Users should protect themselves from this. With the expectation that they will, there will be tons of tools available and this scenario will be a nonstarter.
Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.
Do you really think the average non-technical user will have a clue as to what to do about this hypothetical problem? I don't think that's a credible take.
Consider that this situation isn't like email spam filtering. I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone. And if Twitter is not allowed to filter spam, that's it: no spam filtering for Twitter users.
> I can't run a spam filter on the Twitter app on my phone
That's nothing fundamentally preventing this. It's Twitter themselves who've decided not to allow you to do this. Were their app more open to extension you would be able to download and configure a spam filter of your choosing.
This is it exactly: Apply the same rules that they have today for content moderation, but allow users to opt in to that filtering. Even if they apply it by default, that’s probably enough of an fig lead to get by this ruling.
They can provide a first-party/recommended filter, but like with default browsers, search engines, or other preferences, the app should present the user with the choice in clear terms rather than silently applying the default. Defaults are powerful, so having the app apply its default first-party filter and hide away the option to change it in some menu would be approximately equivalent to changing nothing but forcing Twitter to act as a datastore/api for competing microblogging platforms.
Yes for the end user that will be the main difference. From the curation of the training data to the model itself a number of things have been put together that make the generations substantially more aesthetically pleasing imho
Exactly. The use of ad spend to talk about Russian influence in 2016 is negligent in focusing on a metric of convenience. I suspect the real channels through which they exert influence don't lend themselves to easy quantification.
This is a fair point under some ways of looking at the problem. It could be that advertising is just nasty no matter how it is implemented, and thus any system that uses advertising will be tainted. I'm sympathetic to that analysis and am constantly trying to flesh it out.
With that said, what jonathansampson is proposing mitigates at least one harm of advertising: ubiquitous tracking which violates privacy.
They're trying to replace ads with ads that don't require tracking by third parties.
There's actually a whole area of research on this that's pretty fascinating called privacy preserving advertising.
There are a number of proposed systems under the rubric of "privacy preserving advertising systems" and they are very different than what ad-revenue driven companies are doing today and similar to what he is proposing above.
I'm not aware of any evidence that shows that directly. But there a good number of surveys that show that people don't want advertising to target them based on their interests.
"Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages - between 73% and 86% - say they would not want such advertising. Even among young adults, whom advertisers often portray as caring little about information privacy, more than half (55%) of 18-24 years-old do not want tailored advertising. And contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults."
References all came from a paper by Jonathan Mayer. Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology which I'd heartily recommend to anyone who is interested enough to be this deep into the comments (https://jonathanmayer.org/publications/trackingsurvey12.pdf)
It's worth saying that at a number of firms that 2% goes into the pockets of the partners.
One thing to like about a16z (full disclosure, I worked there over the summer), imho, is that by using this fee to scale their organization to help portfolio companies, they are far less out of alignment with LPs than most firms who have success with a smaller fund and go on to raise a larger one.
The old algorithm of do ok with a small fund, raise a huge one and live off the management fee is under threat -- 5x or die.
Decentralized defenses against bots will be far more effective than the central planning of information ecosystems we have today. Just watch.