Spammers Ruin Everything

Who wants to make spammers pay?

Here continues Rule 2: Don’t Just Boycott, Compete!

Punishing Mark Z. by launching a new social media service is all well and good, but there are dangers of relying too much on any centralized social media site – even one run by the Good Guys. Whatever happened to the Blogosphere? Whatever happened to trackbacks, pingbacks, global tagging services like Technorati, global rating and discovery services like Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and the like? And whatever happened to good old fashioned email?

Spammers, happened. That’s what. And now spammers are even ruining the telephone system.

In all these cases the underlying causes are the same: communication has become incredibly cheap and faking one’s identity is easy. Fix either cause and the spam is reduced to manageable quantities – down to the level of physical junk mail. (And junk mail itself would be more manageable if bulk rates were closer to first class rates…)

A word of warning: I am not a crypto nerd, and I use smart phones as little as possible, so I am liable to write something stupid in a minute. Some of the ideas to follow may be impossible or already done. I’m in Kraken Mode, here. Filter accordingly.

Let’s start with comment spam. The blogosphere needs something better than name/email blanks on forms. Email addresses are too cheap to create, and email addresses cannot really be used for verification since that would lead to griefers typing in other people’s email addresses into blog forms in order to trigger validation emails from the blog. Blogs could become a source of spam. Not good.