I accidentally built a nudity/porn platform

https://elazzabi.com/2020/08/11/the-day-i-accidentally-built-a-nudity-porn-platform/

by elazzabi_ • 6 years ago

482 338 6 years ago

joosters• 6 years ago

I later discovered that Instagram banned all mylink.fyi links from the platform. A customer also confirmed to me via email that Snapchat started blocking links. Heh, I’m banned by Instagram and Snapchat! [...] If you’re interested in acquiring the domain name, and/or the app, let’s talk.

That domain name must have a negative value now?

dijit• 6 years ago

Thinking about it; maybe not.

If you're one of those loud folks who dislike instagram/facebook (like me) then this is a nice way to ensure your content and data does not end up on the platform.

Of course, they're only enforcing it themselves, so it's unlikely to be permanent. :(

sneak• 6 years ago

Guilt by association is illegal in most contexts, but apparently is fine for the censors at Instagram.

_Microft• 6 years ago

You're pointing out a problem there. The tools and processes around moderation (censorship might be too strong a word) are pretty lacking.

Let me consider with two cases.

For one the issue of a company making the rules, e.g. Facebook imposing prudery worldwide, even in places where things like a bare breast are not considered as such (yet?!). Why should someone half a world away physically and maybe even further morally have a say in what people can or cannot post in e.g. Europe?

Another is bans/ignores/mutes by users, I would say. The tools for these are absolutely lacking. Mutes or bans are usually permanent and there is no way to do anything about it. It's like solving every problem with a sledgehammer. (If I wanted to, I could go and mute or ban anyone I like to on e.g. Twitter and they would have absolutely no means to explain themselves, appeal the decision or have any expectation that their sentence is going to be over one day.)

Maybe social media should be rather treated like public infrastructure and should have to provide services too all while leaving any moderation problems to other entities (and should just have to execute their decisions instead of both deciding and executing).

/rant

jokethrowaway• 6 years ago

It's a private platform, so yes, it's absolutely fine.

When you choose to use Instagram you buy into their censorship

yelsom• 6 years ago

I wonder how one can know the history of a domain name before buying it. Imagine making a new website and realizing that your domain name is banned from all social networks!

gvb• 6 years ago

There are various online blacklist check tools. Examples:

email: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

DNS blacklists: https://www.ultratools.com/tools/spamDBLookup

fabiandesimone• 6 years ago

For Facebook use Web of Trust. That's what they use to check if a domain has a good rating. If it doesn't you won't be able to share or run ads.

Jenk• 6 years ago

A market platform I recently worked on allowed users (free sign up) to create multiple wishlists and then send those wishlists to arbitrary email addresses. The user could set a custom title, limited to 100 characters or so.

We soon discovered a similar problem to OPs - bot accounts (mostly @qq.com addresses) were registering by the hundreds per day to create wishlists and then send those wishlists to other @qq.com addresses. They were setting the titles to arbitrary code blocks.

I found it fascinating, if terribly inefficient. Some colleagues and I were speculating on the purpose, perhaps someone experimenting some kind of laundered botnet control path?

We tried all kinds of measures to prevent it but ultimately we blocked all @qq.com accounts and eventually disabled the wishlist feature altogether as it had such little real usage.

coldpie2• 6 years ago

We allow users to sign up for a free trial for our product, you have to put in your name & email address. After the trial expires, we send an email that says "Hey So-and-so, your trial ran out, click here to give us money, etc." Some enterprising spammers filled in the name field with spam URLs and the email field with victims' email addresses, in order to spam them. So the victim would get "Hey hxxp://buyfreerolex.com/, your trial ran out..." spam emails, from our email server. Obviously we've fixed it since, but it's absolutely wild the length spammers will go to.

anyzen• 6 years ago

Ha, thank you! That explains it... I've had several signups via Tor to my service, none of them confirmed, every few days... I guess they were checking if they can somehow abuse the mails.

throwaway744678• 6 years ago

Perhaps a bug in some spamming script, mistaken your sign-up form for a blog comment form?

slyall• 6 years ago

We had somebody signing up to a website with Russian email addresses. What they did though was set the the Personal name to something like the following in Russian:

"Click here to see a translation http://whatever.r/?username"

So when we sent out the email to verify the signup the receiver saw some English text they couldn't read and the above instructions in Russian telling them to click on the link.

This was a Magento site so I assume it was a standard bot.

Santosh83• 6 years ago

Why do social media sites treat "links to X" as directly posting X on their site? Surely the former is not against their terms of service? (Here am talking about legal adult content obviously)...

These overarching powers to censor anything for any reason is disturbing to say the least.

fsflover3• 6 years ago

That's why we have Mastodon now, where everyone can choose what to censor themselves.

hkt• 6 years ago

Which inevitably means an environment normal people hate - because they end up with some of the quirkier denizens of the internet on their global timelines if they use a public instance.

t0astbread• 6 years ago

I suppose if most of the links posted for a site are spam the social media giants would rather just ban the site entirely than do "micro-management" for the site.

avian2• 6 years ago

Linktree, the service the author aimed to replicate had similar problems according to Wikipedia [1].

In 2018, Instagram banned the site due to "spam," although it was lifted and Instagram issued an apology.
Rumors circulate that Instagram will issue another ban.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linktree

bichiliad• 6 years ago

I wonder if using Instagram Login has helped them filter out spam accounts.

pjc50• 6 years ago

Yup. If you build a communications platform, it will be used for spam. If you build a hosting platform, it will be used for porn. If you build a linking platform, it will be used to spam links for porn.

Anything else requires a constant uphill battle of content filtering and deletion. You could call it censorship, but it's a necessary reality.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

Anything else requires a constant uphill battle of content filtering and deletion. You could call it censorship, but it's a necessary reality.

Depends on how you structure it. If they're paying to list, then it makes things a lot easier.

ghaff5• 6 years ago

I suspect that this is one reason you're seeing virtual conferences that are charging $50 or whatever. Yeah, it's a few dollars to offset costs. But it also keeps out the "riff-raff" so to speak.

Charging nominal fees are going to keep out the most casual users but I'm not sure it's a bad idea.

therealmarv• 6 years ago

It's all a joke and it is censorship. On one hand FB is hiding behind freedom of speech but on the other hand I cannot send specific form of links even in private via messenger.

