them you'll find they have some interesting crypto opportunities to invest in, from my experience. There's a lot of pig butchering stuff out there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778486).

I blocked a bunch of those accounts and the number of rando hot girls trying to get me to follow them dropped really quickly. You may give that a try. Maybe they have some very rough algo that does attempt to stop those follow varieties that you block a lot of

I feel like looking at this sort of behavior would make it really easy to spot bot accounts. I have the same thing happening on my account.

There frequency of "game-changing" in comments would say otherwise. It's probably cron running at those intervals, not a work schedule.

There's also the point that one histogram is an order or two of magnitude larger than the other one. Larger samples of normally distributed data will tend to better resemble a normal distribution.

I'll print some, you can pick them up for free in SF. Hoodies and tees.

I will wear it everytime I meet AI investors

I'd like to think we have enough of a proactive community to mitigate this issue for the most part - just set your profile back to Show Dead / etc. if you want to see the amount of chaff that gets discarded.

Also, wasn't the initial goal of lobste.rs to be a sort of even more "mensa card carrying members only" exclusive version of Hacker News?

HN remains good primarily because of the moderators. Thanks Dang!

Real question for those convinced HN is awash in HN bots: What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing?

Karma doesn't help your posts rank higher.

There is no concept of "friends" or "network."

Karma doesn't bring any other value to your account.

My personal read is it's just a small steady influx of clueless folks coming over from Reddit and thinking what works there will work here, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

In the seven years I've been on HN, it has gone through different phases, each with a noticeable change in the quality of the comments.

One big shift came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone went work-from home. Another came when Elon Musk bought X. There have been one or two other events I've noticed, but those are the ones I can recall now. For a short while, many of the comments were from low-grade Russian and Chinese trolls, but almost all of those are long gone. I don't know if it was a technical change at HN, or a strategy change externally.

I don't know if it's internal or external or just fed by internet trends, but while it is resistant, HN is certainly not immune from the ills affecting the rest of the internet.

I do - I think the effect on Meta’s ad revenue is nil.

Advertisers measure ad campaigns by ROAS (return on ad spend). This is driven by actual dollars spent, cutting out all bots right away.

Clicks / views / comments are irrelevant except as far as getting the ad to show for actual buyers.

> You can setup a campaign where you pay for comments

You cannot setup a campaign where you pay for comments (https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1438417719786914#). But maybe you mean other user generated content like messages. You ought to be able to figure out pretty quickly if those are authentic.

Facebook has become full of generic name accounts posting generic AI generated content. Despite all flagging it is incessant, which tells me it’s likely sanction or even created by the company to fill content gaps. I’d say 30-50% or content that shows for me is suspicious.

I often wonder this as well. Would love to have more insight into that

If people are paying lets say these morally questionable companies like meta ad campaigns, they deserve what they get. I don't want to condone any criminal behavior, but this whole business of people's mass manipulation is vastly immoral bunch of white (or not so white) lies.

It just gets a bit smaller. See Mastodon, and why most people's criticisms of it are in fact its strengths. For ~5% of the current internet.

One of two possibilities I foresee, unsure which will play out:

1) People surrender their perceived anonymity in favor of real interactions, embracing some kind of digital ID that ensures some platforms are human-only.

or

2) AI gets good enough that people stop caring whether they're real or not.

I feel the same. I’m not surprised by this, a sleazy site is going to attract sleazy actors. Me good llm.

It would be nice if there were identity providers that could vend attribute certificates with no PII besides the desired attributes, such as:

  - is_human
  - is_over_18
  - is_over_21
  - is_over_65
  - sex/gender?
  - marital status?
  - ...?
  - device_number (e.g., you
    might be allowed N<4 user
    attribute certs, one per-
    device)

The issuer would have to keep track of how many extant certificates any given customer has and revoke old ones when the customer wants new ones due to device loss or whatever.

Any company that has widespread physical presence could provide these. UPS, FedEx, grocery stores, USPS, etc.

I am still very curious about why the micropayment failed. I recall mass outrage at Brave for tying the concept with “cryptocurrency” but at the time the concept(minus the crypto and brave holding the tip unannounced if the site didn’t join-in) seemed decent.

