Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by londons_explore 1550 days ago
It could theoretically route your chat messages through other peers so nobody knows if you wrote the message or you're forwarding it for someone else.

Such a scheme seems open to spam by design. I don't think there's any way to handle spam/moderation in a fully anonymous decentralised network.

1 comments

> I don't think there's any way to handle spam/moderation in a fully anonymous decentralised network.

Surely you could have small bayesian engines running in each client, and coordinate ratings through DHT. It would still have the issue of somebody potentially abusing such engine to effectively DDOS certain types of messages (e.g. mentioning a certain party), but you could try and fight that with modern consensus techniques from the cryptocurrency world.

Reminds me of https://notabug.io/ which makes you sacrifice some CPU in order to vote.
> Surely you could have small bayesian engines running in each client,

If each client has a copy of the filter, then so does the spammer. The spammer can use that to craft spam the filter doesn't catch.

The lack of filter availability doesn't stop spammers bypassing even Google's uber-filters, so it's not much of an argument really. The arm race is what it is. The point is having a system that can react fast enough to remove the spam from most systems once it is identified.
> The point is having a system that can react fast enough to remove the spam from most systems once it is identified.

Then you need a system for distributing filter updates, and preventing the spammers from distributing bogus filter updates. Isn't this basically just the same problem as before?

That's why I said that injecting some modern consensus-finding strategies could be an idea.