Tade0• 6 years ago

Then again what else can FB or other such platform do?

Porn and spam always take over eventually, because they're consumed by, ahem, highly motivated individuals.

unnouinceput8• 6 years ago

use tinyurl

deeg2• 6 years ago

I have my own hobby side-project that allows user-generated content. Do you have some tips for minimizing the ways it could be used by spammers/porn?

For example, my project is a PWA which (I assume) makes it harder for spammers to use because there are fewer direct links that could be used for spam.

What about using verified emails? Google's captcha (or similar)?

madeofpalk2• 6 years ago

Moderate it.

Have actual (paid) humans review the content that users upload.

ClikeX3• 6 years ago

At some point you just have to cave and build a porn site.

unnouinceput8• 6 years ago

problem is not porn per se, problem is illegal porn, that's what I suppose OP encountered on its app's links

pbhjpbhj4• 6 years ago

Which, I expect, will be used for [unlawful] extreme porn in one direction and non-porn copyright infringement in the other direction.

Mind you all roads built get used for crime. There's a point at which mitigations for advise of their services become unreasonable to expect of a company.

munificent5• 6 years ago

Waiting for the follow up article, "The day I accidentally built an open source developmennt platform."

"I made a great fast, free porn hosting site. But then these nerds showed up and started uploading their Git repos onto it."

fangorn• 6 years ago

Was it legal "to take a closer look and see the links they are sharing"?

1f60c• 6 years ago

Why do you think it could be illegal?

The ToS also includes this:

You represent and warrant that: […] the Content will not or could not be reasonably considered to be obscene, inappropriate, defamatory, disparaging, indecent, seditious, offensive, pornographic, threatening, abusive, liable to incite racial hatred, discriminatory, blasphemous, in breach of confidence or in breach of privacy; […]

For which they obviously need to look at the data.

majewsky2• 6 years ago

That doesn't imply they are looking at the data during regular operation. That just means that the user is liable for breach of contract if they post noncompliant links. The first point in time where the admin really has to look at the data would be during the discovery phase of the corresponding lawsuit between operator and customer.

INTPenis• 6 years ago

I have no idea but it should be because that's basic troubleshooting. I once discovered a pedophile network by troubleshooting their server by looking at its traffic.

dTal• 6 years ago

Illegal not to, in this day and age. Websites are held responsible for user-generated content.

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

Absolutely. Nicer if you disclose it in your terms of service but data inspection should be considered the norm unless you explicitly agree otherwise. And even then, if it isn't encrypted with a key that only you control then you should still assume your comms are being read.

krisgenre• 6 years ago

Off topic, I wonder how people publicly admit they released a side project while working a full time job? AFAIK no company accepts this.

emosenkis• 6 years ago

Some companies don't prohibit side projects... My current employer typically allows them if not related to the company's areas of business.

hrudham• 6 years ago

I avoid this with contract work and freelancing.

I've also worked at some start-ups that don't put this into their contract (or remove it when asked) so as not to scare the talent away.

I think you're right for the larger corporates though. It's often not enforced, but you run the risk of them claiming that it was "done on their time"-style issues later if its successful.

mvanbaak• 6 years ago

As long as I'm not releasing something that is a direct competitor for my job, it's all fine. Main thing I learned is that being open about it at work takes away the fear and worries.

rvnx• 6 years ago

As long as it's not very successful and not taking your time it's not an issue.

timgl• 6 years ago

At PostHog we explicitly allow (paid) side gigs [0], with the basic warning that the day job comes first.

[0] https://posthog.com/handbook/people/side-gigs

mikro2nd• 6 years ago

In my local jurisdiction it would be illegal for an employer to have any say in what you do outside work hours. They might try some restrictions via their employment contract, but in general it would have no legal effect whatsoever.

tomschwiha3• 6 years ago

In Germany you have to tell your boss, but it can't be denied if within worktime limits (48h / w)

AMerrit• 6 years ago

It's pretty commonly allowed in my experience. Always with a "as long as you aren't competing with us" disclaimer.

ClikeX3• 6 years ago

My employer would only complain if the side-project would reasonably make me less efficient within my contracted hours. So if I were doing 40h (5 full workdays here) every week and I'd be putting in 40h/w as well.

The other gotcha is that side-projects shouldn't be in any way competing directly with my employer. If you work in product-development that is pretty easy to isolate. Agencies on the other hand could basically make anything for a client. So that's a bit tricker.

No idea what of my contractual limitations are actually enforceable, though. And they've never complained about side-projects because my own projects aren't anywhere near something they would accept as a client.

hansvm• 6 years ago

It depends a bit on the jurisdiction (I'm not really sure if laws or local culture came first, but they tend to go hand-in-hand for this issue).

E.g., in CA there are only a few whitelisted situations where your employer could own your side project, and in all other cases it belongs to you. As a matter of practice, most companies in the area allow side projects, and many "require" that you ask permission -- since they'll just rubber stamp approval onto whatever you're doing anyway, that typically works out in your favor; now you have written proof that your employer doesn't want to exercise any potential claims to your project even if it nominally seems to infringe on their business.

dspillett• 6 years ago

As long as you are not using company resources, including company time, or producing something that competes with the company (effectively using inside knowledge, another company resource), in most legal jurisdictions they can't stop you and any contract clause that tries is not legally enforceable.

Of course that doesn't mean many don't try block such things…

mrweasel• 6 years ago

It doesn’t really matter if they accept it or not, you’re doing it on your own time. The US may be different, but here you employeer have zero say in what you do in your spare time. Don’t use company issued equipment or software licenses, that changes thing, and may count as misuse of company property and that can get you fired.

Most companies I’ve worked for have a provision that states they can buy my projects, by compensating me for my work.

epaga• 6 years ago

"Take a competitor product, remove all features you don’t need, and make it crazy fast."

Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to happen by following this formula. So many good ideas out there could be made so much better by reducing them to their essentials, but making them elegant and "crazy fast".

UncleMeat• 6 years ago

But what are the features you don’t need? That is not the same set for all users.

avian2• 6 years ago

A small fraction of users of a big service is often enough to run a small, non-VC funded business.

Sir_Substance• 6 years ago

Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic.

That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.

stevoski2• 6 years ago

Worked for me.

That sums up so perfectly what I did with a B2B SaaS product of mine. I never found words so perfectly as this quote does to describe what I was aiming to do.

elazzabi_2• 6 years ago

Hey, OP here. I'm glad it resonated with you!

