21 sats \ 2 replies \ @gregory 4 Aug 2023 \ on: Managing Spam nostr
There's another paradigm for spam control on a decentralized protocol that's been operating for decades: email.
It has its flaws but there are groups that collect spam reports and publish a list of how spammy they think an email address / email sending IP is. And email inboxes subscribe to whatever lists they want to trust (and maybe publish their own!)
I could see that working for Nostr too. Some groups will monitor relays for "report" kind events and make judgemetn calls based on their algorithm of which pubkeys are spammy (or even just tag them as NSFW poster, or "posts only cute dog videos" or any other label that clients and users may want to utilize to filter their feeds.
I think that proof of work and making posts cost money can help a lot! But at the end of the day some spam will be worth the cost if it is able to be effective at scamming.
It may be more work to go with a model like this, but I think it'll preserve censorship resistance of nostr (because you can choose relays that listen to lists you agree with, or none at all); while also giving some measure of filtering power that isn't on every user to make a robust mute list.
I'm sure something like that will become widespread. In the discussion I was having on nostr, the concern that was expressed about my idea was that it would limit the entry of new voices with good ideas, if they didn't have the sats built up to comment on popular notes.
The problem of limiting entry, seems even greater with this email type spam filtering. I'm not trying to have a public conversation through my email account, so I'm happy that the spam filter is pretty aggressive. I imagine it could be dialed way back for nostr to just weed out the most obvious stuff.
I like the idea more from the standpoint of content curation.
In general, I like the idea of introducing more tools for individuals to customize their nostr experience.
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Agreed, I think the email model is powerful for nostr but the aggressiveness will be tuned to match the desiers of people on Nostr because of exactly what you're saying.
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