I view these sorts of things as an opportunity. Theoretically, here's how the system should work: 1) Spammer shows up. 2) You, and everyone who thinks like you, identifies them as a spammer and gives them the ol' triple block 3) The spammer ends up without an audience Theoretically, there's no moderation needed - and that's what "report spammer" means. There's no way to deal with "spam" without assuming some form of moderation. The downside to this comes with tag taxonomy and new users. A new user looking for stuff about writing is likely going to subscribe to #writing... which is also the tag any spammer is going to find. A seasoned user looking for stuff about writing knows that it's in #writebetterdammit, which is something spammers won't find without a substantial commitment to the site. I took over /r/realestate on Reddit when it was nothing but a honeypot for spammers. It still gets gobsmacking amounts of crap. We use automoderator like a rented mule, and we're merciless. As a result, it's a useful sub, but beating back the bullshit took a substantial investment of time. I can see that sort of thing happening to a tag as Hubski grows... ...which is why some sort of searchable/merge-able taxonomy so that tags can be parsed via a system other than "folklore" is perhaps the most important thing to make Hubski scalable towards a larger userbase.
Agree 100%. It's not taxing on us as current users to ignore/mute the spam accounts as they appear. If spam bots were to add this site into their portfolio, what would new users see when they come here? They are automated so they don't care whether there is an audience or not; SEO is a goal for many of them so having their link here may be all they're after. Will every thread contain 20 spam comments with the rest of us acting like it isn't happening because we don't see it? Should new users be expected to spend their first hour of being here ignoring & muting every spammer or finding the more obfuscated tags? I'm sure the team has considered this. Hopefully it never reaches that point or there are more creative solutions to the problem. But I don't know if taxonomy is the solution; essentially it's just tagging tags.There's no way to deal with "spam" without assuming some form of moderation.
That's really what it comes down to. A parameter like "sensitivity to other users' ignore/mute/hush decisions" would allow a user to, say, auto-ignore/auto-mute any user that had been ignored or muted by 1-2-a dozen users. Set the threshold lower, see more muted/ignored comments. Set the threshold higher, miss it. You're right, taxonomy isn't the solution to this particular problem, more an end-run around the problem. /r/feminism gets a lot more spam than /r/twoxchromosomes for the simple reason that an auto-search finds "feminism" faster; however, /r/reportthespammers shut down recently because the very nature of "spam" has changed. I just want better taxonomy because it's important.Will every thread contain 20 spam comments with the rest of us acting like it isn't happening because we don't see it? Should new users be expected to spend their first hour of being here ignoring & muting every spammer or finding the more obfuscated tags? I'm sure the team has considered this.
...which is why some sort of searchable/merge-able taxonomy so that tags can be parsed via a system other than "folklore" is perhaps the most important thing to make Hubski scalable towards a larger userbase.
-yep.