bluesky should bring back invite codes very easy to bootstrap trust in new accounts via the social network very easy to prune offending subtrees there are enough users now that it’s not a meaningful throttle on growth - ThreadSky

hdevalence.bsky.social • 143 days ago

bluesky should bring back invite codes

very easy to bootstrap trust in new accounts via the social network

very easy to prune offending subtrees

there are enough users now that it’s not a meaningful throttle on growth

Comments

retr0.id•143 days ago

there are also more idiots. even before, people would paste their invite codes into public messages and scratch their head when it was immediately redeemed by a bot following the firehose

katelynsills.com•143 days ago

why not just automatically revoke any invite code found in the firehouse? A anti-bot bot

retr0.id•143 days ago

it'd be a good start, but that's only one way people leak invites - you'd need to monitor the whole internet (including twitter)

mcint.io•143 days ago

Post a bond to receive an invite code, by user. It’s redeemable for cash or access.

retr0.id•143 days ago

people weren't leaking them on purpose (mostly), so now they're also mad that they lost money as well as an invite code

mcint.io•143 days ago

Great, we can now assign a dollar value to their learning, or failure to learn. A reserve price.

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

yeah this doesn’t work. but just not giving out more codes to people who use them poorly is self limiting

mcint.io•143 days ago

Oh, and split it with bsky. $5 bond. If invite is used (or not) and cash out not claimed for …a month, fully refundable.

$2.50 if cashed out, $2.50 to bsky.

mcint.io•143 days ago

Hmm yeah bot people could just use this too. Still, opportunities for lower human friction, higher mass scale friction. Like CloudFlare’s proof of humanity/challenge token

retr0.id•143 days ago

but I guess it'd still be a reasonable obstacle to bot herders operating at scale

retr0.id•143 days ago

however, invite codes don't help with 3rd party PDSes. the bots are on https://bsky.social for now but maybe they'd start self-hosting. it'd suck to have to scrutinise 3rd party PDS users more than 1st party ones

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

it’s inevitable, might as well start now

natanael.bsky.social•143 days ago

It's always the end state in federated / decentralized networks. Lots of email-like reputation systems will end up being recreated

The most annoying part about it is the widely different views of the same thread it ends up creating (because not even OP can provide an authoritative view to clients)

natanael.bsky.social•143 days ago

With stuff like forums such as lemmy there's at least a host defined view of a thread (and your own client/host may filter some of it, but that's more visible and mostly under your own control)

Microblogging threads, especially long ones, don't have any equivalent control (other than locking them)

orthanc.nz•143 days ago

I've seen a bunch of T&S people highlight that invites probably wouldn't solve this problem.

If invites are rare enough to limit bots when there are already 20M accounts then they'd significantly limit actual organic growth too.

retr0.id•143 days ago

Well I think the idea would not to have any scarcity at all, just accountability - if you invite a spammer you get dinged

retr0.id•143 days ago

But the regularity with which "good" users accidentally leaked their invites made it hard to take decisive action in such cases

ira.bailey.nz•143 days ago

You could have another step where the invitee has to approve the code use though? Then leaking doesn’t matter at all.

And if you’re crazy for members, do a revenue share from Bluesky premium for anyone that uses their invites. And wipe their share of the revenue if bot invites get too high

orthanc.nz•143 days ago

Yup. And giving normal users power over each other. Either as "your behaviour reflects on me because I invited you" or "be good and I'll invite you to the club" doesn't tend to create great dynamics.

Everywhere else ended up detecting and limiting or down ranking as the best of a bad set of options

orthanc.nz•143 days ago

And if you start using X invited Y so limit X type logic there are just way too many abuse vectors because like you say, people don't treat invites as soemthing where they need to vet the recipient

The "I'm going to convince you do give me a code, then create a troll alt to get you punished" is bad

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

the punishment is that you don’t get more invite codes, it’s not a big deal

maybe it times out after you learned the lesson

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

i think they probably would solve the problem

invites are not one big global pool, they’re scoped to users

if you give your invites to accounts that get suspended you don’t get more, or very few more

dollspace.gay•143 days ago

Doll also remembers that when people brought up that this was happening they would roll their eyes and deny that this was happening, then post more codes.

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

then they stop getting invites

wolfreak76.bsky.social•143 days ago

I wouldn't mind going back to when the site was 90% Furries and adjacent, but I admit I might be biased.

xenofy.bsky.social•143 days ago

I'm normal and can be trusted with seeding the invasion force of the main fle-- I mean, I can be trusted to be an authentic user😁

emmz.bsky.social•143 days ago

I asked a T&S expert about a similar thing a while ago, and found her answer to be really informative & thorough!

https://bsky.app/profile/emmz.bsky.social/post/3l3jeymg7ns26

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

i believe the concerns in that thread are addressed by my suggestion https://bsky.app/profile/hdevalence.bsky.social/post/3lf4de3eats23

ngerakines.me•143 days ago

It's a dumb idea, but I like it.

notplants.bsky.social•143 days ago

this seems like maybe another interestingly simple variation of transitive trust

like in trustnet (https://cblgh.org/trustnet/) or other possible systems

i could imagine transitive trust approaches i might prefer to invite codes, but on other hand invite codes has the advantage of being understandable

natanael.bsky.social•143 days ago

If trust calculations are mostly automatic and people are too generous with high trust scores (which is common) then this doesn't work, too open to Sybil attacks

notplants.bsky.social•143 days ago

im curious how someone could assert it to "not work" without knowing a particular set of weights applied. especially in a subjective p2p trustnet system where potentially each user has a different algorithm for turning a social graph of trust-weights into what they actually see

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

luckily bsky pbllc has all the info needed to dynamically adjust the scoring

hdevalence.bsky.social•143 days ago

finally, it doesn’t require building something new, but using something that already existed

unhinged.posts.fyi•142 days ago

it's probably a temporary solve, which is fine

it kinda doesn't solve the echo chambers issue, pace of diverse opinions to flourish requires accessibility

splaystate.bsky.social•142 days ago

idk about that. edge networks would over time expand the set of overlaps between disparate schools of thought. I think the 'echo chamber' claim is sort of a myth.

unhinged.posts.fyi•142 days ago

at it's current form, this app has not reached

pausing entry and issuing vouchers (including to pornbots that can reuse vouchers to get past detection again) doesn't then become the quick fix that a pause is supposed achieve

thus, at its current form, it's not a full representation of society

splaystate.bsky.social•142 days ago

good point about a botnet using vouchers for themselves, that's a real vector

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