Based on other comments to some of them, I am not the only one. I checked my account's activity log and security settings just in case but everything is fine.
Do you experience the same?
This is your regular reminder that if you want a decentralized anything, you need to solve the spam problem again, which means censoring content.
> Spam needs censorship?
Spam needs to be deleted or hidden by someone or something or your inbox/feed will be full of spam. Trying to manage this individually with keyword filters or even the more sophisticated Bayesian anti-spam is exhausting.
> But isn’t spam only profitable at scale?
Yes. So what? Spam scales. It's like cryptocurrency, you burn trillions of FLOPS of computing power to make a few cents.
> Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something?
Fee? For Facebook? This absolutely kills customer acquisition. It has often been suggested and never worked; the only site I think that does it is Metafilter?
Facebook went in the other direction with subsidised data plans that were free to access Facebook. The economics does not permit them to charge the eyeballs to look at Facebook. On the other hand, they can't afford to let people advertise for free on Facebook, since that's the service they do charge for.
In practice this is why accounts get tied to phone numbers so often, because it's slightly more difficult to acquire another few thousand phone numbers after the first thousand are banned for spamming, than it is with IP4 addresses.
There is also the fact that it can be hard to see the overall gain when each interaction is very marginal. For example, updating your timeline with a photo and a status by itself doesn't seem worth paying for even if the cummulative effect over an entire year could be very beneficial for your networks.
My own personal gimmick ideas for twitter, that will never be tried, would be "premium" which gives you abuse reporting that actually works (and maybe some other stuff), and a system to enable people to pay for premium (or part thereof) for other users.
But there’s also nothing inherently wrong with censorship. It just tastes extra bad when the things we like get censored.
There’s censorship right here on HN for example and that’s OK.
Gee this sounds like telephone billing...
There are many other problems with this (not least of which being the amount of energy required now just to send a message).
Fortunately I don't really rely on my gmail email for anything important, but it's filling up with that spam and marking it spam doesn't make any difference.
Interestingly I don't get any of those on my primary email which is self-hosted (and the address is a lot more public and older than my gmail address).
I'm currently trying to get rid of them by filtering the messages. I do
Settings --> Full settings --> Filters and Blocked Addresses
Create a new Filter
Add the display name or similar to the 'Includes the Words' field
Create Filter
Select 'Delete it'
Presumably you would hardly see messages that haven't been approved by someone who has been transitively approved by you. Decentralized systems are usually networks, and if you got spam or uninteresting messages you would reduce the weight of that part of the network.
You can't trust a centralized party to censor for you, because then that entity has power over you through what you see. It has to be your secretary, i.e. it has to actually work for you and be a reliable servant. What better to use as a secretary than network of people connected by who is interested in the output stream from whom?
Sure you could install filters, but decentralised networks in practice has spam (the only ones that don't have any spam and don't have any filters are those too niche that spammers won't bother).
I quip, but I think there are solutions in that kind of thinking. Not everything needs to connect to everything.
In a distributed system of the kind I propsed above, if you got a spam message you wpuld reduce your trust in those who transitively approved the source of the message, immediately.
Someone spamming would be cut off quick, as would anyone with high trust in a spammer.
I won't think too deeply if your solution works theoretically, but in reality in our imperfect world most people would just choose to outsource the job to the point that we're back to the email problem. Majority of people liked Gmail - majority chosed Gmail and spammers galore we have. Even Mastodon is not resistant to centralization despite their efforts to be decentralized - most wouldn't bother to set up their server and so a lot ends up signing up to mastodon.social.
You've fallen into the naive assumption that spammers use the same identity for each piece of spam being sent out, which is simply not true. I get plenty of spam phone calls with fake phone numbers despite the fact that STIR/SHAKEN has supposedly been implemented. Forged digital identities are cheap. And if forged identities are cheap, there's no trust mechanism that can work.
Presumably you'll counter by saying that you can simply assign a negative trust to unknown identities. In the real world there are plenty of us that have to communicate with people we haven't communicated with before (my business can't afford to turn away customers I don't already know), so we can't simply drop unknown identities.
The spam problem is hard because identities are hard, and digital identities are doubly so. Time and time again has proven that simple hand wavey solutions do not work.
A message from an entity which has not yet sent a spam message does indeed have the save priorization characteristics as one from any other entity withour connections to anything, but presumably a new user is invited by someone.
Furthermore, a new user could presumably say things on the spam-filled rubbish subforums, until he gets an upvote from someone who is trusted by somebody, and then after a while he becomes a participant.
The readon you see problems is, I think, that you imagine a system of private, individual, communication, while I imagine an enormous public forum.
Writing code is dead easy if you remove all the requirements from users.
Furthermore, among high-trust users PMs can be permitted even on such systems; and I csn actually give a superb procedure for dealing with spam in PMs among moderately trusted users: by letting a receiving user move a PM into the public flow of the sender.
Plus you still have the problem of how to treat an individual that is a first time poster. On many forums I never bothered creating an account until I felt I had something useful to contribute. In your system, how do you distinguish between the first time poster making a beneficial addition to the conversation versus a first time spammer? I feel you're hand waving this really hard problem away.
The Donald was genuinely popular. Some people didn't want it to be, but it was. I believe that this contributed more to its banning than any incidents relating to it.
The problem you're bringing up isn't really a solvable problem unless you have a human secretary as intelligent as yourself, and then it would be as appropriate for you to be the secretary for the person you'd have as a secretary.
Curation by some entity is going to involve being manipulated, which is very dangerous.
Furyhermore, it's not like people can't post illegal content even if they can't spam. In a way, your readoning regarding it is like responding to a threat as if the person in question can't realize it even if his conditions are met.