I would love to take a look at your B2B project for inspiration if that's possible :)

moonbug2• 6 years ago

seems like he took out a few too many features..

treeman79• 6 years ago

Been forced to use Jira instead of pivotal tracker.

Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features.

Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a massive pain. Sometimes things just won’t work.

So I refuse to use it for stories beyond one mega story.

nkrisc• 6 years ago

One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.

snarf21• 6 years ago

Exactly, Jira is garbage and only PjMs seem to like it. A spreadsheet is a better tool for actually tracking work.

growlist• 6 years ago

I got so annoyed when someone that I shared JIRA admin credentials with changed the front page to a Kanban board. All I wanted was bloody issue tracking! KISS.

marcusjt• 6 years ago

How interesting, my experience is completely different - I'm a UX Designer working in a squad and I/we find JIRA super easy to use, allows you to customise ticket types pretty much to our heart's content (including removing stuff you don't need), ditto customising the board and other features, allows us to track changes, comment on tickets, and works reliably. Almost nothing else allows us to do the same. Admittedly Jira has been overhauled recently and is much better than it was, plus some new features have been added. Oh, and there's an app which allows me to do most of what I need to do on my phone super quickly, partially thanks to the notifications.

oostevo• 6 years ago

I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides.

https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

ip26• 6 years ago

Is that really "innovation"? I thought that was pretty darn standard "business".

tachyonbeam3• 6 years ago

YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google.

That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?

munificent5• 6 years ago

It's recipe for making a loved product, but necessarily a recipe for making a profitable business.

Shared4042• 6 years ago

I think you dropped a 'not'.

Softcadbury• 6 years ago

Shameless plug! Following this formula, I made an app to have fast access to football results: https://footballpeek.com/

elric3• 6 years ago

One of the hidden consequences of the insane censorship that's being pushed by social media companies.

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

No, it's a consequence of not being on top of abuse on your platform. And because those big social media platforms are working really hard to avoid going down through no particular fault of their own they shut stuff like this down at the first sight of trouble.

HN does the same with spam, which is the only reason we can have this conversation in the first place. I take it that you do not consider that censorship?

elric3• 6 years ago

If big platforms weren't so obsessed with trying to censor porn, there would be no need for people to hijack other platforms simply so they could create links to share porn. There's this bizarre obsession with "protecting" people from nudity (especially female nipples). Advertisers will stay away from your platform if there's nudity. Credit card companies will refuse to process your payments (or charge much, much steeper fees). And for what? So people can pretend that naked bodies don't exist? That sex isn't a thing? Seems odd to me. If I want to private message my friends dirty pictures, who is FB (or whatever platform) to tell me I can't?

As for spam, it's a shame that after 20+ years of the stuff, we still don't have a good answer for it. Some subset of people is spending money on whatever spammers are advertising, or they wouldn't be doing it.

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

- anything that allows file upload -> porn / warez / movies / any form of copyright violation you care to come up with.

- anything that allows anonymous file upload -> childporn + all of the above.

- anything that allows communications -> spam, harassment, bots

- anything that measures something -> destruction of that something (for instance, google, the links between pages)

- any platform where the creator did not think long and hard about how it might be abused -> all of the abuse that wasn't dealt with beforehand.

- anything that isn't secured -> all of the above.

Going through a risk analysis exercise and detecting the abuse potential of whatever you are trying to build prior to launching it can go a long way towards ensuring that doesn't happen. Reacting very swiftly to any 'off label' uses for what you've built and shutting down categorically any form of abuse and you might even keep it alive. React too slow and before you know it your real users are drowned out by the trash.

It's sad, but that's the state of affairs on the web as we have it today.

dustingetz• 6 years ago

"Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...

ThreeFx• 6 years ago

The measure law is also known as Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

est2• 6 years ago

github is fairly open and it's not used for porn, yet.

moonbug2• 6 years ago

and from that one can infer....

barbecue_sauce• 6 years ago

As far as you know...

arsome• 6 years ago

It's definitely used for pirated stuff.

Put any technical book title into google with site:github.com in it and click the first PDF that shows up.

esgwpl• 6 years ago

Probably because you have to be somewhat familiar with git to be able to upload stuff to it, there is a barrier of entry.

eru• 6 years ago

The logic of the parent comment would suggest that this hints at a fairly large amount of work going on behind the scenes to keep it that way.

For fun, see https://github.com/topics/pornography

tyingq• 6 years ago

I would guess part of it is that you can't control the mime type of uploaded files.

praptak2• 6 years ago

There was a project called "Dick ML" though, which I believe was used by some idiots to spam Zed Shaw with invitations.

mesaframe• 6 years ago

Well, there are a lots of porn related projects. One of them being Deepfake

Cthulhu_2• 6 years ago

I'm sure their community team has to deal with a LOT of shit on a daily basis, even after automated checks and filtering.

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

I've stumbled upon some, FWIW–I think I was searching for file carvers or something like that.

newsbinator• 6 years ago

I used to work with a person who used these principles to say no to building anything at all.

praptak2• 6 years ago

There was an article on HN about Disney internet apps. Disney management consider "safe for children" to be a critical part of their brand. Their stance was very clear: no communication between users under any circumstances, ever.

metaphor• 6 years ago

It's sad, but that's the state of affairs on the web as we have it today.

Hasn't this been the meta since ever since?

Imagining you'd know all about that with camarades. It was my first exposure to web streaming as a teen way back in the day. Initially, it didn't strike me as a porn platform, but it didn't take long before it felt that way.

floatingatoll3• 6 years ago

At the beginning there were exponentially fewer people and syndicates, so there was much less total volume of abuse.

cptskippy• 6 years ago

NetMeeting was filled with all sorts of Perverts in the late 90s.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

132-column lineprinter nudes were in circulation well before the web. (and "typewriter art" predates even the IBM 1403)

related, SFW: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/0... and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII-Art#/media/Datei:Schreib...

At one point there was a movie shot at SAIL with rather open minded approaches to computer-human interaction. In the early 1970's (as in the twenties?), "hangups" were for inhibited squares. (If they'd been running unix instead of waits, they'd probably have invoked nohup(1) for the shoot.)

