Everything on here is awesome right now, it feels like an online forum from the 2000s, everyone is friendly, optimistic, it feels like the start to something big.
Well, as we all know, AI has gotten very smart to the point captcha’s are useless, and it can engage in social forums disguised as a human.
With Reddit turning into propaganda central anda greedy CEO that has the motive to sell Reddit data to AI farms, I worry that the AI will be able to be prompted to target websites such as the websites in the fediverse.
Right now it sounds like paranoia, but I think we are closer to this reality than we may know.
Reddit has gotten nuked, so we built a new community, everyone is pleasantly surprised by the change of vibe around here, the over all friendlyness, and the nostalgia of old forums.
Could this be the calm before the storm?
How will the fediverse protect its self from these hypothetical bot armies?
Do you think Reddit/big companies will make attacks on the fediverse?
Do you think clickbait posts will start popping up in pursuit of ad revenue?
What are your thoughts and insights on this new “internet 2.0”?
I think the key here is going to be coming up with robust protocols for user verification; you can’t run an army of spambots if you can’t create thousands of accounts.
Doing this well will probably be beyond the capacity of most instance maintainers, so you’d likely end up with a small number of companies that most instances agreed to accept verifications from. The fact that it would be a competitive market - and that a company that failed to do this well would be liable to have its verifications no longer accepted - would simultaneously incentivize them to both a) do a good job and b) offer a variety of verification methods, so that if, say, you wanted to remain anonymous even to them, one company might allow you to verify a new account off of a combination of other long-lived social media accounts rather than by asking for a driver’s license or whatever.
And of course there’s no reason you couldn’t also have 2 or 3 different verifications on your account if you needed that many to have your posts accepted on most instances; yes, it’s a little messy, but messy also means resilient.