One of the largest problems we face today are shills and bots attacking online forums. Discussion on how we can combat this problem.

submitted by icebong from self.PhoenixForum

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[–]icebong[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You can give yourself reputation with 100s of alternative accounts.

This is known as a Sybil Attack which is the main problem that IOTA, as I have linked in another comment in this thread. The way they deal with this problem is by assigning each node (user) a weight (reputation) so that users with more weight are more trusted. It takes a lot of time and posting (for good actors) and a lot of money (buying up accounts on the internet) for the bad actors. So the CIA can buy a trusted account for 1000s of dollars, and the moment they start to spew out propaganda, and users report them , they will start to loose that reputation fast.

So iota says, More mana = more messages read. So, within the community, there is a natural distribustion of users. Say 10% off the top users of a community constribute to most of the posts. Something like that, i can't remember exactly. So with such a system, the higher mana you have, the higher you are on the 'font page'.

But yeah, trust is very important in todays systems. I think users need to 'earn' trust within that community. BUT still allows new users to have a say. So with low mana/trust, their comment/posting will be limited, as well as having a visible indicator (we know we can trust accounts that are less then 1 week old on reddit) . But instead of opening their profile, it should be displayed next tot their username...something like that.

[–]zyxzevn 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I agree that the mana system could work ok.
I am even thinking about having multiple layers of trust networks, but do not know exactly how.

[–]icebong[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

So...

First first level : USER SIDE. User will be given tools to help filter though posts, users decide what kind of posts they choose to want to see, ie Show posts by users only over level 3.

Second level: MOD TEAMS. Mods can and will become corrupt over time. We all start off with the best intentions but nothing is ever guaranteed. Communites should default to the mod team that created the community, however, in the sidebar, anyone can start they own mod team for that particular community. That way, a user can check out what the information looks under another mod team, and even change their settings to see the community under the non default mod team.

Third level: MANA reputation. We talked about this. Beefed up reputation system.

In this way, it's harder for a central entity to control the narrative, as how the filtering of information is now much more 'decentralized'