Going back yet another century prior, we find the Victorian equivalent to OnlyFans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23791112

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

Yes, that is one of the reasons. Also, helping a number of other platforms to combat all kinds of forms of abuse. Unfortunately, as you correctly surmise, I have some relevant experience which some people find useful to tap into.

Camarades went 'downhill' about 6 months in when it went mainstream and more and more people that had other ideas of where we should go with it joined. Then they brought their buddies and it was 'game over', we had to decide what to do about it. This roughly coincided with the ad market collapse and drove the decision to put the porn behind a paywall to finance the rest of it. Which worked well for more than a decade.

iRomain• 6 years ago

Haven’t heard the word wares in 20 years!

unnouinceput8• 6 years ago

*warez

Wandfarbe• 6 years ago

yes and i'm always looking at HN Entries which show the next file upload etc. and think 'puh holy shit they are fearless' because thats why i'm not building something like this.

I would create a company to have legal seperation for my private assets, i would use a ton of mechnism upfront to make sure i do my best to not support childporn and stuff and when i have analyzed how much work the proper way is, i will just stop thinking about it :)

gwd3• 6 years ago

FWIW I made a website for our yearly project conference that allowed anybody to create an account and post material. But 1) all postings had to be moderated until the account was verified (either manually by me or by a code sent only to conference attendees) 2) I was pretty active in monitoring new posts and deleting posts and accounts that were clearly spam.

And of course the normal stuff, links all prefixed with "nofollow", only whitelisted markdown content / HTML, &c.

The first year we had a handful of spammers try to post stuff, but it didn't take much time at all to filter it out. This year we didn't have any spam accounts at all.

So my suspicion is that getting ahead of the "spam problem" by doing heavy manual moderation early on is an investment. If he'd just spent 5 minutes a day looking at the accounts and deleting rubbish, he would never have been swarmed by spammers, and the moderation load would have remained relatively low, until he got popular enough that he could afford to actually spend some real effort automating / crowdsourcing the spam-fighting capabilities.

julianlam3• 6 years ago

The key here is manual moderation. At NodeBB we also have had our fair share of spam companies trying to build scripts to post things, and the only foolproof solution is manual moderation via a post queue for new users.

The downside, of course, is that they takes effort to maintain, and is a barrier to entry for new accounts.

freedomben• 6 years ago

Interesting, thanks for sharing. I'll be launching a service that allows users to upload content and I've been thinking about how to handle anti-spam. I really appreciate you sharing your experience.

stevenicr3• 6 years ago

Manual moderation in this way could open you up to other forms of liability that you may have easier defense against without it.

I don't think it'd be an issue for a hardware forum, although mass approving comments and finding that one is defamatory about person or company X could get some lawyer's drool glands working for example..

Also section 230 appears to be under threat by the current administration and how things are interpreted - and I just read where Biden has been talking about removing it completely..

So this situation is in a state of flux at the moment I believe.

/not a lawyer / doctor yada yada

Pick-A-Hill2019• 6 years ago

100% this. As soon as an IP / Service appears for the first time it is scanned and hammered to look for low hanging fruit. Once the initial wave of exploit bots have found out they don't get far, your 'thing' is marked as 'too much faff' and malicious traffic drops off and is left alone (usually, y.m.m.v etc etc etc).

rstuart4133• 6 years ago

My experience is different. I manage a wiki. It was a wonderful success in terms of getting people to contribute, however the wiki itself (moinmoin) has lousy authorisation and authentication tools, so I wrote my own. A few versions later changed to moinmoin broke those tools, but by that time most of time content has settled down so I just reverted locking down the system by making the user database read only (literally: "chmod -R a-w"). That worked well enough.

However every so often you would have to create a new account. To do that the chmod had to be undone, but only for a minute or two. In that minute or two typically 2 or 3 spam accounts where created, and maybe 20 wiki pages spammed or defaced.

In short: defending the site had no effect whatsoever for us. The bots were always probing, every few seconds, and it never stopped even years after the site was totally locked down.

PS: SPAM wise the bots were just an annoyance. But every page hit runs moinmoin's Python code, and it's not the fastest thing. We were running on low end VPS's that took a dim view of anybody using too much CPU. Our VM regularly got shut down because of those bloody bots.

leephillips• 6 years ago

Would charging for signup, even $1.00, eliminate essentially all of the abuse?

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

That would depend on the lifetime revenue per user gained spamming your system. There definitely is some sufficiently high signup fee, but it’s different for every spammer. (And for the child pornographers, there may be no fee you could charge to stop them.)

0xffff2• 6 years ago

Along with 99.9% of your legitimate users in most cases.

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

It is a very coarse filter. Your ratio will go up but there will be plenty of people who feel that since they paid you they now really get to do as they please.

tomjen3• 6 years ago

I believe it works for Metafilter, but you also run into problems with Credit Card abuse, fraudsters who create accounts and test which cards are not yet reported as having failed etc.

It is a nightmare.

nradov• 6 years ago

The bad actors use stolen credit card numbers so then you have to deal with chargebacks and fraud issues.

nakodari• 6 years ago

This is so true. We built Jumpshare (https://jumpshare.com) for file sharing and visual communication, so you can imagine the abuse we got. We had to spend a considerable time and resources to fight this abuse and adds checks and balances which slowed down our product roadmap.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

Did you think of the risks as a legal issue, reputational issue, moral issue, or some combination of the three?

mattmagoo• 6 years ago

Does something like email verification resolve this in some small way.

I ask because we are looking at extending our platform to include enterprise file sharing and rendering for niche file types, bit don't want to expose ourselves to the extra work you've described.

sixhobbits• 6 years ago

It's sad and also not always true. I think most people were pleasantly surprised by how the "get into a stranger's car" and "go stay with a stranger for a few days" models worked out for AirBNB and Uber.

Obviously there have been some issues and obviously they have processes in place to minimize and respond to abuse of their platforms, but overall both platforms rely on "trust by default" which is interesting and leads me to think that your comment might lean too far towards pessimism.

lgeorget2• 6 years ago

AirBnB and Uber are a bit different though, because being online gives you a sense of immunity and relieves a lot of inhibition that you'd have in real life. To some degree, we all have a different sense of morality online and in real life (like most people would never steal even a fruit in the supermarket but see no problem pirating movies and software) and some push it very far.

dataflow• 6 years ago

I think most people were pleasantly surprised by how the "get into a stranger's car" and "go stay with a stranger for a few days" models worked out for AirBNB and Uber.

