MotivationEnergyAndCommunity

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The pillars of SoftSecurity

Motivation: The reasons someone has for editing a page
Energy: How much change a person commits, based on their motivation but amplified by technical competence
Community: Combining the energy of many people with compatible goals

Wikis work if the energy of the community vastly outweighs the energy of malfeasants; this is a pillar of SoftSecurity. Traditionally, however, we have assumed malfeasant motivations are unstable, either inherently (e.g. teenage vandals who quickly get bored) or as a result of community action (e.g. peace-making, et cetera). The new "threat" to wikis, spam, is simply one with a stable motivation: profit.

Initially, we relied on community to combat spam; however, the spam energy has grown to the point where this is destabilising SoftSecurity. By targeting energy alone, we risk starting an arms race - one we cannot ultimately win - because we are simply escalating our own side of the motivation-energy balance. Instead, we have to return to SoftSecurity's first pillar: ensuring malfeasant motivation is unstable.

People have suggested several ways of killing motivation; without global adoption on all wikis, these will never prevent spam, as there now exist 'bots who are blind to motivation-sapping. We must win the arms race and sap motivation, simultaneously. If an anti-energy weapon is deployed without an anti-motivation one then, like giving last-resort antibiotics to farmyard animals, we risk losing the weapon; if an anti-motivation weapon is deployed locally without an anti-energy one, it will only be partially effective.

Never think of motivation and energy as separate.

Definitions

Energy weapon: A tool used to blindly amplify the change one can effect with one's available energy. Thanks to widely-standardised wiki interfaces and markup, energy weapons often work on multiple sites, allowing one user to effect an immense volume of change across the internet.

Community weapon: Attacking opposing energy using an existing community (or, presumably, by calling down SlashDot), either positively to achieve SoftSecurity by uniting the community against an attacker (e.g. MeatBall to ZwikiClone when it was SlashDotted), or negatively as a TrollingTactic by dividing the community in your favour.

Anti-energy weapon: A defense against a known class of energy weapons or category of changes. Usually installed on a wiki to prevent changes, but can also be implemented as an off-site energy weapon (fighting fire with fire). Anti-energy weapons usually take a fair number of innocents along the way, unless carefully monitored, and thus require more energy to employ safely.

Anti-motivation weapon: A tool used to deter a category of malfeasant motivation. For example, a defense against link spammers is to tell Google not to increase the PageRank of arbitrary links on a wiki page. (Silent anti-motivation weapons are the least effective defense known to man, comparable perhaps to filling your house with fool's gold before leaving the door unlocked: just because you know there's no point stealing the stuff won't dissuade a thief from entering and messing up your house.)

Anti-Energy in 2007

Having won the energy war on MB — for now — I suggest that in 2007, we move on to brainstorming ways of sapping the motivation to spam wikis, to present the wiki community with a complete package. A little early I am, but here's some ideas:

Add a PoisonPill? to all new wikis: if the average number of links per page rises too high (or some other metric), add nofollow to all outgoing links. The aim is to negate the benefits of turning GhostTowns into spam havens once the local anti-energy weapons are defeated.
Add nofollow to all new URLs until they pass PeerReview, forcing spammers to completely obliterate a wiki's anti-energy weapons and its CommunitySolutions before any benefit is gained — and hopefully triggering the PoisonPill? in the process.
Set up a trusted network of non-spam domains (whitelist), with a reliable LongNow strategy for ensuring the network is never compromised or disabled.

Our minor victory in the spam wars has restored some of my personal energy. Lay on! -- ChrisPurcell

One amusing idea, is to replace the text in link spam. If enough sites did it, could create [Google Bomb]. Then anyone could retrieve a list of spam URLs by searching google with the replacement text. -- JaredWilliams

Indeed, that is what chongqed.org is all about. -- SunirShah

Ah they approach from other end, as it were, replacing the URLs.

Another is to use a bloom filter for publishing the whitelist of domains. I think the false positive nature is outweighed by the compactness of storing each domain in a few bytes. For instance, 10,000 domains could be stored in around 14KB, using 4 hash functions with a 1% false positive rate [1]. This means when parsing a post, can keep the filter in memory, and also reduces bandwidth publishing it. Other sites could simple retrieve and OR it with their own filter. (Assuming using the same hash & number of hashes) -- JaredWilliams

After some experimentation, I think my previous idea is probably not that workable, due to having to deal with sub-domains, sub-sub-domains etc. Another possibility is using bloom filter to record the entire set of external URLs on a whole wiki. This would allow to limit the HumanVerification to when new URLs have been added to an edit. Maybe reduce the hassle for refactoring pages. -- JaredWilliams

CategorySoftSecurity CategorySpam

MotivationEnergyAndCommunity

The pillars of SoftSecurity

Definitions

Anti-Energy in 2007

Discussion