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by inductive_magic 1001 days ago
I find it fascinating that we have no way of telling if a user is human just by looking at their signal.

All the meaning we attribute to a signal depends entirely on something that is not detectable from the signal itself itself: wether an actual human is behind it.

This phenomenon intersects with philosophy, cognitive science, and information theory, and the best solution corporate automata come up with is "just let them pay for the usage".

What a weird web (no pun intended) we've spun.
2 comments
3cats-in-a-coat 1001 days ago
At some point we’ll realize it doesn’t matter if there’s a human behind. Say if there is a human behind claiming to be 20 year old girl from Russia mad in love with you, but it’s a Nigerian scam run by a 50 year old man, does the fact he’s a human help you? It matters in terms of voting and forming overall opinion. But I’d say it doesn’t matter for individual interactions. It can always be a scam.
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anon1199022 1001 days ago
or it would cost a lot to build to detect via signal?
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pointlessone 1001 days ago
It's not too hard to build a decent detector. At one of my previous gigs (a niche social network) we trained a fairly OK NN to detect all sorts of undesired behaviours to flag content/account for moderation. We didn't even need that much data and training time for it to get OK.

In case of X its scale is the issue. Running the detector for every message, or even for every posting account once a month might be very expensive. This might be the primary reasoning behind the deliberation: make bots a little bit more expensive and finance the detector operation.

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Arnt 1001 days ago
Likely not. Here's a paper that provides a decent argument that you just can't be sure that two Twitter accounts represent two different real people.

«We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties of identity -- sentience, location, and uniqueness -- that cannot be simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. […] We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options […]» https://cs.paperswithcode.com/paper/sok-the-ghost-trilemma

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