Most Americans for the former, maybe. "Get into a stranger's car" is literally an everyday routine in other places in the world, and has been for a long time.

TuringNYC• 6 years ago

Are there recommended services where I can point to...say...an s3 object and validate it doesnt fall into some /all of the above categories? Seems like a good business and also something i'd pay for to remove this risk.

curiousgeorgio• 6 years ago

Yes, look at Amazon Rekognition. I use it (very successfully) for a website that used to encounter similar issues with file upload abuse.

In my case, image uploads aren't mandatory for users, but they are very helpful in identifying the spammers (for some reason, the spammers almost always try to upload images that get filtered, so it makes it easier to spot them). That, combined with an IP check (getipintel.net) has almost completely eliminated the spam issues on my site.

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

Microsoft does some of this for the worst offenders, see 'PhotoDNA'. For once something that they did that has no downsides that I can determine.

Chirael• 6 years ago

Don’t forget malware too - a problem even big companies have to grapple with, unfortunately [1].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-suspends-firefox-send-...

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

I predicted that about send the day it was launched. It helped that I had done a very close review of a large competitor in that space so seeing 'send' open up gave a lot of bad people a new playground with predictable results.

unixhero• 6 years ago

Maybe this could somehow be remedied by a Blockchain technology.

ponker• 6 years ago

Anyone implementing a POST handler should think “what if this is child porn”

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

Good one, yes, the POST references should all come with pointers to abuse potential.

lazyant• 6 years ago

- platform to send money / gateway -> fraud

samus• 6 years ago

And money laundering. It even helps the perpetrators when the operator finally decides enough is enough and nukes the platform.

ChuckMcM• 6 years ago

Was going to say generally the same thing. Back in the day it was anonymous FTP, if you enabled it in your server you didn't have to wait long and suddenly all the things would start showing up.

It reminded me a little bit of the guy that started a "buy a gift card with bitcoin" site, not realizing he was effectively creating a way to convert bitcoin into actual cash while avoiding an exchange. It was wildly successful until he realized that it was really really hard to get large quantities of bitcoin rapidly converted into cash.

jsonbourne• 6 years ago

What is the best way to moderate each such categories?

ensignavenger3• 6 years ago

I'm building a platform that could be abused in similar ways. Does anyone have any suggested resources I could read/use to avoid this problem, preferably without employing captchas? Akismet might be helpful?

jacquesm11• 6 years ago

Manual review (depends on the scale you intend to go for), build a 'trust' profile of your users, analyze the crap out of sign up page activity to detect abusers even before they've made their first move.

None of those require extra user interaction and can be quite effective.

ensignavenger3• 6 years ago

" analyze the crap out of sign up page activity"

Do you have any suggestions for further reading about approaches to this? I do plan to do manual verification initially, but if the project is succesful, I won't be able to keep up- a good problem to have, and I don't want to optimize prematurely- but I also don't want the site to become overcome with spam before I have any clue how to handle it :)

gwd3• 6 years ago

One thing to think of is not to be valuable to them.

So for instance, ALWAYS do HTML sanitization via whitelist; don't let anyone put any javascript or any weird CSS or HTML into your posted content that you don't allow there.

If you allow links, make sure they all have the "nofollow" tag, so that you can't be used for link farming. (Both because it helps spammers, and because if Google detects that your site is being used for link farming, your own sites bomb.)

Other tricks spammers use: Using a link for the username, since that is sometimes emailed or displayed even when moderated content is not.

The site I run is a special-purpose conference website for a relatively small community (usually 60-100 attendees), so manually moderating all content until a user is verified works pretty well. The first year we had a handful of spammers, but their content was all deleted by me before it was seen by anyone. (With the exception of the link for a username. Missed that trick.) The next year we didn't have any spam accounts at all.

No idea how well that will scale for your use case.

ensignavenger3• 6 years ago

I will certainly be employing these methods, and doing manual verification at least initially- but if the project is successful, it will outrun my ability to manually verify everything.

Thanks.

timwaagh• 6 years ago

i think it's somewhat of a start for a business if you have the stomach for it. you just need to figure out how to make money off the freeriders and get around the social media censorship for the paid users.

harry-wood• 6 years ago

I've come across these kinds of prototype link sharing sites in my battles with SEO spam. On the face of it SEO spam is simple: the bad guys bung a load of links into your wiki or blog comments in the hope of gaining google rankings for their "SEO clients", but... Increasingly they started bouncing links all over the place in complex spamdexing webs. Link sharing sites often get thrown in the mix, along with cross-linking other blogs/wikis where they've got their spam to stick. This all makes it easier to evade any filtering by a particular blog/wiki admin, but maybe also makes it harder for google to filter and down-rank the baddies, and finally depending on how complex a spamdexing web is, it offers protection to their clients because it ends up being impossible to see which end websites the spammer is actually aiming to promote (the links tucked away amidst the randomised cross-linked chaos)

But maybe that was a game of a few years ago, and now spam bots are mostly just trying to push porn on social media.

heipei• 6 years ago

I'm facing the same issue with a URL analysis service I operate which lets you take a snapshot and screenshot of a website. I get countless submissions to other sites which allow user-generated content (Reddit, Medium, random support sites, everything that's "open") and all of these sites themselves host images and links to "Watch XX Soccer Game Live 2020 HD" etc., so all link-spam. I found my ways to battle these submissions and users, but obviously don't want to reveal them here.

The other thing is signup-spam. I'd say a full 50% of my signups are spam, and I do my best to remove those user accounts. What surprised me was that the spammers seem to be human, i.e. using a Gmail address (which requires verification), solving Captcha, entering form fields, clicking the email-verify link, etc. Just crazy. Again, the countermeasures are not something I would want to publicize...

yoran• 6 years ago

We've had multiple spammer attacks over the years. Our platform allows users to create and publish their own content. Our primary target is education, teachers and students. But naturally it's being abused by spammers. It's been an interesting cat and mouse game to counter them.

- One time, they used our platform to publish links to their streaming websites for the quarter finals of the 2018 Champions League. Suddenly we ended up being first result on Google for "arsenal v barcelona". It was fifteen minutes before the game so you can imagine that we got a lot of traffic. On the one hand it was kind of flattering that the SEO ranking of our domain was so strong. On the other hand, it wasn't great nor beneficial for the platform to be abused like that. As a counter-measure, we decided to block indexing of project pages for 24 hours when they're first made public. The spammers never came back.

