Evan

On the way home he can pick up a crudité from Wegners.

Yeah, I think you’re right. And yet we’ve seen this happen on all the major platforms. I can only imagine that investors/board/execs are weighing short term too heavily and as a result these platforms grow toxic and eventually collapse under the weight of t-shirt scammers and the like.

Yeah, eventually you can’t make meaningful distinctions even if you look closely at individual accounts. It’s really hard. I’m not advocating for any particular approach but I am concerned that platforms’ attempts at CoMo are hampered by all the money they make from inauthentic accounts and content.

Click Bots and Fake Traffic Cost Online Advertisers $35 Billion Studies show click bots and fraudulent traffic are widespread, but Google remains slow to react.

That’s only the revenue that Meta made from the bots it *did* ban… assuming Meta is only able to ban a fraction of the bots on their platform, the actual revenue from fake traffic is much higher. It seems like ad fraud is big business, but nobody knows for sure since the market is notoriously opaque

Meta Made Millions in Ads From Networks of Fake Accounts The social media giant banned accounts promoting disinformation, spam, or propaganda—and kept the money it made from ads.

This, at least, is an easy position to defend and well-documented. Bot/fake account ad impressions are difficult to distinguish from human ad impressions, so platforms get to charge advertisers when bots look at their ads. They all make money from it, this is just the first article I found.

In fact the whole sale of Twitter seems to (from the outside) be emblematic of this very gap between people within Twitter who probably had lots of hope for and confidence in the platform, and the investors who only saw their short-term gain and preferred to take the cash and walk.

Certainly the money from bots doesn’t disincentivize all efforts to combat them. Platforms still fight bots — they need to strike a balance that maintains advertiser confidence. As for short-termism, I’m sure lots of people within Twitter took a long view. But investors are notorious short-termists.

If platforms have created an environment where systemic problems like spam bots can only be addressed by thousands of dedicated humans playing a losing game of whack-a-mole, I think the responsibility still rests on platforms. They created the environment. So, they can learn and create a better one.

I agree 1. fighting spam is excessively difficult and 2. Twitter was full of people like you who truly wanted the platform to be free of spam. But as you point out, the incentive was there. I’m suggesting that as long as platforms make money from bots, they will never get rid of them for good.

But Twitter never just banned these accounts because these accounts drive ad revenue on the platform, right? They were good for business. Can an ad-supported platform ever really deal with this kind of spam, or is another business model required?

What if you could choose if a block were permanent or temporary? Give someone another chance in 6 months? Blocks are a social signal that could incentivize people to change their behavior, but since they’re permanent people never get a chance for redemption. Sometimes people change.

Safety may not matter much to you personally but it will start to matter to you if unsafe networks cause your society to crumble (arguably this is already happening)

I think we are living in a time where everybody (in the “big Other” sense) knows this is a lie but society is still offering this narrative anyway. It’s hard to imagine an “official” narrative that could replace it which would be simultaneously accepted as true and maintain the legitimacy of society

Love the idea of demilitarized zones and yes it’s sad that most online spaces essentially hand you weapons when you walk in instead, and then people understandably have a hard time imagining that it could be any different

The Evolution of Trust an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

Right the problem is when you mix miscommunication (unavoidable in a context collapse space like this) and assuming bad faith (which is not unavoidable but is driven pretty strongly by the mechanics of a space like this). I’m really influenced by this explainer so I thought I should just share it -

Yeah that’s fair, I think media structured like this can *make* otherwise unassuming people *want* the bloodbath though, since that’s what the medium rewards. Brief interactions, low chance of repeated interactions, and high chance of miscommunication all breed a low trust bad faith environment

I fear that lots of people secretly want the perpetual bloodbath

As far as I know the Alphabet union is a “minority union” which I interpret to mean “a union without collective bargaining power”. Alphabet is very good at union busting and it seems that lots of tech workers within Alphabet are surprisingly (to me) surprised by this.

sir this is a wendys

This. Someone I knew was being stalked and found out that Spotify had no block feature, so their stalker could follow them there and there was nothing they could do about it. Apparently Spotify finally added block in 2021 after years of user outcry.