[rglullis]

First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter.

Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.

[Kye]

Spam is not just unsolicited commercial messages. Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.

The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.

[latexr]

> Remember: Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.

That looks to be retrofitted, not the origin of the term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming#Etymology

[Kye]

I know. It's also one of the meanings.

[themoonisachees]

All the accounts seen on the popular "ignore previous instructions" screenshots have paid for twitter. There's no reason to believe that these bots don't operate at scale and don't all spend $8 a month.

On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.

[rglullis]

Bots being paid by a state that is a misinformation campaign is not the same as spam.

Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.

[latexr]

> they could simply run their own instances

And then what? No one is going to navigate an instance that is just spam, and other instances will promptly block them.

[rglullis]

Right, the incentive will be to create accounts on the popular instances, not on the paid ones.

There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".

[sumeno]

Bots spamming misinformation isn't spam, gotcha. Really moving the goalposts there

[rglullis]

I meant spam as shorthand for "bulk send of messages of similar content". Cheap to produce and to send. If bots paid by some government count as spam, then we should also say the same about sponsored content or PR releases.

Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is good enough for a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.

[jen20]

I classify both sponsored content and PR-speak as spam, personally.

[rglullis]

Should we start complaining about HN's "spam problem" because of all the "Launch HN" posts? And what about YC companies that have job ads pushed to the top of the frontpage?

Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.

If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?

Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.