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Comment by N_A_T_E | Hacker News Reader

My off the cuff opinion, find a way to verify the people on the site are not bots and actually real. This is a hard problem with some expensive solutions, privacy implications, significant trade offs and real cost, however it may be worth trying to address. Imagine twitter (X) or facebook without the noise.

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It's basically impossible. The sites that manage to be strict enough just end up with bots which are real phones in a building somewhere.

You just have to design so the bot's aren't relevant. The problem with Twitter, Facebook, and friends, is that they push the bot content at you, even if you don't follow them.

> It's basically impossible.

Require a fee to post.

Then you just get bots that support scams or overpriced garbage and can afford the posting fee.

It's a question of price. No bot can afford a fee that increases exponentially based on the number of views.

Similar to quadratic voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting

The reason people suggested that for emails, is because you have to send a large number of times to spam. With social media, that's not true. A single post can be viewed a large number of times.

Use quadratic post fees. The larger the number of people who try to view a post, the larger the fee becomes or the post stops being viewable.

So the fee isn't a one-time fee, but an "open" fee that keeps increasing.

Another mechanism is to require a fee to view. If after viewing the content the user deems the content isn't valuable, they flag it in some way or they don't bookmark it, and this indicates the poster should pay the display fee.

Yes. It's the algorithms.

Yeah this would definitely be a unique feature.

I still don't think it would work now though. People don't trust social networks like they trusted Facebook in the olden days, and they never will again.

Require an email address, charge a dollar a year and have a reasonable report / takedown policy. That’d probably be 99% of the problem gone.

This is an impossible to solve problem, attackers have the advantage.

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