- Another time, we got an email from AWS that our SES bounce rate was 15%, and it was rising fast. Being blocked from sending emails by AWS would have been a disaster. It turned out that our invitation system was abused. A creator of a project can invite an external person by email. That person receives an email saying "John Doe invites you to collaborate on 'A nice project about the 2018 Champions League'" with a link to the project. Replace "A nice project about the 2018 Champions League" by a Chinese ad and you've got yourself spammers who are sending thousands of emails a second to a random collection of email addresses. Naturally a lot of these bounce, which caused AWS to warn us. So we had to start verifying the MX validity of invited email addresses and throttle the system to a maximum of 100 emails in a window of 24 hours.

- We still get a lot of spammers publishing obvious spammy projects. One thing that has helped is the Clearbit Risk API. You send them an email address and it comes back with an assessment of how spammy the address is. We use it for certain domains (protonmail.com, yandex.com,...) and it frequently flags someone as a spammer right after signup. They can still use the platform but can't make stuff public, completely defeating the purpose of them being spammy.

I'm sure they'll keep finding creative ways to get around the limitations we put in. The toughest is to find a way to counter them without it hampering the experience for all the other users.

Demiurge4• 6 years ago

Awesome tips there!

victor106• 6 years ago

I optimized it in a way I’ll only pay hosting fees when the site is having a lot of traffic. Like 1M+ visits per month.

I wonder what optimizations were done so you can only pay for 1M+ hits?

JshWright• 6 years ago

1 million hits in a month is only one request every couple seconds. It doesn't take much to host that.

nightcracker• 6 years ago

1 million hits in a month is only one request every couple seconds.

That's a really naive view of how hits are distributed over time.

elazzabi_2• 6 years ago

Hey, author of the post here.

The whole app lives in Firebase. Once a user hits a profile page, a cloud function runs, get the data from the DB, constructs the page, and caches it at the CDN for 24h.

If a user add/delete something on their profile, the cache is removed. Otherwise, the content is served from cache only with no need for a lot of computation.

With this, you can still get your way through Firebase's generous free tier https://firebase.google.com/pricing

JustWright• 6 years ago

Firebase free tier is only 125k invocation per month. How are covering +1M invocations per month on free tier?

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

Link hiding tools are unfortunately a security threat due to all the bad actors in the world.

Demiurge4• 6 years ago

I've been maintaining a community forum for more than a decade. We had some abusive users, so we introduced pre-moderation. Meaning, any new user is on probation for a few posts, and all anonymous posts have to be manually approved by an admin to be posted publicly. This has pretty much completely stopped the visible abuse.

However, for about 10 years, there are bots registering every day, some of them even make realistic accounts with cool and unique username, email, even description. Strangely, the email and username never match... And they make post with html links embedded. They even know to actually select the 'HTML' content type, which is an extra select input. Some bots even make a few innocent posts, before the link spam. But just too few to get past probation. Obviously, the spam posts never get approved, and accounts never get out of pre-moderation queue and yet they're still trying every day... Not intelligent enough to make more than 2 dumb posts.

Similarly, I have some work projects that have user registration with a human on-boarding process, where another person has to add the user to their group for them to share any data, none of which is ever public. So these bots are tirelessly registering, and staying in limbo forever. Thousands of useless accounts.

It boggles the mind how much energy is wasted, but I guess it must my profitable enough.

nickjj• 6 years ago

This has pretty much completely stopped the visible abuse.

This process works well but it can also turn away a ton of people from ever joining.

I know there's this one product that only offers support through public forums and new accounts need to be reviewed by a moderator and then you're not allowed to post any threads until you've made a few replies to other threads and it's been white listed by a moderator, and then on top of that and you also can't use links until you've met some other criteria.

But in order to get proper support it requires linking to large files (videos) that aren't able to be uploaded directly through the forums.

It becomes such a pain in the ass to open a support request. It could easily take over a week just to post your question and the worst part about it is the forum software orders posts by date, and your post will be buried on the 8th page before it's visible because it takes your original pre-moderated post date as when it was created.

Demiurge4• 6 years ago

That’s a very good point. I have experienced this myself, but I don’t see another way to stop abuse except tweaking the requirements. It sounds like too many hoops in your example. On our site if the user makes just one relevant comment I instantly promote them. It’s that easy to tell. I wish this deterrent wasn’t justified by walls of spam as the alternative.

naveen_• 6 years ago

Can we control this to a certain extent by including a Captcha in register page?

Demiurge4• 6 years ago

Yes, somehow captchas gets solved... But yes, I think it helps.

Normille4• 6 years ago

Captchas are the absolute spawn of the devil. Every time I see one on a website, I want to punch the face of the person who invented them, until my fists hurt. Unless I really NEED to use that site, I just go elsewhere, once I get a Captcha shoved in my face.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

Sure, and make it a proof-of-work captcha at that. No privacy issues and no one will care for the 30 seconds "lost".

yvdriess2• 6 years ago

Heavy moderation and a $10 registration barrier is what has kept the SomethingAwful forums around for so long.

Normille4• 6 years ago

It's amazing how some people can't seem to spot a bot/spam post, no matter how obvious.

One of the websites I host is for a retired elderly middle-aged academic who pens articles about his former field and invites comment.

Almost every week I'll get an email from him along the lines of "Is this worth following up?" and attached will be either a comment reading something like "I love your article. So much good info and useful to me.." or an email from some g3gergergew@gmail.com address saying "We love your site. It has much good infos and is useful but we are notice your CEO could being better..."

No matter how many times I tell him to look for the telltale signs...

* Random gibberish email from address

* Half a dozen links in the comment

* Broken English

* Generic text which could apply to ANY article or website in the bloody world

...he'll still forward them to me and ask if they're worth getting in contact with. Every time, I'm gobsmacked how he can fall for such inept spamming.

criley2• 6 years ago

The ineptitude of the spamming is actually a sign of eptitude -- they intentionally include the signs you look for because you're a waste of their time. They have figured out the precise line to walk where bad marks like you avoid them but easy marks like him engage.

joncrane2• 6 years ago

I hope you're charging him for your time.

zarq• 6 years ago

Ironically, there is another side to this too: you have to teach people that if they want a response, they need to include relevant information that relates to the person you are reaching out to, a "serious-looking" e-mail address, a proper greeting, good grammar...

