This isn't, and has never been a hard problem. Just pay for people's attention. People you follow don't have to pay, and make that transitive. Penalize people in your network who propagate spam by increasing the cost to get your attention.

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tux3 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If a scammer, advertiser, or some other form of spammer can get a payout just 1% of the time, they will be willing to pay much more than the average person posting the average tweet.

If you make everything explicitly transactional, you will be left with only people trying to make a profit.

	▲	direwolf20 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Penis enlargement spam is worth like $0.00000001 per message. Any number higher than that makes them lose money. The real problem is that nobody will post on a social media network where you have to pay to post.
	▲	echelon 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You have the graph of everything you follow, the graph of what they like, second order graphs ... There are so many heuristics and models you can use to filter.

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echelon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is one of the most interesting properties of peer-to-peer networks.

You can run your own ingestion algorithms, and one of the things you can do is set up inbound rules that incorporate micro transactions.

We have to build a lot of infrastructure to make this work, but it seems ideal for a world full of agents and autonomous systems acting on our behalf.

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direwolf20 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Do the outbound rules of other participants include microtransactions?

And who besides a spammer would pay more than $0 to have their message read by you? If I wrote a blog post about vulnerabilities of blockchains, or how I ran Doom on a pregnancy test, and you don't read it because I'm not paying you, you're losing value, not me. You guarantee an inbox of only spam — but at least you get paid for it.

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echelon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If you've got great content, I would just follow you. Or someone I follow would follow you, and through the network it would lead to discovery. I want your content, so unless you charge for it, nobody's paying anyone.

If someone wants me to ingest something novel from far outside my network, one way to gain reputation might be to pay a microtransaction fee. I'd be free to choose to set that up as a part of my ingestion algorithm. Or maybe my peers do it, and if they "upvote" the content, I see it.

If my peers start acting poorly and sending spam, I can flag disinterest and my algorithm can naturally start deboosting that part of the network.

With such systems-level control, we should be able to build really excellent tooling, optimization, and statistical monitoring.

Also, since all publications are digitally signed, your content wouldn't have to be routed to me through your node at all. You could in fact never connect to the swarm and I could still read your content if you publish it to a peer that has distribution.

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direwolf20 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I still think that any content anyone is paying for you to see is necessarily spam.

	▲	anonymous908213 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't agree. I think the chief problem with advertising is that it is extremely repetitive. I'm not, in principle, opposed to being informed about new things relevant to my interests existing. In a world that is completely oversaturated with content, it is hard to gain traction on something new with word-of-mouth alone, even if it is of very high quality. There is a point to being informed about something existing for the first time (maybe I'll use it), and there is a reason why people would have to pay to make use of that informational system (the barrier to entry is necessary to make the new thing stand out in the ocean of garbage).