[HN Gopher] Vampire Attack Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
Vampire Attack Twitter
Author : ProtonPower
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-04-17 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (geohot.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (geohot.github.io)
| anfogoat wrote:
| Dead on arrival on account having _blockchain_ appear in the HTML
| body.
|
| Ask anyone here, the blockchain/crypto part adds no value to
| this. Better ways to do this. There are banks and credit card
| companies and they would have zero issues being intermediaries in
| a scheme like this. They're neutral actors after all.
| disruptalot wrote:
| This almost reads like satire. Banks and credit card companies
| are exactly _not neutral_ , this is perhaps the only widely
| understood reason Blockchains and cryptocurrencies exist.
|
| Which bank or cc company is going to jump on the opportunity of
| platforming an alternative to twitter that almost definitely
| going to include content that the institutions already voted
| wouldn't be platformed.
|
| On the other hand, a fresh network of imaginary credits that
| perhaps might inherit some value requires no permission and can
| be setup by almost any entity.
| anfogoat wrote:
| > _This almost reads like satire. Banks and credit card
| companies are exactly not neutral, this is perhaps the only
| widely understood reason Blockchains and cryptocurrencies
| exist._
|
| I forgot to tout the banks' other well known qualities that
| perfectly demonstrate the vapidity of cryptocurrencies. Chief
| among them, their ability and willingness to facilitate high
| volume of transactions to a mass of semi-anonymous website
| users.
| [deleted]
| pluc wrote:
| > Step 1: Make a clone of Twitter on a blockchain
|
| and that's where you should stop reading
| pluc wrote:
| in case you're thinking "but a blockchain database would be a
| in interesting enough idea for data immutability!", then you
| should stop reading at the end of that sentence instead
|
| > Step 1: Make a clone of Twitter on a blockchain with a native
| currency of TWITCOIN.
| TillE wrote:
| Glaring technical issues aside, scraping and reproducing the
| entirety of Twitter is a pretty blatant copyright violation.
| djcannabiz wrote:
| Does twitter hold the copyright to tweets on its platform? I
| would assume the writers of the individual tweets do but I know
| nothing about this kind of stuff.
| asmr wrote:
| you only need to do it for enough time to eventually acquire
| twitter lol
| zyrtech wrote:
| Not sure - what goal do you want for that new Twitter? It would
| be set up as a money making machine, and the incentives don't
| seem to guarantee good content at all. If you want likes to make
| money, post pictures of cute cats. Another way to generate
| traffic to your posts is to make them outrageous and
| controversial. And there would be the people gaming the system by
| boosting their likes with fake audiences... Do we really need
| another social media cesspool? Would the money incentive make it
| the worst of the social media cesspools?
| revicon wrote:
| This is another example of the blockchain "solution" looking for
| a problem. There's nothing in the provided description that
| requires blockchain in the slightest.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In addition, if you replace all mentions of blockchain/crypto
| with their fiat equivalents you'd pretty quickly realize it's a
| flawed business model.
| asmr wrote:
| that's the entire point. this scheme would not be possible
| without some sort of technology to distribute value to users
| in an automated fashion. it would take a significant amount
| of capital to take over twitter if you wanted to implement
| such a scheme and deliver payouts in fiat. it would never
| work. this is about a hostile take over of a company in a
| short period of time with a relatively small capital
| investment.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > this scheme would not be possible without some sort of
| technology to distribute value to users in an automated
| fashion
|
| No, your plan of _giving away money_ and _giving away
| bandwidth_ and making money... through magic? is not going
| to fly.
| bobabob wrote:
| I fucking love geohot.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Most replies haven't caught on to the fact that he wrote this.
| I have to give it to him he sure is a special person that I
| very much grew to appreciate.
| [deleted]
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I've always liked the idea of silent client-side community
| scraping being the mechanism by which centralized services are
| dethroned.
