[bastawhiz]

We almost got there with Pingbacks being the first step. Then they devolved into meaningless spam. Without a system of manual curation, it's impossible to build something where _everyone_ contributes. Spam scales easily, and moderation and curation does not. A thousand good links buried under a million spam links don't add any value.

And we can talk about reputation and proof of stake systems until we're blue in the face, but so far, nothing exists that actually works. If it did, we'd already be using it.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I never understood that; PoW seems like not merely an elegant solution, but a simple one. What am I missing?

[Yen]

My gut sense is that proof-of-work as a spam deterrent can _improve_ the signal-to-noise ratio, but won't bring it up to an acceptable level.

Say you have a simple proof-of-work protecting some action (posting a comment, voting up/down a story, etc.), and you have its difficulty tuned to allow a median-productivity human on a typical desktop computer to do that action at their typical rate.

A spambot doesn't need to sleep, take days off, and can get illicit access to much more computing power than any one human.

It _would_ probably shift spamming activities to focus on more central, high-value venues, though. hmm.

[bastawhiz]

Not everyone has CPU cycles to waste, like users on mobile. Even then, the cost of a consumer contributing one connection is an amount of work that's totally tractable by a spammer.

Unless you get into tokens and paying money to contribute. Which defeats the purpose. Why would I pay money to contribute to a decentralized service?

[Sir_Cmpwn]

I think web of trust might be suitable here.