People still think about it in quaint ways.
Spammers are a minir annoyance. I have one word for you: swarms.
Swarms of sleeper accounts can be deployed with existing technology. They can astroturf revolutions, rile people up against others, make reputational attacks at scale — and perhaps most destructively, they can overwhelm anyone with a different viewpoint, with 10-1 content ratio (eg I could deploy 20 bots on HN to downvote and argue with the people who disagree with me ad nauseum).
As you can imagine, forums could use “grandfathered” accounts to sort of mitigate this. But when regular people start preferring bots, it is game over.
You think it is hard for bots to endear themselves over humans? Karma / likes / upvotes is actually a measurable and gameable metric, and the bots can excel at it better than humans. Not to mention if you own a dating site you have access to all the messages that have ever worked to get a date or get a laugh. HN anyone can analyze the type of messages that got the most upvotes.
We keep analyzing one bot among 8 humans at a poker table. No one seriously considers the exponential jump to 1000 bots surrounding every human.
At best - we are building a zoo for ourselves. But we can’t stop!
Spammers are a minir annoyance. I have one word for you: swarms.
Swarms of sleeper accounts can be deployed with existing technology. They can astroturf revolutions, rile people up against others, make reputational attacks at scale — and perhaps most destructively, they can overwhelm anyone with a different viewpoint, with 10-1 content ratio (eg I could deploy 20 bots on HN to downvote and argue with the people who disagree with me ad nauseum).
As you can imagine, forums could use “grandfathered” accounts to sort of mitigate this. But when regular people start preferring bots, it is game over.
You think it is hard for bots to endear themselves over humans? Karma / likes / upvotes is actually a measurable and gameable metric, and the bots can excel at it better than humans. Not to mention if you own a dating site you have access to all the messages that have ever worked to get a date or get a laugh. HN anyone can analyze the type of messages that got the most upvotes.
We keep analyzing one bot among 8 humans at a poker table. No one seriously considers the exponential jump to 1000 bots surrounding every human.
At best - we are building a zoo for ourselves. But we can’t stop!