|
| I don't see why a blockchain needs to be involved though. Can't
| we just work on mirroring Twitter onto mastodon?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Agreed, maybe something like a modern RSS with better support
| for private or paid content.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| Somewhere out there, a person really believes that the way to
| take twitter over is to make a random cryptocurrency and crypto-
| pay people to clone things through a browser extension
|
| Nevermind the insane electricity costs - how are you getting
| anyone to install the extension, when nobody values your fake
| coin?
| doopy1 wrote:
| Why would there be insane electricity costs? It doesn't have to
| be a POS blockchain. Also, it's not completely vaporware since
| the proposal includes backing the coin by $1B to kick it off.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I think you tried to write "POW blockchain," because POS is
| what the people spending the smaller insane amount hold up as
| a solution
|
| But even a POS blockchain is a giant waste of electricity on
| what amounts to a casino backed by illegal securities
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > Also, it's not completely vaporware since the proposal
| includes backing the coin by $1B to kick it off.
|
| Note: since the $1 is fictional, this remains 100% vaporware
| jayd16 wrote:
| How about paying content creators for exclusive content on your
| platform?
|
| Or just making the Twitter clone and open api and the extension
| so it's a seamless experience to follow anyone across any of the
| clones. Users can just scrape their own feeds as needed.
|
| Not enough hand wavy crypto magic in these ideas?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| This would not work. It misses why people use Twitter.
| steve76 wrote:
| zerop wrote:
| Did not get it fully, but will celebs also move to this clone to
| Tweet ?
| asmr wrote:
| they most likely won't. hence the need to have users scrape the
| TL. "content creators" refer to the smaller creators and micro
| celebrities with a decent twitter audience that would be likely
| to follow such a scheme
| tjpnz wrote:
| If they don't there'll be a queue out the door of fraudsters
| willing to take their place.
| menshiki wrote:
| celebs will do anything for shitcoins
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| The quality of the content I'm seeing recently on HN is
| definitely dropping.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| So I just create an unlimited number of unique tweets for the
| browser extension to detect and I get unlimited profit? You'd
| need a way to validate tweets, and a way to make sure that the
| validators are not rogue.
| throwawayHN378 wrote:
| notatoad wrote:
| So, if this is a demonstrated to be a thing that works, what's to
| stop Google, Facebook, MBS, Jeff Bezos, or any other billionare
| from simply doubling the money and doing the same thing.
|
| The various right-wing twitter alternatives are already there
| with polished platforms providing the equivalent functionality,
| why don't they pay Twitter's users to switch over?
| can16358p wrote:
| > If you provide an unseen tweet to the chain, you get TWITCOIN
|
| If will take mostly an hour, if not minutes, for someone to hook
| into Twitter API and mimic the browser extension's requests to
| mine TWITCOIN by constantly feeding new tweets. Scale this to
| many developers out there and you've just invented Proof-of-well,
| ...bandwidth? ...API access? ...processing power (aka Work)? that
| gives you coin in return.
|
| No one will use the extension, and because of the nature of it,
| it will be totally open to Sybil attacks anyway.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| I think that's kind of the point. The more people jump on this
| and the faster they are, the quicker you'll saturate the "tweet
| space." Once you have all historic data and a near real time
| replication of new data, you'll have a near perfect clone of
| the platform, while only few will have the knowledge and
| resources to compete in this data transfer business. All you're
| effectively doing is outsourcing a ton of dev time.
| can16358p wrote:
| For building the platform content, sure. But how can then the
| coin have that amount of value the article talks about?
| mytherin wrote:
| How do you verify that people are actually posting historic
| data instead of random garbage, without either (1) you
| yourself already having access to that historic data, or (2)
| looking up each tweet through a Twitter API to verify that it
| is actually real?
|
| If you can't verify that the tweets are real, what is the
| incentive for anyone to post real tweets, instead of just
| streaming random garbage into your system in exchange for
| coins?