Especially young professionals struggle to understand why any of this is important, and are left wondering why they are not getting a response.

fuzxi2• 6 years ago

Just count it as a victory that he asks you first, rather than handing out his bank details.

DangitBobby• 6 years ago

I think part of the reason he "falls" for it is the contents of the spam are things he wants to be true. In other cases he'd see the warning signs and know it's spam, but with things he actually wants to be true, he would rather someone he trusts to tell him there's no way.

mgkimsal• 6 years ago

Many people never look at email addresses (just like they don't look at full URLs - the programs have made it harder to see them by default).

Many - most - native English speaking people don't really know 'bad' English. People I've known my entire life who've grown up in the US and went to university still have trouble writing more than a few coherent sentences. Folks are bad at writing, and I think tend to not look critically at bad writing.

MichaelApproved2• 6 years ago

They even know to actually select the 'HTML' content type, which is an extra select input.

It's not surprising because spammers write scripts for all sorts of platforms (WordPress, vBulletin, etc.). There's probably no custom code written to attack your site.

They detect your platform and use a script from their pre-existing library to post their spam.

For realistic usernames, they can just reuse names they've seen on other platforms.

Goes the same for emails. Any existing email list could be a source for genuine sounding names. Just throw a couple of numbers at the end of the name and you've got a unique name that a human already came up with.

bonestamp2• 6 years ago

There's one website I run where we were getting some spam through the "contact us" form. No problem, I'll just install captcha. I looked at the docs and realized it was more effort than I was willing to spend to kill a few spam messages a week. So, I just added an extra input field where the user has to type in "123". No spam since.

I thought it was kind of funny how easy it was to defeat the spammers, but on the other hand, there are so many easy targets that it's not worth their effort to try to overcome something so elementary just for our site. Conversely, there are much higher value targets where captcha is very valuable and worth the effort to implement because it is worth it for the abusers to try to defeat them.

joshspankit3• 6 years ago

I’ve never wanted the ability to “react” to hn comments as much as I want it for the comments on this post.

alexellisuk• 6 years ago

I really like the design of the page - very clean and easy to understand the value prop. I could see this being useful for influencers and bloggers. Shame to hear about the mis-use :-(

tomschwiha3• 6 years ago

For me the knowledge that bots rather don't execute and run Javascript helps to get rid of most bot comment/contact requests.

95_JL_OK• 6 years ago

Some can, Selenium or other browser automation is sometimes used in bots. Really, any headless browser can be paired up with some automated QA toolkit and turned into a rather effective bot. All that has to happen is for the bot to load the page in headless mode, then issue the keystroke events to the specified elements.

tomschwiha3• 6 years ago

From my experience most don't as it costs more money (ressources). For me a hidden input with some math solved by Javascript got rid of 10 spam contact requests per day to actually 0.

However of course, the larger a page gets the more dedicated the bots get.

But for the plain porn/russian spam it helped.

Abishek_Muthian5• 6 years ago

We were running a privacy focussed Chat-App-Network dating platform in 2017 which was accelerated by Facebook[1].

i.e. A network between, Messenger<->Viber<->Telegram<->Line App.

By design no media sharing was allowed(to prevent pornography) and the user profile images were received from the platform itself. But we soon faced unique challenge of people from certain countries using their children picture as profile picture(often just the children), there were people with group photo as profile image and then there were people who using explicit images as profile pictures.

So we integrated Amazon Rekognition to identify children, group and explicit images. Those using explicit images were banned immediately and those with children/group photo image(Face detection not Facial recognition) were asked to change their profile image(Their profile was not shown to anyone until they changed their profile picture with just them). We were processing >200,000 profile images per month as people change their profile images often.

But, as we very well know Amazon Rekognition or for the fact any such ML solution is not 100% accurate, we faced issues with people with darker skin color(Amazon told me that they were working to fix the issue; exactly why this type of half baked tech shouldn't be used for things which can cause harm) and so we had to reduce the confidence levels to such an extent that anything resembling a child would be flagged by the system(False positives are better in this case than false negatives).

[1]https://hitstartup.com/about/#FindDate

2sk21• 6 years ago

Fascinating! How expensive was it to use Rekognition in your application? Was it a significant expense?

Abishek_Muthian5• 6 years ago

Thank you, I think we incurred ~ $200 for ~200,000 images for Rekognition API and I also think Amazon had fairly large free-tier limit for Rekognition at that time, since the service was relatively new.

nerdkid93• 6 years ago

privacy focused Chat-App-Network... accelerated by Facebook

Why would any company focusing on privacy partner with Facebook or Google? I would guess that some ardent supporters of such a product/company would be put off by such a partnership, no?

Abishek_Muthian5• 6 years ago

Good question.

Chat-App-Network

Messenger had >1Billion users and so its users were 98% of our user base. We enabled them to communicate with users of other chat apps and vice versa. We didn't even use the 'Name' of the users.

I applied for their bootstrap phase under their FbStart program but they directly selected it for the Acceleration phase.

As for why I applied for Facebook if I care about Privacy?

I was a disabled, solopreneur from a village in India, without any kind of network strength competing with Valley behemoths and any kind of help is not just a force multiplier but life or death(But my product was selected meritoriously by FB). Facebook privacy issues(Cambridge Analytica) started only several months after I launched the product, so the image of Facebook was not like what's today. But it did bother me and just after a year of running the platform successfully, I had to close my startup due to my health issues[1]. I did not sell my platform to safe guard the privacy of the users.

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...

y-c-o-m-b3• 6 years ago

Wow this is incredible for multiple reasons. I'm also working on a dating app and pondered this "security/content" issue, and I am also a victim of spinal damage. I had cervical myelopathy in 2018 and had to have an emergency fusion on C5-C7. I still experience various neurological issues for which they can't trace (they claim it's not related to the spine issues), but causes symptoms very similar to multiple sclerosis (although that's been ruled out). Your condition looks and sounds even more serious than that. I'm sorry you've gone through so much. I hope your health improves and I wish you success!

Abishek_Muthian5• 6 years ago

Is that you Abishek, from the future? :)

Thank you for your kind words. I can visualise what you had to go through. I share mutual respect and wishes for your recovery or should I say 'Management of our conditions'.

