[brk]

Facebook/Meta has how many thousands of general engineers, AI specialists, and massive amounts of hardware at their disposal, and they can't solve this in a more practical way?

Pushing their problems down to the user in this way feels shitty, at best.

[redmen]

Yes they have engineers but they're all nearsighted, uncreative and high hubris engineers with little to no empathy.

[rsync]

"Pushing their problems down to the user in this way feels shitty, at best ..."

You've identified exactly what is going on.

Platforms such as this are facing a brutal, relentless scam/spam onslaught and I think we can conclude that no, in fact, they do not have an elegant solution to it.

The closest things I have seen to real, elegant solutions to this problem are:

1) metafilter charging $5 per new registration - I think you can send them a five dollar bill

2) lobste.rs with their chained/linked account referral which puts the cost on the referrer and introduces some personal responsibility for new signups, etc.

The common solution is to demand a SIM identity - any SIM identity - "for your protection". That's the best solution they have come up with - any functioning truly mobile number (backed by a SIM card, not VOIP) is enough sand in the gears to slow down the onslaught ...

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Not if you are constantly attacked by millions of scammers, bot nets and government-sponsored info-terrorists.

Same people that complain in this post about over-jealous verification, will complain in another post about misinformation and propaganda.

[brk]

I don’t buy that excuse.

If they cannot adequately protect against these scenarios they really should not be trying to collect and monetize so much granular user data. Clearly the organization is incapable of operating what they have built.

The reality, IMO, is that it is just not financially worthwhile for them to give a shit. People will jump through hoops for stupid validation purposes because they want access. Why spend engineering time solving a problem that is more easily handled by inconveniencing your users.

[kspacewalk2]

Your very insightful last paragraph makes the preceding ones an unnecessary appeal to high mindedness. They absolutely should be collecting granular user data if the user and the jurisdiction is willing to let them, and it makes them money. They absolutely are capable of operating what they've built if they're financially healthy despite being a dark pit of nothingness to randomly fucked users. Not prioritizing users can work as a business model for some time. Maybe that's the time horizon their shareholders care about. Don't judge.

[d110af5ccf]

> Same people that complain in this post about over-jealous verification, will complain in another post about misinformation and propaganda.

A bit tangential but actually I suspect those are nearly disjoint sets. In my experience the people who complain about misinformation and propaganda are okay with identity verification and censorship while those that want privacy (such as myself) typically dislike censorship and don't want a central authority getting involved to judge whether something is misinformation.

It largely comes down to trust in authority and centralized versus decentralized system design.