| neodymiumphish wrote:
| Why wouldn't an extension be able to parse a link to each
| tweet? This seems like a trivial concern.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Parse the link and do what with it? Request Twitter API
| to see if that was a valid tweet? You'll get your keys
| banned within a few seconds for too many requests.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| Have any similar 'attacks' been pulled off in practice?
| asmr wrote:
| As briefly referenced in the article SushiSwap was able to
| steal roughly $1B liquidity from the Uniswap platform by taking
| their users and offering various incentives for them to move
| their funds
| latchkey wrote:
| It wasn't a 'steal'... it was an incentive to move, which was
| only the cost of a transaction. Liquidity providers are
| looking for the best rates and most amount of transaction
| fees, which far outweighed the cost of the transaction to
| move. The bar was very low. It was also brief and only lasted
| until the next thing came along...
| EGreg wrote:
| The problem with this idea is #2, people can post bogus tweets
| and how would you verify?
| freemint wrote:
| > Step 2
|
| Distributed Denial of Service of the Legal system by violating
| copyright distributedly.
| bscphil wrote:
| > 100k people would install this, and you'd scrape Twitter quite
| quickly.
|
| Yeah, uh, definitely.
|
| > Tons of creators would migrate for the FREE MONEY! ... Even
| lurkers will use TWITCHAIN front end because it doesn't have ads
| and fake "trending" topics.
|
| So the whole gimmick here is that supposedly you're going to get
| ordinary users to switch (i.e. install your extension that puts
| them on a duplicate site)? Actually, if you succeed at anything
| at all you're going to run into the issue that the people who
| want to use your site are, for the lack of a better word,
| _cringe_. Most people are like me and won 't use it exactly
| because of the sort of audience this kind of supposed "Twitter
| alternative" would draw. That's if they even care, and most
| people don't.
|
| (I realize describing people as "cringe" is judgmental sounding,
| but there's really not a better word here from the point of view
| of the people who I'd call "normies".)
| Kiro wrote:
| Only "normies" call stuff "cringe".
| bscphil wrote:
| I mean, yes, that's why I used it. I'm implicitly calling
| myself (and most people) "normies".
| TomSwirly wrote:
| Freak here. Blockchain stuff is super-cringe to almost
| everyone. "It's called blockchain because I block u."
| TillE wrote:
| Seriously, "cringe" (as a non-verb) has been incredibly
| widespread and lame for a couple years now. Mostly used by
| literal children, as far as I can tell.
| twic wrote:
| > Make a clone of Twitter [...] 6 months of engineering work for
| 5 good engineers.
|
| Sure.
| eklavya wrote:
| He should prove Twitter engineers incompetent by doing it.
|
| Hubris of some people ...
| thesandlord wrote:
| I mean he clearly didn't put much thought into this blog
| post, but from an engineering perspective I think the founder
| of Comma.ai could probably pull this off.
| asmr wrote:
| GNUSocial already exists
| neathack wrote:
| Let's assume just for a second that copyright violation isn't a
| problem, that 1B is enough to motivate enough people, that it's
| not overrun by bots, etc..
|
| What kind of blockchain would actually be able to deal with the
| expected transaction count? According to [1] Ethereum peaks out
| at 15 transactions per second, but [2] claims around 6.000 tweets
| per second on average.
|
| A difference of 2-3 orders of magnitude is not something a team
| of 5 engineers can simply solve in 6 months.
|
| [1]: https://blog.coinbase.com/scaling-ethereum-crypto-for-a-
| bill...
|
| [2]: https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/
| dmitriid wrote:
| Don't forget that tweets are not just tweets. In 2016 Twitter
| handled 3000 images per second (around 20GB per second) [1].
| The number undoubtedly increased since then. There's also
| video.
|
| Good luck storing those on blockchain :D
|
| [1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/4/20/how-twitter-
| handle...
| marban wrote:
| I created the very first Twitter client for Android, sold it to
| Idealab and was instrumental in a strategy to move our huge
| market share (IIRC it was ~40% of all clients) to a new,
| compatible network/app. As you can tell, that didn't work out and
| when Twitter got notice, it kicked off the new era of official
| vs. third-party apps.
