[gjsman-1000]

> 2009 I could run Pidgin and load messages from AIM, FB Messages, Yahoo... Where did that go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBcY3W5WgNU

But seriously; the internet is now overrun with AI Slop, Spam, and automated traffic. To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols. This problem is structurally unsolvable, there is no solution, there's either a useless open internet or a useful closed one. The internet is voting with Cloudflare, Discord, Facebook, to be useful, not open. The alternative is trying to figure out how to run a decentralized dictatorship that only allows good things to happen; a delusion.

The only other solution is accountability, a presence tied to your physical identity; so that an attacker cannot just create 100,000 identities from 25,000 IP addresses and smash your small forum with them. That's an even less popular idea, even though it would make open systems actually possible. Building your own search engine or video platform would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. No need for Cloudflare if the police know who every visitor is. No need for a spam filter, if the government can enforce laws perfectly.

Take a look at email, the mother of all open protocols (older than HTTP). What happened? Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management, and now we on HN complain we can't break through, someone needs to do something about that centralization, so that we can go back to square one where people get spammed to death again, which will inevitably repeat the discretion required -> who has the best discretion -> flee there cycle. Go figure.

[immibis]

I run an email server with no specific spam filter. Sometimes I get spam. Then I add a filter on my end to delete it and move on. It's nowhere near as bad as people proclaim. Neither is deliverability, for that matter, even after I forgot to set an SPF record and some random internet server sent a bunch of spam on my behalf (which I know because I got the bounces).

[gjsman-1000]

You have a dirt path to your house and are therefore convinced the interstate highway system should allow direct residential driveways.

Gmail processes 376 billion emails per day. At that volume, even 0.1% spam getting through is 376 million messages. However, we're not talking about 0.1%, but 45.6% of email being spam globally. For Gmail, that's 171 billion spam messages daily. Congrats that your private server works at your scale. It's completely irrelevant, and only works because bad actors don't care about it.

Imagine though, if we even accepted spam culturally and handled it individually, as per your solution. That would mean spam can get through with brute force, which it can't right now, meaning that 45.6% would probably explode closer to 90%, 95%, or more overnight. It's only manageable at 45.6% for you because Gmail's spam filters are working overtime harming the economics.

[taink]

Why should curation be centralized? We do not need a "decentralized dictatorship" (what would that even be? that's antithetical) and we certainly do not need a centralized one. It seems crazy that your solutions to AI, spam, and "automated traffic" (I don't know what that is, I assume web crawlers and such) is that the police control every single transaction.

First off, we can simply let the user, or client software, choose. Why should we let centralized servers do that by default?

At scale, DNS is somewhat centralized but authorities are disconnected from internet providers and web browsers. They're the best actors to regulate this.

For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders? There could be different limits based on whether you are an individual or a company, and whether you're sending 10'000 emails or just 100.

Regardless of whether these are good solutions -- why jump to extreme ones? "TINA" is not a helpful argument, it's a slogan.

[parliament32]

> For mail, couldn't we come up with a mail-DNS, that authenticates senders?

So RFC 7672? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7672

[taink]

I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

Also, I think it solves a different problem: it prevents spoofing/MITM but what about legitimate certificates? We would still need CAs that actually curate their customers and hold them accountable. And we would need email servers/clients to differentiate between strict CAs and ones that are used solely for encryption purposes.

I don't know that DNS should be applied to emails as is anyway but I find it could force spammers to operate with publicly available information which would make holding them accountable easier.

[account42]

> I have no knowledge of DANE but its reliance on DNSSEC makes me worried that it would be difficult for people to adopt it.

It's not hard to set up DNSSEC as long as your DNS server software supports it and most people don't run their own authorative DNS servers anyway.

[tptacek]

Uh huh.

https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html

[dbspin]

So the solution to AI slop and spam is end of anonymity and total state control of the internet? Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.

The issues with todays internet stem specifically from the centralisation of power in the hands of Google, Apple and the social networks.

Bad search results? Blame Google's monopoly incentivising them intentionally making their results worse.

Difficulty promoting or finding events? Blame Facebooks real revenue model - preventing one to many communications by default and charging for exceptions.

AI overrun with slop? Blame OpenAI and Facebook, both of whom are actively promoting and profiting from the creation of slop.

Automated traffic slowing down sites? It's often the AI companies indexing and reindexing hundreds of times.

Spam? Not a huge issue for anyone that I'm aware of.

The closed internet platforms are the problem. Forcing them to relinquish control over handsets, data and our interpersonal connections is the solution. It will be legislative, or it will be torches to the data centres, likely both. But it is coming.

[gjsman-1000]

I completely disagree.

> The issues with todays internet stem specifically from the centralisation of power in the hands of Google and the social networks.

> Bad search results? Blame Google's monopoly incentivising them intentionally making their results worse.

> Difficulty promoting or finding events? Blame Facebooks real revenue model - preventing one to many communications by default and charging for exceptions.

You're misdiagnosing what happened here. These aren't diseases. These are symptoms that the more open internet, that we had in the early 2000s, completely failed at scale. The disease was the predictable failure of an open system to self-moderate, the symptoms the centralization that followed. You're mistaking effect for cause.

People started using Google, because it was the only tool good enough at digging through manure. Facebook started charging for mass communication, because otherwise, everyone has an excuse why they need to use it. Cloudflare became popular, because the internet didn't care when 40% of traffic was bots, half of them malicious, before AI was even on the scene. And so on.

The open system failed, and was becoming unusable. Big Tech arrived offering proprietary solutions as CPR. They didn't cause the death.

[parliament32]

> To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols.

The contra-example, of course, is email. SpamAssassin figured this out 24 years (!) ago. There is zero reason you couldn't apply similar heuristics to detect AI-slop or whatever particular kind of content you don't want to accept.

> Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management

Only for the lazy.

[gjsman-1000]

A. SpamAssassin has never been tested at Gmail scale, and would likely fail in such a scenario.

B. SpamAssassin is benefiting from centralized players, like Gmail, harming spam's economics. You're a free rider from the onslaught that would occur if spamming actually worked. Spam is at 45.6% of email globally with aggressive spam filters, but could easily double, triple, quadruple in volume if filters started failing even moderately. Weaker filters, and we'll start seeing the email DDoS for the first time.

C. Heuristics on AI Content? What are you going to do, run an "AI Detector" model on a GPU for every incoming email? 376 billion of them every day to Gmail alone? This only makes the email DDoS even more likely.

D. Lazy = 99%+ of global computer users - and that's changing as soon as everyone becomes their own paramedic. If you can't convince most people to learn how to save other people's lives, and probably didn't bother yourself, despite it being disproportionately more important, you're never teaching them technical literacy.

[parliament32]

I think you misunderstand what I'm getting at. SpamAssassin is older than Gmail. It's an old example, much newer and better spam-filtering-at-scale solutions exist (although SA is still maintained). Trying to claim that only the big boys can filter spam is an uninformed opinion.

No, you don't need an AI model to detect AI content (lmao). Heuristics already exist, and you see people mention them online all the time -- excessive use of lists, em dashes, common phrases, etc. Yes, a basic text heuristic scorer from the 1980s can pick these up without much difficulty. The magic of auto-learning heuristics (which have also existed since the 1980s, and performed fine at scale with less processing power than your smartwatch) is you can train them on whatever content you don't want to receive: marketing, political content, etc. You can absolutely apply this to whatever content suits your fancy, and it doesn't really take any more effort than moving messages you want filtered out to a Junk folder or similar.