Would the concept work, if it was unbundled from cryptocurrency and made into something like, Paypal, where you add money(prepaid), visit some site, if the site is registered, you see a donate button and decide to donate few cents/dollars/euros/yens whatever the native currency of the author is and at the end of the month, if the donations collected was more than enough to cover the fees + excess, it would get paid out to author’s desired mode of withdrawal?

Micropayments failed because users hate them[0]. They would rather pay more for flat rate plans. Here's an excerpt from The Case Against Micropayments [1]. It's an old paper, but human behavior hasn't changed.

Behavioral economics, the study of what had for a long time been dismissed as the economicly irrational behavior of people, is finally becoming respectable within economics. In marketing, it has long been used in implicit ways. One of the most relevant findings for micropayments is that consumers are willing to pay more for flat-rate plans than for metered ones. This appears to have been discovered first about a century ago, in pricing of local telephone calls [13], but was then forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1970s in some large scale experiments done by the Bell System [3]. There is now far more evidence of this, see references in [13], [14]. As one example of this phenomenon, in the fall of 1996, AOL was forced to switch to flat rate pricing for Internet access.

The reasons are described in [19]:

What was the biggest complaint of AOL users? Not the widely mocked and irritating blue bar that appeared when members downloaded information. Not the frequent unsolicited junk e-mail. Not dropped connections. Their overwhelming gripe: the ticking clock. Users didn’t want to pay by the hour anymore. ... Case had heard from one AOL member who insisted that she was being cheated by AOL’s hourly rate pricing. When he checked her average monthly usage, he found that she would be paying AOL more under the flat-rate price of $19.95. When Case informed the user of that fact, her reaction was immediate. ‘I don’t care,’ she told an incredulous Case. ’I am being cheated by you.’

The lesson of behavioral economics is thus that small payments are to be avoided, since consumers are likely to pay more for flat-rate plans. This again argues against micropayments.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180222082156/http://www.openp2...

[1] https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micr...

> I weep at the thought that every site will require login with sso from google (and maybe Apple if you're lucky)

I think that's where we're going. Not only is it a decent way of filtering out bad accounts, it's also often easier to implement on the dev side.

> Or there were some way to prove I am human without saying _which_ human I am.

I'm sure at some point a sort of trust network type thing will take off. Will be hard to find a way to make it both private and secure, but I guess some smart people will figure that out!

It is always money. You can sell “I will get your launch to top 10 in ProductHunt.” Yes if/when taken too far, everyone will ditch ProductHunt and it will die, but until then, a quick buck can be made.

Existing businesses did this with live humans.

Ranking/review sites for B2B services would work with paying customers to solicit interviews and reviews from their customers, and of course only the 5 star reviews get posted.

Heck, a lot of these "bots" may actually be a real human working a table of 100 cell phones in some cheaper country.

Why not do it? It’s essentially spam / pollution, and there are no consequences.

DIT was misnamed... Dead Internet Prophecy would have been a better term, something that hadn't happened yet, but will come true in the future.

Related, a real human on HN is limited to 5 comments per 6 hours, while bad actors simply need to create hundreds of accounts to avoid this limit.

Now it's back but the damage was done, lost 4 hrs of votes and won't recover

https://hnrankings.info/41708837

That's fascinating to me, I've never blocked a single account on Twitter and see very few bots. The most annoying thing about twitter for me are the folks monetising the platform, that keep posting rage-bait to game the algorithm! But note I also generally only use the "for you" tab.

If you only use the “following” tab twitter is fine, if you try to use the “for you” tab then you are expecting too much of someone who posts known nazis and says “hmmm…” or “interesting…”

Why bother if you have to spend that much time curating a good feed?

I haven't used Twitter in ages, but what happened to Musk's paywall idea? That might actually deter bots and real users, so it seems like a win-win for everyone to stop using it.

Otherwise, I doubt spammers/scammers are really paying $8/mo for a verified account. How are they getting them then?

There is no twitter, only X.

edit: What I meant by this is not the name thing but more fundamentally that what twitter was, is no longer so. It's now a different thing now, its has similarities to twitter, but its not twitter.