|
| Good luck to anyone trying to do the same.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Back TWITCOIN with $1B in buy orders
|
| > 100k people would install this
|
| > Tons of creators would migrate for the FREE MONEY!
|
| I'm surprised that the author thinks these are all /easy/.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| If anyone had ever perused around the steem network (pre-Justin
| Sun takeover), you'd know what twitter would become if
| posting/liking/retweeting ever got monetized. It was a strange
| place. It might still be, but it seems to mostly be chinese
| posters now so I can't judge.
|
| On the flip side, monetizing social interactions is a great way
| to suck the vitality and soul out of them, which would fastly
| reduce twitter's impact on the real world. So if you don't like
| twitter this isn't the worst proposal.
| Raed667 wrote:
| this kind of manoeuvre will mostly get you Twitter rejects as
| early adopters, that's not the audience you want to bootstrap
| your new shiny social network
| bogwog wrote:
| Reminds me of "Voat"
|
| The initially harmless Reddit alternative that got overrun with
| nazis. I actually started working on a Voat app for Android
| back when it seemed like it actually had a chance to be
| successful... but when I connected it to the site and saw
| racist garbage polluting my shiny new app, I decided to abandon
| ship.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This plan ignores the part where it is going to get DMCA'd like
| crazy by people who do not want their tweets to have anything to
| do with the world's most deliberately-inefficient database, aka
| The Blockchain, never mind people who do not want someone
| stealing their work for profit.
|
| By cloning people's accounts without their permission and storing
| data in these "shadow accounts" (to borrow a phrase from
| Facebook's fuckups) it's probably going to run afoul of the GDPR,
| too. Data on the blockchain is immutable and undeletable, have
| fun complying with the GDPR's right to data erasure, for
| instance. Really _any_ "let's make $service but ON THE
| BLOCKCHAIN" proposal runs up against that one, _hard_.
|
| This plan also ignores the part where people who do not want to
| be part of your pyramid scheme would start sharing blocklists of
| people known to be running the browser extension. How long do you
| think it would take to make a bot that watches for people who
| have linked their Twitter accounts to Vampire Twitter accounts,
| and auto-block them for anyone who wants to subscribe to it?
| Autoblock extensions sprung up _very quickly_ after the hexagonal
| NFT icons popped up on Twitter.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Sounds great until Twitter revokes your API tokens.
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > If you provide an unseen tweet to the chain, you get TWITCOIN
|
| How does the chain "know" that the tweet you just provided is
| legitimate and not spam you just made up? Malicious actors can
| quickly exploit this to farm endless amounts of the coin as it is
| cheaper than searching for true tweets that haven't yet been
| seen.
|
| Furthermore if your objective is just to pay people to join your
| site then I don't see the need for a bullshitchain.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| I guess you could just provide the coin-site-or-whatever with
| the ID of the tweet instead of the content.
| torginus wrote:
| Umm, can't just Twitter disallow this in their EULA and delete
| all users who engage in this behavior? Besides, doesn't Twitter
| have some kind of intellectual ownership of tweets posted there,
| so a competitor can't just scrape the site and display the
| results as their own?
| flotzam wrote:
| TWITCHAIN engineers and users scraping Twitter could be
| anonymous
| withinboredom wrote:
| So, basically a blockchained-twitter-client with the hope of
| removing twitter at some point by swapping out the backing
| service? People will come for the free coins and nowhere to spend
| them, or will it cost coins to post or something?
|
| I don't get it. But I don't get the point of most blockchain bs.
| pixl97 wrote:
| "Blockchain, the internet, but worse"
| messe wrote:
| > People will come for the free coins and nowhere to spend
| them, or will it cost coins to post or something?
|
| That's where the 1B in buy-orders backing the coin is meant to
| come in, allowing people to exchange those coins for real
| currency.
| christopherwxyz wrote:
| The system isn't immune to spam attacks.
