Habryka's Shortform Feed

habryka

This is a special post for quick takes by habryka. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

In an attempt to get myself to write more here is my own shortform feed. Ideally I would write something daily, but we will see how it goes.

This is a special post for quick takes by habryka. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

In an attempt to get myself to write more here is my own shortform feed. Ideally I would write something daily, but we will see how it goes.

Is it OK for LW admins to look at DM metadata for spam prevention reasons?

Sometimes new users show up and spam a bunch of other users in DMs (in particular high-profile users). We can't limit DM usage to only users with activity on the site, because many valuable DMs get sent by people who don't want to post publicly. We have some basic rate limits for DMs, but of course those can't capture many forms of harassment or spam.

Right now, admins can only see how many DMs users have sent, and not who users have messaged, without making a whole manual database query, which we have a policy of not doing unless we have a high level of suspicion of malicious behavior. However, I feel like it would be quite useful for identifying who is doing spammy things if we could also see who users have sent DMs to, but of course, this might feel bad from a privacy perspective to people.

So I am curious about what others think. Should admins be able to look at DM metadata to help us identify who is abusing the DM system? Or should we stick to aggregate statistics like we do right now? (React or vote "agree" if you think we should use DM metadata, and react or vote "disagree" if you think we should not use DM metadata).

The reason I suggest making it filter-in is because it seems to me that it's easier to make a meaningful filter that accurately detects a lot of sensitive stuff than a filter that accurately detects spam, because "spam" is kind of open-ended. Or I guess in practice spam tends to be porn bots and crypto scams? (Even on LessWrong?!) But e.g. truly sensitive talk seems disproportionately likely to involve cryptography and/or sexuality, so trying to filter for porn bots and crypto scams seems relatively likely to have reveal sensitive stuff.

The filter-in vs fi... (read more)

2mako yass2y

Okay if send rate gives you a reason to think it's spam. Presumably you can set up a system that lets you invade the messages of new accounts sending large numbers of messages that doesn't require you to cross the bright line of doing raw queries.

3habryka2y

Yeah, I've been thinking of setting up something like this.

Habryka's Shortform Feed

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Habryka's Shortform Feed

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