Blockchain tech is good at one thing: making numbers expensive. That property has made them really unpopular, along with doing it by turning huge amounts of electricity into heat, but it's useful in that an identity is just a number, and if you can make identities allodial and somewhat expensive, you can solve the problem at the user level, by banning bad actors.
If a user ID costs ten bucks, spammers have to make that plus labor back before everyone shuns them. That's discouragingly difficult to do.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work system is inspired by Hashcash.
But yes, the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically.
I also don't ever remember having received an email with Hashcash.
These days the performance difference is about less than 10x on the cheapest of phones. A hashcash that takes 100ms on my PC and 1s on my phone to send an email would be prohibitively expensive for any spammer.
(The "inventor" of HashCash is also responsible for the corporate take over of the GitHub repository of Bitcoin Core).
If not Chia coin works that way, maybe that algorithm could be used? In either case it would make ASIC useless.
Here, I've googled it for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
> the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically.
This is used nowhere in practice? In practice, the solution is for a small number of dedicated central spamfighters to cooperate on lists of known spam IPs, or correlate across a large number of emails to produce statistical markers of spam.
The biggest mistake Satoshi made was including a reference to HashCash in his white paper
The tomatoes are too thick, and will cause a mess when eating. They are that thick IMO for appearance sake, not for flavour sake. I only need so much of berries on my sandwich!
And it uses those purple onions, which I suspect I see everywhere because they are pretty, and show in pictures better, not for flavour.
And the cheese and meat are hanging off the bread on purpose, after all, the camera must see them! Never mind that it makes eating more difficult.
Yup, even the spammy turkey sandwich pic is all pizazz, hype, shallow appearances.
Bah.
Oh and, bring back a clear way to make the timeline chronological. This is the first sign that facebook is not designed to be useful, but designed to increase engagement. Let users choose. Power users will tweak their timelines and make it chronological, while others will continue to use the default way.
You can still make friends lists, but sometime in the last 2 years or so, they removed the feature to focus on updates from friends, and the friends lists don't do anything at all other than interact with privacy scope for your posts, which I guess is still nice.
IMO FB long ago decided it was going to be guided by metrics rather than theories about utility. Maybe they know better what users want than users do themselves, or maybe they care about other things, either way, the days of power users are done here.
That only benefits the user, it doesn't benefit Facebook... so why it would be implemented at all? Do we really think Facebook (and other big platforms) are doing what they do in order to benefit their users? Please, it's 2022, Facebook et al. don't have to beg for our attention/loyalty; they effectively do whatever the hell they want. The sooner we stop using their services the better for the internet.
Separately, I do tend to agree, social media with engagement feedback loops is _bad for most people_ like hard drugs. The sooner folks quit, the better it is for them.
I'm getting ready to drop facebook completely. They need to provide me more value if they want to sell my eyeballs.
FB engineer reporting. We have no control over this.
Honestly, at this point most of us just hang on to siphon off as much money as possible from the company before it all comes crumbling down.
My advice for FB users would be to stop using it. I'm not using it either.
I know most of the internal threads end up pointing to the URL trick to make the timeline chronological. But I think it’s worth continuing to ask and argue for more user-focused features (and even ask during Q&A).
As everyone here can work out, Amazon's latest AI platform did not appear on the BBC news and it was not making banks scared. What's very strange is the url in the ad leads to a clothing website when typed in, and a MML pdf when clicked.
Anyway to answer you question yes, mind is filled to the brim with these ads and only these ads.
They’ll do things like repost comments from other videos to similar ones, etc. pretty pernicious.
This may very well Facebook experimenting with moving into 3 and 4 of Lessin's 5 steps in the article. Moving away from content based around friendships, and more towards professional and algorithmic content.
This will be the end of Facebook. The value prop is not algorithmic content, it's friends and family.
Friends and family posts don't keep you on the site for very long, reducing the number of ad impressions each user sees. The value prop is indeed in algorithmic content, but using "friends and family" as the hook.
What you are describing is bait-and-switch, which is unethical, in retail, illegal, and will result in long-term irreversible audience atrophy. Selling keeping in touch with friends and family and delivering clickbait is not a sustainable strategy.
I don't think this pivot will work.
"Facebook feeds flooded with celebrity spam"
Do they really think that changing the algorithm in this way is going to help them in the long term?
So, to put a slightly different spin on your observation, they have pretty bad spam filters that happen to also be pretty good legitimate user filters.
I find that Facebook tinkers with the algorithm far too much, IMO, based on whoever complains the loudest. It would probably behoove them to introduce more explicit controls instead of basing the whole thing on machine learning.
I interact very little with Facebook, and while I have friends, I am not part of any group. It is essentially a "read only" thing, so I suspect Facebook algorithms couldn't profile me, and as a result they show me the most generic things.
The discussion about the Sunset of the Social Network, where you'll see less of your friends posts.
A Norwegian in another forum wrote that he/she (I can't remember) had the timeline full of things like birthday greetings from people they didn't know to other people they also didn't know.
I view it as extremely offensive and abusive behavior, since I don't follow any of such pages, even on others sites that can in theory track my behavior and share with Facebook.
I guess we are joining the era of corporate techno-fascism, where mega corps don't care about actual wishes of people and just push ideas, narratives, sympathies, and other emotions which are suitable to them. F*ck those narcissistic billionaires that build "virtual realities" essentially to exploit the others.
BTW, hyper-capitalism and democracy are obviously incompatible with each other. No wonder there so many different crises in the world right now.
It was pretty bad before but now it's completely unusable.
Literally any news article that can be related in any way back to Russia or China, or is about America is over run with how great Russia and China is and how Putin is a saviour and how America is going to collapse.
Prior to Russian invasion into Ukraine it wasn’t so bad. But 2022 it’s got really bad.