| latchkey wrote:
| Posting costs a variable amount of shitcoin (just like
| transaction fees on a blockchain).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| okay and why am I not paying them in real currency to begin
| with if all I want to do is steal twitter users by paying
| them to come to my platform
| ickelbawd wrote:
| Because you need a number-go-up coin to allow for rampant
| speculation and to build hype. Then everyone that joins
| thinks they're getting millions instead of nothing.
| withinboredom wrote:
| That's not a lot of money for the number of users twitter has
| and the number of tweets that exist.
| notwedtm wrote:
| What if it was $20 billion? Maybe the idea is feasible if
| you go bigger? Still less than half of the current strategy
| of a hostile takeover.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That billion dollars isn't going to last very long when folks
| start piping GPT-3 into the system for free coins
| nickysielicki wrote:
| Do the mechanics of the Skinner Box really matter? If GPT-3
| generates interesting popular content and posting it is
| profitable because it gets retweets and reactions, is it
| any worse than the content that comes from real people?
| geoffeg wrote:
| So instead of trying to limit the number of bots on this
| new social network, we'll encourage them!
| mobiletoss1337 wrote:
| GPT-3 isn't free either.
|
| But neither is the GPT-3 to verify if the GPT-3 is GPT-3.
| golemotron wrote:
| Lawsuit in 3, 2, 1..
| profmonocle wrote:
| Automatically copying tweets from Twitter to a competing service,
| without permission of either Twitter or the original tweet
| authors, sounds pretty dubious from a copyright standpoint.
| Especially since you'd also presumably be copying any images and
| videos attached to those tweets.
| moron4hire wrote:
| The NFT market has pretty handily proven that the crypto crowd
| doesn't care about copyright.
| samarama wrote:
| How so, NFTs are exactly about requiring to own a picture to
| use it and that nobody else can use it.
|
| Crypto is exactly about strengthening copyright.
| generalpf wrote:
| Uhhh how do you explain people minting tokens for art they
| don't own the rights to? And OpenSea turning off their
| reporting mechanism for this?
| px43 wrote:
| > OpenSea turning off their reporting mechanism
|
| What, this?
|
| https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-
| us/articles/4412092785043-W...
|
| Art gets stolen from Deviant Art etc every day, as it has
| been for decades. The NFT ecosystem makes it super easy
| for people to look at listed art and ensure that the
| proper artist is getting paid. If they fail to do their
| due diligence, then the NFT they paid for is worthless.
| The system seems to be working just fine.
|
| NFTs don't prevent theft of IP, nothing does. What it
| does do is prevent people from effectively profiting off
| IP theft.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The NFT ecosystem makes it super easy for people to
| look at listed art and ensure that the proper artist is
| getting paid.
|
| How so? Walk us through the steps that _ensure_ the
| proper artist is getting paid
|
| > If they fail to do their due diligence, then the NFT
| they paid for is worthless
|
| So:
|
| - the person who paid for stolen art was scammed out of
| their money
|
| - the original artists weren't paid
|
| - the scammer got the money
|
| I see, NFT is working as intended
|
| > What it does do is prevent people from effectively
| profiting off IP theft.
|
| How come people are profiting off IP theft on NFTs right
| now?
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > What it does do is prevent people from effectively
| profiting off IP theft.
|
| Totally wrong. Utterly wrong.
|
| Suppose Alice has an NFT of an image, whereas Bob has
| legal ownership of that image.
|
| Charlie makes a series of T-shirts with the image. Bob
| can sue Charlie and win. Alice has no rights, not even
| legal standing to sue.
|
| NFTs have zero legal value.
| krisoft wrote:
| > What it does do is prevent people from effectively
| profiting off IP theft.
|
| How so? Let's say you made an NFT of your art, how does
| that prevent someone else printing it on a t-shirt and
| selling it?
| thesandlord wrote:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/nft-art-sales-are-
| boom...
|
| A lot of the art is stolen. NFTs do nothing to prevent
| that.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Where did you get that idea?
