I wish I could say more about how spammers work ... but this won't work like you think it will. You are assuming all the spammers are distributed among a single branch in the tree, and you'd only realize it wasn't working when you ban someone popular who obviously isn't a spammer and has the clout to do something about it.

I'm pretty sure they mean ban the invite tree below the branch of the spammer, not the entire tree that spammer is on. The chances of a false positive are much lower in the former case than in the latter.

Users who actually believe in the site and understand how the mechanism works and appreciate the high snr that they've enjoyed, will be understanding for the most part even if they end up on the wrong side of one of these bans, and have to go through an appeal system to rejoin the site on some other trust tree which is much more closely monitored by its members than the one they were on before. Ensuring that future bans will be highly unlikely.

Out of curiousity, how is a scammer that has hundreds of thousands of actual real people under it handled? Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well? Not even talking about scammers, if someone near the root of the tree has a bad day and decides to take it out on the community (or simply gets hacked), it seems you could lose the entire community.

> Are all of those hundreds of thousands of users banned as well?

Depends on whether you can trust them. If someone at the top of the invite tree gets hacked or starts shitposting, it doesn't really imply anything about the people they invited, they're all probably innocent users. If they turn out to be a spammer though? Then you can't trust anyone they invited. Any false positive should be handled on a case-by-case basis or reinvited by someone else who is trusted and is willing to vouch for them.

So, what if the root node of the tree starts spamming everyone?

If it's that simple cut and dried situation, then you just ban them. Invite trees aren't Merkle trees, you can certainly modify any node arbitrarily without invalidating subordinate relationships.

So, you're saying the root nodes have preferential treatment over leaf nodes... interesting. Yeah, def not interested in joining a nepotic org like that. I had other reasons for not joining, but ... interesting.

Thanks for answering my questions though. It was insightful.

I don't think you understand how invitation trees work, or how Merkel trees work for that matter, if that's what you drew from my comment, which essentially said nearly the opposite. The graph is the shape of a tree due to the patterns of invitation fanning out, but there is no such thing as a branch that has more priority over others in a structural or modeling sense.

The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet. Acting like this is some sort of petty fascist power move is not arguing in good faith, it is actually an attempt to escape an argument that you are failing to understand, by changing the subject from how to deal with a certain kind of common social network pathology, to a completely different name calling argument about someone's imaginary nepotistic motivations. It's probably best that you do excuse yourself from such discussions, even if you feel you need to disguise your exit with a juvenile parting shot.

Anyway you already advocated for, as you say, a "nepotic" system, by presuming to kick out people - spammers- whose behavior you feel disrupts the environment you're trying to curate for the benefit of people who are there to support it. There's absolutely no pretending you're above the enforcement of value system boundaries, it's only a question of how focused you want them to be, what stable values you want to optimize for in order to create a consistently attractive experience for your users.

I use this site far more than reddit, in large part due to the fact that it does encourage its users to identify and punish behavior (through flagging, disliking) that is out of step with the objectives of the site, as outlined in the usage guidelines which everyone implicitly agrees to (try to) follow when posting here. And yet in the public scope reddit is the clear 'winner' if raw traffic metrics are the score.

After being on the internet for 20 something years and Usenet for 10 before that, I've had quite enough experience with free for all dumpster fire communities to know that they are not the bastions of high-minded openness that people naively or foolishly believe them to be.

> The other commenters remark that you ban the entire space below the spammer, is a subjective judgment call they would make if they're the one paying the operate the servers and not wishing to use their time and energy to subsidize someone's desire to abuse the internet.

How are people lying on the internet and me having a discussion about it somehow me acting in bad faith? I've made it pretty clear in this thread that I don't care for lobsters, but I haven't made any arguments, at all, in bad faith. If anything, I'm trying to help the commenters by informing them of how spam networks work. So far, I've only been told that I'm wrong. So, whatever.

And yes, treating the nodes closer to the root with "favoritism" by not banning all their children and then banning "further away" nodes by banning their children (and parent?!) is almost a textbook definition of nepotism if nepotism extended to trees.

Being suspicious of dormant accounts, is not nepotism.

> informing them of how spam networks work

You haven't informed much to be honest. Whenever you're pressed for real bits of information, you just say you can't reveal the facts because they're secret and revealing them would help the spammers. So you're not doing much to reduce the uncertainty surrounding this topic which is critical to quality information. You're just generally claiming that the methods we're describing won't work while providing nothing but appeals to authority.

The information you've provided is the fact spammers try to obtain invitations and create aged accounts in order to look legitimate. This is already known and is the reason why you turn accounts and invitations into scarce resources to begin with. Spammers should not be able to just randomly create accounts, they should need to be invited. Whoever invites someone is vouching for them and responsible for their behavior. People should be inviting good people who they trust, not random spammers on the internet. You enforce this by also punishing the guys who invited bad people into the community.

I'm not claiming you're wrong either. I'm defending the rationale for the methods I've seen actual administrators employ to manage real communities. Those guys weren't up against spammers either, they faced far more serious adversaries.

All that means that I can’t spell it out for you, I don’t know how you can be here and not understand contractual obligations. You have to come to the conclusions yourself. All I can kinda do is act as an oracle and say “yeah that might work” or “that sounds like a false sense of security.” Everyone here thus far has had zero curiosity or willingness to debate things on actual merits despite me dropping a few big hints and would rather either attack me personally for being willing to debate something I can’t go into details about (but could probably talk what-ifs), or tell me it is impossible because of a magic tree and I must not know what I’m talking about.

So sure, this thread isn’t very informative, but that’s not entirely my fault. I’ve said as much as I’m free to say, the rest relies on other creative people who can read between the lines and ask the right questions.

At the end of the day, I’m sure some of the people that have joined the lobsters fraternity, er, site, have at some point worked at trust+safety in big corps and can actually help if asked. So I suspect they would actually be fine. I was just hoping to have an interesting discussion about it here and help people understand that a magic tree won’t help you in the long term.

It's not really "nepotic". The goal was to reduce the number of accounts you need to look at to some manageable number. Ideally you discover some root spammer account and ban the entire tree under the assumption they're all spam accounts. Then you ban the guy who was dumb enough to invite a spammer into the community since they clearly cannot be trusted. If you can't or won't ban them, you take away their invitation privileges.

If the problematic account is too high up in the tree, then they probably have way too many descendants which increases the false positive rate which means you can't conclude that they're bad based on the fact they're invitees of a bad account. Essentially, the spammers diluted themselves inside a huge number of maybe good users so that you can't blanket ban them without collateral damage. In that case you're better off banning the bad account individually and looking for new bad roots further down the tree.

A rationalization of nepotism doesn't make it not nepotism.

Let's look at the definition:

> the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs

Basically, if you are friends with the "right people" (aka, people closer to the root), no matter what they do, you are fine. You aren't getting banned for one of their actions. That is people in power (closer to the root) favoring friends (the people they invited), where "power" is the ability to behave with near impunity without severe repercussions.

Trees are rooted somewhere. The problem is reduced to finding the root account which invited all the spammers and banning that account and its entire invite tree and the guy who invited that root account for good measure. This reduces the number of accounts that must be evaluated, making it much more manageable. Any false positives can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Make accounts and invitations a limited resource. People will think twice before inviting someone who can get them banned. This reduces the problem to one of trust which is the foundation of real security.