compiling an open source C project isn't time consuming?

For almost all of human history information has been centralized among a small actors, for some time period we had a large independent press but those days are gone.

Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and therefore they have an interest in owning part of that system.

Beyond federated systems, P2P systems seem to have a strong advantage here in identifying bad actors.

Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency would solve bad actors posting behind VPNs/proxies like evil bot farms / state actors and marketers.

Real users have their own IP address, and IP addresses are expensive like $20-50 a month which would make mocking traffic an extremely expensive proposition.

Mocking 1% of reddit's 120M daily active user would cost 58M and you wouldn't want to share/sell these addresses with other actors since it would ruin your credibility

I think it would do the opposite. The regular user posts 5 times per day, but the spammer has bought access to 65536 IP addresses and posts once from each, boosting his posts 5x. And the town in South America with one CGNAT IP address to go around gets censored.

You're not wrong that its easy to get relatively obscure IP addresses cheaply, however youll be sharing them with lots of folks potentially damaging reputation.

At scale, say P2P-book becomes the largest social networking site, all bad actors will be focused on using it and they will likely be sharing IP's, comingiling their reputation.

Sharing account ID's across IP would also be penalized.

People who post consistently from the same IP / MAC would be boosted, those are real people.

Of course before one is the biggest game in town you will simply not be on the radar, so using a captcha as well will be useful to prevent bots.

The 65K IP addresses cost 1.638M dollars, thats alot more than they would spend doing the exact same thing today.

The idea is to accept bad actors but make it more expensive and also you can directly identify cliques by IP ect.

Yeah, but he's got a botnet of residential ips that he didn't pay for.

You're sharing the IP! That will severely harm the credibility of the poster for popular system at scale

You don't need to own them. You just need to rent the rights to send a spam message on a particular service using a proxy.

If you're sharing the IP that harms the credibility in the first place for an established system.

> Ranking posts/comments by the exponential of inverse IPAddress-post-frequency

Doesn't this just incentivize posting a bunch of comments from your residential proxy IP addresses to launder them? This smells like a poor strategy that's likely to lead to more spam than not. Also, everyone has to start somewhere so your legit IP addresses are also going to seem spammy at first.

Hmm consider an established social network which sees lots of bad actor activity, these folks will likely be sharing IP's on these residential network severly damaging their reputation.

You should only see one user-id per MAC / IP. If you see multiple then its a sign of a bad actor.

Before you're established using something like a captcha prevents most spam, except for state actors, and they wont be focused on the site until its larger.

I think residential proxy IP's still have the same associated cost, and arent those often for bundled traffic?

I'm not much of a blackhat so excuse my lack of knowledge on tricks of the trade

I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics, but It seems thats not the case.

I wonder if it is widespread knowledge internally or if just the select few know.

Why would you think that engineers have stronger ethics than the population at large? Following this logically, some profession would have to have lower than average ethics or perhaps only the unemployed do?

I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.

> I used to think that most engineers had strong ethics

Civil engineers maybe. Software "engineers" were never known for their strong sense of ethics.