| jsnell wrote:
| Ok, what do those numbers actually mean?
|
| Twitter has 200M "monetizable" DAUs. The poster suggests that
| spending $1B would move those users and those users traffic over.
| That implies that $5 in some shitcoin would be enough to make
| people switch to this app. That does not seem plausible at all.
| If acquiring and retaining users was that easy and cheap, there
| would be a lot more major social networks around.
|
| Twitter in 2014 had 500M tweets per day. How long a time period
| will the $1B be distributed over? The poster doesn't say, but
| let's assume a year. That'd be about 5 cents per tweet. No real
| users would care about that. If anything they'd be insulted. But
| botnets posting spam would have a field day with it. It would of
| course be botnets that the company would have no way to fight,
| since with this distributed scraping idea they'd struggle to
| collect any kind of abuse signals related to the actual
| tweets/likes/other monetizable events.
|
| This would never work.
| jrmg wrote:
| I think that in the mind of people that think this will work
| TWITCOIN is _obviously_ going 'to the moon', and will be worth
| 1000s of times what it was at conception, because that's what
| crypto does.
| syllablehq wrote:
| I've played with ideas like this. And in fact, we can do one
| better than a Vampire Attack. We can use what I nickname a
| Mitochondrial fork attack. With smart design about how we read
| and write to/from both the old chain and a new chain, we can make
| a live superset of Twitter. This has some interesting advantages.
|
| #MitochondrialFork.
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TIbvOjbaHbcwSqiEJzBBIcH1...
| aaron695 wrote:
| It's an amazing idea, but it needs to be fleshed out to see
| what's possible.
|
| Peoples extensions will just fake tweets. Or a single bot running
| through many IPs can just harvest them all.
|
| This can be solved.
|
| But Twitter is a incredibly complex database with a lot of the
| data and data structure unable to be seen.
|
| This would take years of engineering work and would assumably
| break copyright or maybe IP or patents.
|
| If it's enough to scare Twitter shareholders it might allow a cut
| price sale. But what a MVP would be is unknown off this article.
| fudged71 wrote:
| This post shows zero understanding of how social networks attract
| users and usage.
| thom wrote:
| I've always found it hard to know which bits of crypto are
| serious and which are just LARP.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Rewards for creators will cause people to post junk. Rewards for
| likers and retweeters will cause useless likes and bots to spam.
| Was he drunk when he said it'd totally work?
| chii wrote:
| it sounds to me he posted the idea knowing the vulnerabilities,
| so that he could then do the bot exploit and earn free money.
| Or he was sarcastic. can't really tell...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Copyright law prohibits vampire attacks on creative works.
| fortran77 wrote:
| You'll get a site with a lot of Crypto fans playing with it, but
| daily twitter users (like myself) wouldn't every consider
| switching over to it.
| coding123 wrote:
| Why would people migrate to alt-Twitter just because
| boobmachine74 has the latest Elon tweet and boi9 has his previous
| 3 etc...
| harel wrote:
| And the tweets and media lives on the block chain? So to use
| twitter I need to download tweeter? Sync my local copy? Or would
| it be "somewhere" linked to from the contract? Potentially wiped
| out in the future?
| the_gipsy wrote:
| If there was ANY value in those shitcoins then it would be
| flooded by botnets.
| intuitionist wrote:
| The big issue here is that it's not clear that you need a
| blockchain for any of it. Economically you're launching a Twitter
| clone with the intention of spending $1B on customer and content
| acquisition. The rest is details of how that's budgeted.
|
| The smaller problem is in those details--the scheme described is
| highly vulnerable to attacks like the following: I create a
| network of private bot accounts who post high-frequency generated
| content, and a follower account who follows them all and installs
| the browser extension. Whenever I want I can print money (well,
| Twitcoin) by uploading these fake hornet tweets to the new
| platform. I can think of ways to defeat this specific attack
| relatively easily, but I'm not sure it's easy to defeat all such
| attacks.
