Hey all, another moderation topic here 🙀
We’ve all had a lot of discussion about it. Rather than posting my opinion on it, I wanted to share this talk from usenet about what they’ve learned from it.
They talk about the fediverse at the end!
I also want to share these 2 stories:
A study on how usenet learned to deal with spam: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/09/18/content-moderation-case-study-usenet-has-to-figure-out-how-to-deal-with-spam-april-1994/
One of the ways usenet deals with child porn: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/clean-news-proposed-as-usenet-censor/
If you watch the video and find any interesting bits, let’s discuss them!
The problem is, 5+ seconds on what? A low end smartphone? A bitcoin mining rig? your average Joe’s laptop? Anything reasonable for the end user is going to be a minor setback for anyone with the resources to do massive spam operations, and anything challenging for them is going to be a massive interruption to the regular users
I’d have to look at options for proof of work systems to see what is available if I were implementing such a system. I imagine the target would be a mid-range smartphone which would have dedicated hardware to handle cryptographic operations.
Upon some skimming, Hashcash seems like a candidate solution. It uses SHA-1 hasing which is common enough that most smartphones have dedicated hardware to handle the operations and wouldn’t be at as much of a disadvantage over a PC as it would when using algorithms that don’t have dedicated hardware implementations.