Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
The downside of that approach is that AI can pretend to be humans wanting to join quite well. It’s possible to set up a lobster.rs like system where there’s a tree of people you’ve invited so admins can cull entire spam groups at once, but that also has its downsides (i.e. it’s impossible to join if none of your friends have already joined, or if you don’t want to attach your online socials to your friends).
It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.
I don’t think that’s a perfect system anyway though, spammers could create a massive tree of fake accounts and just only use a small proportion of them for spam
Use a number of compromised user accounts to set this up and it becomes a nightmare
And that is how you get singular point of view echo chamber.
Most of the internet is made up of echo chambers now even though anyone and everyone can access a majority of it. I don’t think being selective in who we allow into communities worsens the pre-existing echo chamber issue. If anything it may help to be more selective. It can sometimes be impossible to tell the difference between trolls, bots, and real people, so I feel like we assume every person we disagree with is a troll or bot. The issue with that is that we may be outright dismissing real opinions. In theory, everyone in a selective community is a real person who is expressing their true thoughts and feelings.