| ajross wrote:
| Seems like you need the blockchain there to guarantee that your
| outrageous copyright violation becomes unpunishable.
|
| Basically this strategy is "steal Twitter and fund the effort
| with another crypto Ponzi".
| Nextgrid wrote:
| If you're paying users to scrape, how do you ensure that they
| are indeed scraping and not just making up spam? You've got a
| catch-22 here - you need people to scrape but at the same time
| you need an authoritative source of the scraped data to ensure
| people aren't cheating, but then if you've got that source then
| you don't need those people to begin with.
|
| Interaction with the real-world (outside the blockchain) is
| where the vast majority of these bullshitchain projects fall
| apart.
| krisoft wrote:
| > If you're paying users to scrape, how do you ensure that
| they are indeed scraping and not just making up spam?
|
| Ironically the fact that they are paying 10x for original
| "tweets" posted through their interface makes it so that
| nobody who can think would try fake scraping. You are 10x
| better of just blasting your crap directly at their interface
| as "original" "content". :)
| flotzam wrote:
| > how do you ensure that they are indeed scraping and not
| just making up spam?
|
| For TLS 1.1 (and supposedly "TLS 1.2+" since
| https://github.com/tlsnotary/PageSigner/commit/4e12573):
| https://tlsnotary.org/pagesigner
|
| For TLS 1.3 there's also TLS-N from
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/578.pdf but it requires a
| cooperating server:
|
| "TLS-N generates non-interactive proofs about the content of
| a TLS session that can be efficiently verified by third
| parties and blockchain based smart contracts. As such, TLS-N
| increases the accountability for content provided on the web
| and enables a practical and decentralized blockchain oracle
| for web content. TLS-N is compatible with TLS 1.3 and adds a
| minor overhead to a typical TLS session. When a proof is
| generated, parts of the TLS session (e.g., passwords,
| cookies) can be hidden for privacy reasons, while the
| remaining content can be verified."
| jmull wrote:
| You could bypass this kind of verification by routing your
| spam through Twitter. Send spam to twitter, scrape spam
| from Twitter for twitcoin.
| lawl wrote:
| If your plan is to scrape _all_ of twitter, the question
| is if that matters among the years of existing spam.
|
| Probably not. If it does start to matter it should start
| becoming an issue for twitter too and they'd probably
| have to deal with it.
| croes wrote:
| >The big issue here is that it's not clear that you need a
| blockchain for any of it.
|
| Doesn't the same apply to many blockchain applications ?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Yes.
| jmull wrote:
| I think blockchain is actually central to the scheme. Like
| this:
|
| The ostensible scheme can't possibly actually work (it requires
| Twitter to not do anything to stop it -- of course, Twitter
| would work to stop it to the extent it ever actually threatens
| them).
|
| What can work, though, is the _narrative_ of the scheme. What
| you need is a mechanism to incentivize people to promote the
| narrative of the scheme.
|
| That's where the crypto comes in. It's a viral mechanism to
| franchise selling the scheme. Anyone can buy in, promote the
| narrative, and get others to buy in. It doesn't really matter
| how many of the people have a deep belief in the original
| narrative or not. Get people's attention, get them to believe
| there is more money in it if they put in a little money, and
| once the money starts moving around, there will be
| opportunities to grab some, or perhaps a lot of it.
| notatoad wrote:
| if you're relying on the narrative, you're going to run into
| the same problem as any of the other twitter clones that have
| tried to siphon away twitter's audience by targeting a
| specific demographic (e.g. parler) - you end up with only
| that group, and the prolific posters who bring the most value
| to the platform do so because they're chasing the broad
| audience that twitter provides.
|
| the crypto bros don't want to perform for an audience that's
| only other crypto bros, they want to reach the people who
| aren't part of their circle, and twitter provides that. same
| for the right-wingers - if they can't reach the suburban wine
| moms, there's no point in posting.
| Tao331 wrote:
| > It's a viral mechanism to franchise selling the scheme.
