A better plan for spam? [nerd version]
I think that small tariffs on “published” messages could stop spam, and also reduce the need for advertising online. Users don’t pay to receive e-mail, but they do pay a little each time they send. Users don’t pay to read web pages, but they do pay a little to comment on them. This wouldn’t change the model of the Internet or Web greatly, but it could significantly change the result.
The need for a better solution
Stopping spam is a difficult problem. It could be tackled at the source and/or the destination. Politicians could criminalize spam, or at least tax it — ideally, stop spam at the source. Why anyone would want more regulation and more taxes is unfathomable to most computer programmers. We prefer to invent clever algorithms instead — ideally, stop spam at it’s destination.
There’s a problem with our approach. Spam isn’t caused by buggy machines, it’s caused by greedy people. If humans have trouble deciding whether an e-mail is in their best interest, how much more a disinterested computer! Even if you believe that greedy people are actually just buggy machines, are you willing to bet the spam battle on your ability to create a superior being? If you have an algorithm that takes text as input and gives a motive as output, there are 33 sets of grieving Hokies still groping for answers. (I’m not sure whether Cringley’s recent “search engine for hate” post is meant as some kind of sick joke to that affect, or what.) There’s no algorithm that can stop sin, except for a sacrificial love which overcame death.
The solution applied to e-mail
Don’t keep up the AI arms race, spammers are clever too. Don’t let the government start skimming more profits, spammers are expert evaders. Instead, let the ISPs charge to accept email on your behalf. This might require modifications to the inter-net email relaying protocols, but with things like DomainKeys and server-based spamboxes we’re doing that anyway.
The solution on the Web
There’s more to gain on today’s Web. Imagine leveraging an OpenID-like (or even OpenID-based) system in a micropayments context. Please don’t check out just yet if you think you’ve heard this all before.
Five years and who knows how many market cycles later, I still agree with most of Jakob Nielsen’s User Payments synopsis. Basically, paid content stinks, but ads and spam stink worse. “Information wants to be free” may remind me of “Arbeit macht frei”, but I still don’t want to pay to read your blog. There’s a lot of pressure keeping the Web from going back to a royalty model, perhaps rightly so. But we can flip micropayments around.
A practical scenario
The Web is currently infatuated with user-generated content, so there are plenty of other extrapolations, but weblogs are an obvious use. A successful blog currently tries to exploit it’s fixed content for money and protect it’s user feedback frome abuse. This is naïve and ugly: income via ads, protection via captchas/logins/AI plugins. Instead, why not install a micropayments plugin? Basically:
- The webmaster chooses a username/signature service from any number of providers
- These service providers act as brokers, deducting/depositing money into the user’s account
- The user’s info/balance is not stored with the service providers, but in an account with a larger entity
Basically, it’s PayPal for Web 2.0 — less centralized, more user friendly. The user doesn’t want to keep his credit card on file with every blog he users, but neither can one company be expected to provide plugins for every blog/forum/link-swamp-service out there. Hence the middle-man services providers. They provide an API specific to a problem-domain, and use a standard protocol to link up with any main account provider the user chooses.
Result: Blogs with active discussion have a reasonable, and practical, alternative to advertisements. Users think just a little bit before they respond. Most importantly, spammers get sick of making blog owners rich.
Potential drawbacks
Users could refuse to accept such a plan, preferring to leave the financial and spam-filtering burden completely on the content providers’ tab. But trading chaotic 
s and 
s for a painless just-charge-it is not really a bad deal. I’m paying about a tenner a month for the privilege of writing on my own site, and I’d gladly support your site with my literal 2¢. This does mean speech for the end-user would no longer be free-as-in-beer, but if adequate attention was paid to privacy concerns there would be no harm done to free speech. If a user doesn’t have a credit card, they can sign up with an account provider that foots the tab in exchange for completing Mechanical Turk-style tasks.
Spammers may not give up so easily, though. If they can’t afford to pay microtariffs on everybody’s blog, the most likely alternative is to instead target only relevant blogs. How this differs from AdSense, I don’t know. The only serious concern left then is security. Spammers must not be able to phish or botnet their way into anyone else’s main account. But this is a concern for countless other scenarios as well, and is by no means an excuse not to try. And if time is money, the time we save by tackling the problem of spam as capitalists rather than technologists will more than make up for any spurious charges encountered as the system is gaining experience.
