Or connect with trusted curators over a decentralized network, similar to the fediverse?

Or a baked-in a use-based rating system. That would be cool if it could be protected from abuse.

Then you have a user reputation problem instead… me and my 5 million alts say this is the REAL korn_blind.mp3.exe.

Nothing is new under the sun since the internet was created, these are the same problems that email has tried and failed to solve for 50 years.

Its going to be an unpopular take, but crypto solves this. As in currency. Make people attest to things with locking a very small amount of money.

This has been used by record labels in the past. I can't remember which system tried to do reputation (was it kazaa?), but some of the most upvoted songs were the current hits, but replaced with a ~10s loop going for a few minutes.

Now, do you think you can outvote riaa enforcement group equivalent, if they decide so spend money on this?

> Its going to be an unpopular take, but crypto solves this. As in currency. Make people attest to things with locking a very small amount of money.

So claims Elon on Twitter, a platform that is very obviously to anyone who uses it completely overrun with bots who have found it very profitable to validate their spam accounts and get preferential listings for a mere eight dollars, while scaring off legitimate users who (fairly) do not trust a service with no functioning security department with their payment information.

Bitcoin originally evolved from the "hashcash" proof-of-work system, which was intended to be a scalable anti-spam measure (force an attacker to generate a unique proof that is expensive to generate but cheap to verify). And you are basically describing proof-of-stake (force participants to stake, and if they misbehave you slash their stake). I wasn't kidding about "nothing is new under the sun" ;)

In general though others are right that the problem often is that attackers are more willing to play these games than individuals - you are not willing to put up 10 bucks to post on a web forum, but an attacker might think $10 to get a wonderful commercial offer delivered to 1000 people sounds really good! You won't spend 10c to upvote each individual song, but the RIAA will! Etc. It needs to be highly asymmetrical, and ideally have minimal/zero cost to "honest" users with an exponential penalty for attackers.

Obviously we are not living in a post-email-spam world unfortunately, and what we have is basically the "lightning network" with gatekeepers offloading and centralizing a lot of the problem so users don't have to deal with it. But you aren't the first person to make the observation that these are related problems!

>And you are basically describing proof-of-stake (force participants to stake, and if they misbehave you slash their stake). I wasn't kidding about "nothing is new under the sun

That's sort of the central point of my post....

they shouldn’t do anything aside from a disclaimer

just opt out of being an arbiter, like public utilities do

Things like this need good signal to noise ratio to survive. Just throwing your hands in the air and saying anything goes doesn't work because users don't want to search through 10 billion mislabelled things to find the right one.

that’s what’s going to happen though

Unfortunately the majority of it will be malware or illegal porn in the blink of an eye without a good way to separate it.

street smarts

community indexer

why download anything from a list of torrents, okay use the same set of rules

I have a DHT indexer implementation I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39425381. It definitely finds everything, and you need a metric to sort for quality. That metric can be seeder/leecher counts from a trusted tracker, or peer count on the DHT. https://www.coveapp.info/ uses this to grade its search results.

All the CSAM torrents are fed honeypots. Just don't accidentally download them and you should be fine.

How do you know? And why would you know?

Ad blockers seems to imply that we can do curator without the centralized aspect. Ublock has a couple hundred of lists, each with thousands or more filters. A user choose to enable or disable what they want with no central control.

Further more, the filter itself can be made to limit disclosure of the original data while still providing a binary decision regarding filtering a content or not. Hashing, bloom filters, ai models and so on are common tools for filtering data like emails and link reputation.

Is it possible to use bots or use a riaa enforcement group equivalent to get ad blockers to green lights specific ads? Personally I trust easylist as long the community does so, and would discard it the moment it lost the community trust. That makes it a kind of centralized curator, but also very much not.