| Anyone can buy in, promote the narrative, and get others to
| buy in.
|
| This is a great definition of cryptocurrency. It nicely
| frames how they become pyramidal.
| pc86 wrote:
| > _The big issue here is that it's not clear that you need a
| blockchain for any of it._
|
| This could be said about 99.9% of all blockchain products and
| companies.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Blockchain has extremely narrow potential in a decentralized
| social network. Blockchain was designed to prevent double-
| spending. In a social network, the only analagous purpose might
| be to reserve a name, or to locate the servers (bypass DNS).
|
| It would be ridiculous to use a blockchain to authenticate
| posts, upvotes, friend connections, etc, since these should all
| be done with digital signatures alone
| TomSwirly wrote:
| That's just one of the big issues.
|
| Another is that Twitter is 6000 transactions per second,
| whereas Ethereum only manages about 15tps - 1/400th as much -
| and BTC 7tps.
| drdrey wrote:
| The gist of the idea is that:
|
| - if you provide an essentially identical service
|
| - you make it seamless to switch
|
| - and you incentivize users to switch
|
| Then you may be able to aggressively siphon users from your
| target.
|
| OP's example is using a blockchain as the distribution
| mechanism for the incentives.
| daveed wrote:
| > you incentivize users to switch
|
| Lot of startups do this but have pretty high CaC. In the
| Sushi/Uniswap case, users were already crypto-native. In the
| twitter case, the majority of users are not. There's just
| going to be a bigger barrier than in the former case. Sure, I
| think if you spend money some people will switch, but it's
| much less clear to me how much money you'd need.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Perhaps a way to migrate this is to only allow tweets < a
| certain creation date. Would this make TWITCOIN have a hard
| limit similar to how Bitcoin has a Hard limit ?
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| That's going to be 0.000000032 Twitcoin. If you want a a coin
| to succeed you need to make the amount people pay easier to
| fathom. This goes especially for people that come from a fiat
| world.
| asmr wrote:
| i think a better way is to forgo the browser extension and
| simply pull a users timeline via the twitter API. Only grab
| tweets within the past 30mins to an hour (this interval is
| arbitrary but can most likely be optimized) as to prevent
| spam
| zemnmez wrote:
| "With TLS verification captured by the extension it's easy to
| confirm that any scraped data is authentic" hahaha yeah let me
| know what API you can use for that
| emerged wrote:
| Blockchain feels like an SV where all the devs are junior.
| menshiki wrote:
| Hotz has a lot of great ideas (and some not-so-great ideas). This
| can't be a serious one and I'm sure he's just trolling as per
| usual.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > Create a browser extension that watches while someone browses
| Twitter, and puts any tweets they see on the TWITCHAIN. If you
| provide an unseen tweet to the chain, you get TWITCOIN. 100k
| people would install this, and you'd scrape Twitter quite
| quickly.
|
| I can't tell if the author is serious or not. This seems like the
| most roundabout (and optimistic) way to solve this problem
| possible.
|
| But more generally, Twitter is tweets, and tweets are written by
| people, and lots of folks think the promise of "free money" is a
| bad one. Your weird uncle switching does little to help this
| plan, you need Matt Levine and Popehat and all the other prolific
| posters to move. This plan, at its core, tries to attack Twitter
| the wrong way. It tries to replace the utility of Twitter
| (reading tweets by interesting people) with financial incentive.
|
| Honestly a great way to waste a billion dollars.
| Applejinx wrote:
| As soon as I saw the word 'blockchain'... heh :)
|
| 'it would totally work!'... uh-huh. Suuuure.
| forty wrote:
| Sorry if I missed something obvious, but it's not 100% clear if
| this is a satire or not?
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Twitter would get those extensions taken down immediately.
| latchkey wrote:
| I've installed a few extensions directly from git. Certainly
| another barrier, but not the worst. Can also consider that
| something like FB Purity hasn't been taken down.
| Taek wrote:
| Isn't this basically what YouTube did to the music industry?
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