The plea
Spam is a people problem, as is making a microtariff system acceptable. I am a programmer. If spam was a big interest of mine, I might be immersing myself in Bayesian Filtering and Neural Networks in a technologic attempt to save the world. But this series has been immersing enough, and I have no interest in becoming the PayPal of the New and Amazing Web. Currently this site is low bandwidth and SpamKarma hasn’t swatted too many of my dad’s comments. However, when this site’s readership and “spammer”ship grow beyond what my budget can bear, I would much rather join a privatized microtariff economy than Google’s ginormous AdSense scheme. If you know someone who’s looking for a get-rich-and-save-the-world,like,yesterday scheme, I’d love to hear what they think of this plan. The comments are open and, for as long as practical, still free!
How about striking back? I personally find the idea of Spamper utterly appealing.
Comment by Dmitry Shechtman — April 28, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
Definitely an interesting suggestion! From what I gather from your posts on it, and what I could find in the phpBB anti-spam thread, “Spamper” basically tries to DOS/DDOS any bot (or is it any link?) that is considered spam. Yes, there’s something gratifying about that, but it’s not a good idea. First of all, you would be returning greed with hatred. Secondly, as a few people on the phpBB thread pointed out, that kind of network abuse is a spammer’s chief speciality — not a battle you want to escalate. Plus, some of the bots might actually be running on other people’s exploited computers. In the end, it would just add to network congestion in a perhaps-illegal way.
Plus, you still have the problem of deciding whether it’s spam or not. If you can do that, you can just filter it, right?
Comment by natevw — April 28, 2007 @ 2:39 pm
It is a DDoS on spam links. It isn’t about hatred, it’s about eliminating backlink spam. Since the counter-attack is a distributed one, there’s little those criminals could possibly do to stop it, and since it’s against the web servers (not against the posting IPs), no innocent people’s machines are affected.
The phpBB MOD automatically detects spam links (and successfully filters them). However, as I already noted, this isn’t about just filtering spam any more (which is gradually circumvented on every possible level), this is about stopping it altogether.
Comment by Dmitry Shechtman — April 29, 2007 @ 3:37 am
I guess I can see how that idea could be motivated by practicality instead of “getting even”. What I should have said is that a denial-of-service attack is an ATTACK, not a defense and not a passive deterrent. If you think a war analogy is truly appropriate (I don’t think so), you need to make sure that any offense is justified. I apologize if you don’t fit the stereotype, but most “nerds” aren’t very good diplomats and just-war theory just isn’t something we’re wise in. Just-war theory is necessary for an individual people group when there is no higher authority (a living God or a higher power such as the UN) to appeal to. In this case, there are higher powers who should approve any “military action” online — the Internet service/backbone providers and (in many countries) their government regulators. If you really believe this really is a practical solution (and given wider network concerns, and potential firewalling/countermeasures, I still have many doubts), then I’d encourage you to convince the powers-that-be to approve this plan. Until then, do you think the plan presented above would work? I think it has many benefits beyond discouraging spam, whereas a “Spamper”-type plan has many drawbacks.
Comment by natevw — April 30, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
I apologize for dragging you into a discussion about an alternative anti-spam measure here. Spamper does have its drawbacks beside its benefits, as does your plan (see the Potential Drawbacks section).
Although it is an interesting idea, I’m afraid it’s mostly impractical. You can’t expect every blogger to install this plugin by herself, and if you’re talking about one or more central services, how would they share the revenue? If each comment costs 2¢, do you split it 50/50?
Then, link spam isn’t strictly blog-specific. Would you charge for each wiki edit? How about forum posts? I know a few users who regularly post a hundred times a day. Would they still be users once they have to literally invest $$$?
This could still be considered a potential solution for very large bulletin boards. I’d suggest those to have one forum singled out first to see if this works.
Spamper, on the other hand, could be deployed immediately on every board/blog/wiki/site out there…
Those are my 2¢.
Comment by Dmitry Shechtman — May 1, 2007 @ 1:05 am
I shudder to think what chaos would ensue should Spamper see sudden widespread deployment. Can’t you just smell the magic smoke coming from all the routers and hear the desparate whimpers of all the network administrators trying to deal with a Massively Multiplayer DOS war-playing-game?
Yet no apology necessary at all. It’s interesting and hopefully helpful in the long run to discuss the pros and cons of a number of options. I just wanted to hear some feedback on this idea too, and yours was helpful! You bring up some good points. I do think the blog plugin would be very practical — certainly no harder to install, and potentially much easier to configure, than SpamKarma. And for users of Blogger, Myspace, Xanga, whatever, etc. there wouldn’t be any installation hassle, and I would assume that the revenue would be split however any ad revenue is split now.
Like you say, this plan would definitely need to cover more options than just blogs. Forum posts are probably the second easiest, although I didn’t realize just how prolific some posters can be. I suppose you’d have to adjust the “economics” appropriately: things like lower fees in general (1/10 of a cent times a hundred posts is still only a fraction of a soda/snack per day); bulk/amortized discounts; maybe even giving back credit for helpful posts.
You’ve got a great counterexample in wikis, I’d agree that that would be a stretch. The best I can think of is that spam/vandalism posters are charged k*x per edited word, and edits that are accepted get only a 1*x credit per word. But this would be just as much work for the moderators/community and when spam did decrease, the ‘k’ factor would have to increase proportionally to the point where somebody who had a change rejected as “vandalism” unfairly (say in the course of an NPOV dispute) would risk a significant fee. (Credit systems in such an open-ended environment would also risk abuse.) Maybe the kind of clever and zany thinking that made wikis successful could also find a more creative way to make microtariffs successful in that context. Then again, a simple red/yellow/green statistical relevance flag might be just enough help from the machine to allow the community’s “self-moderating” strategy to continue, at least on the more popular wikis.
Like you said, I’d love to see a few forums or a blogging platform try this out. The whole multilayered account ecosystem would need some critical mass before the ideal ease of use (and ubiquitousness) began to shine. It might be best to try it with wooden nickels before expecting the users to break out their credit cards for just one site! This is an economic/people problem, and I don’t have a lot of experience predicting, modeling or encouraging those kinds of solutions. Hopefully, having the idea out there will at worst only result in the flaws being exposed, and at best lead to something better for the Internet/Web before some patent troll or big bureaucracy ends up calling the shots.
Comment by natevw — May 1, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
Whoah, that last comment was more like $1.50, didn’t realize it was getting so long-winded! Don’t anyone be afraid to chime in, my perspective[s?] may be meandering but I’m sure it’s still missing parts of the complete picture.
Comment by natevw — May 1, 2007 @ 7:23 pm
This is an interesting idea, but what about those who don’t have any dispensable income such as children or those in developing nations? What do you think about a generally centralized identification service? Possibly something invitation based kind of like gmail’s invites?
Comment by Jeremy — May 2, 2007 @ 7:53 pm
For those who don’t have credit cards (or even much money), I was thinking of a system like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (linked above). Maybe they would start out with a little balance each month, but then they would do tasks that aren’t easily automated by a computer, [acting like an oracle] deciding how many kids are in a picture, transcribing garbled audio or (aha!) if they knew the language they could detect vandalism on wiki pages.
Invites require an e-mail address or something, would be a bit troublesome for newcomers/loners on the Internet, and seem more easily abused. Does that sound fair enough? In general, I don’t like a centralized /hardly anything/. For one, it provides a single point of failure. For two, it gives that point an awful lot of power. (An awful lot of power corrupts…awful lotly?) I’m not opposed to an identification system, although it needs to be an anonymous identification system for those under, shall we say, “overdeveloped” national governments. OpenID seems like a neat [decentralized] system, if it proves robust it sounds helpful.
Microtariffs would still be necessary with an ID system to avoid needing to blacklist users. If the Internet is just an information access system, its a privilege that can be taken away. But it’s an extreme thing for a country to deport or, uh, “delete” its citizens, and I think that’s more what a blacklist would feel like. I’m interested in trying a free economic solution first. Capitalism has its issues. However, human greed has been shown to produce better economic results under capitalism than, say, communism with a large dose of centralized control.
Comment by natevw — May 3, 2007 @ 5:20 am