I still experience various neurological issues for which they can't trace

The main issue I had (Tingling on the Face) has been successfully resolved after the surgery. Any other discomfort I had has been largely due to anxiety and post-traumatic stress from surgery, loosing my hard earned startup etc.

So targeted efforts in bringing down the anxiety helps me a lot[Staying in present, taking lesser sensory inputs(had dozens of phone calls earlier, now its zero phone calls, only email].

Side note: Does wearing hear rate monitor on the wrist, like Fitbit/Apple watch hurt you after 15-30 mins?[1].

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/my-experience-with-fitbit-charge-...

dhosek2• 6 years ago

I run a mediawiki site. I got to play the cat and mouse game as well. For a while I was getting hundreds of spam page creations per day despite implementing as many defenses as I could. I was at least once a day going through and deleting the spam posts using the Smite Spam plugin. It's finally calmed down and I get one or two posts maybe every couple of weeks. I think I may have finally been removed from the site list of whatever "packaged" software the spammers use.

vorpalhex2• 6 years ago

With prebuilt software, a small custom change required for creating content is often times enough to deter mass automated spam. My go to for a number of the years was to add a form field with the label "Enter the word 'orange'". Trivial for a human but requires just a bit of customization for a bot, enough that most spammers won't bother.

dhosek2• 6 years ago

I'm building a bespoke replacement for the wiki since all the pages share the same structure and the mediawiki solution isn't as user-friendly as I'd like.

Hopefully I won't do anything dumb like the naïve contact form I'd made that turned into a spam vector because I was putting unsanitized user input into mail headers.

ganzuul2• 6 years ago

Slasdot's moderation system is brilliant in this regard.

ramses02• 6 years ago

Can you elaborate?

ganzuul2• 6 years ago

Oh, yes. It assigns a small number of 'moderation points' to random users, and a larger number to trusted users. Essentially their algo picks out random users to moderate just a little, which lets the diaspora bump up visibility of what they like. In addition to up and downvotes the mods label a post "+1 Informative", "+1 Funny", or "-1 Flamebait". Users can assign more visibility to something which has been voted Informative twice than once Informative and once Funny. There is no "-1 I disagree". The purpose of the votes are obvious.

There is meta-moderation on top of this which has users check the moderation of other users. I assume people who repeatedly abuse their privilege are given sub-naive priority for mod point assignment.

This scales with traffic and requires the minimum of admin oversight.

desireco42• 6 years ago

I wanted a long time ago to make a free speech forum and platform. As much as I believe it would be good to have place you can say what you want, the hassle of spam and plain nastiness is just what always stopped me from doing this.

dumbfounder• 6 years ago

I struggled with it myself with Twicsy, except Twicsy was just a window into Twitter and made it much easier to find the porn and (gag) child porn. I remember the first time I found a network of child porn, it made me sick to my stomach. Tooks me hours to get rid of it, report it to Twitter, and to the authorities. It was a problem for a long time, I felt like I was doing all of Twitter's dirty work that they wouldn't do themselves. I made tools for people to report it easily, and tools to eliminate it en masse. Twitter took way way way way way too long cleaning up their act in this respect. They also often just deleted tweets and not pictures, pictures could linger for months without being deleted from their content servers, and still appear in Google.

jonnycomputer• 6 years ago

I recall in the early days of mobile apps downloading an ipad app which had this neat idea that kids could share their drawings, made in the app, with each other in a sort of random way. It did not take long for me to realize that meant seeing an endless stream of inappropriate, or sometimes potentially harmful content (e.g. from adults interested in exploiting children).

devit• 6 years ago

I don't understand what the problem is with using the service to provide links to porn, and also don't understand why Instagram and Snapchat would care about links to lists of links to porn?

buzzerbetrayed• 6 years ago

I imagine it would have to do with 1) The number of minors on Instagram and Snapchat. and 2) The image that Instagram and Snapchat want for their platforms. They aren’t looking to become tumblr in the eyes of the masses.

taftster• 6 years ago

Here's an example of a similar problem - that I created for a website I help a friend with.

We had outbound referral links, basically to monitor the number of times that a visitor clicks out of the website. The URL pattern was something like: example.com/out.php?url=outbound.com

The out.php script would just simply (naively) redirect the user to the url specified. We never validated if the outbound link was to an authorized reference.

The result is the same. Eventually spammers figured out the above link and then just started posting their spam using the site's redirect script to any number of social media sites, embedded in email, etc.

What's interesting too is that we would see multiple redirects embedded into a single request. e.g. out.php?url=another.link.service/link=spammer.com

Obviously in hindsight this was stupid, but when we built it (some 10 years ago), the idea seemed pretty sound if not maybe a little naive. The solution would have been to only allow redirect links to authorized outbound sites, which works when those links are relatively static and not open ended.

mikorym• 6 years ago

There is an easier way to accidentally build a porn website:

1) register domain

2) don't renew

Not completely unrelated either, since it seems like OP's domain is now bust too...

What is also interesting is that probably half of what FB or <insert nonexistant competitor> does is moderation of sorts. This is why FB is becoming a commerce/community page website and why they need Instagram for social media.

iagooar• 6 years ago

Other solutions include: requiring credit cards for trial periods, ban all adult content from the platform… But they all require me to put extra effort in the project. And I don’t have time for that.

There is people who spend their entire life trying to build a working business, and those who just walk away from what would possibly be a pretty lucrative business because of lack of time.

Humans, strange and exciting beings, really.

picodguyo• 6 years ago

I created a site intended for family photo/video sharing and it did not take long for people to start uploading penis pics. The weird thing is they don't even have a reason or recipient. They just want their penis out there on the internet in the hopes someone might stumble upon it.

klyrs• 6 years ago

Every time I see somebody identify moderation as censorship, I remember my experiences with public wikis, forums, etc. It's always spam and porn. They'll spin up more fake users than you'll ever have real users, every damned time. It's a vicious cycle, as real users won't stick around if you don't filter.

twodave• 6 years ago

IMO the better way to design a product like this to avoid abuse would be to simply force them to sign in using each platform they want to link to. At that point all you're building is a way for people to say, "These 5 social media accounts are all me".

You could allow them to select one of their accounts to source information and a photo for their combined profile. At that point you're not storing anything besides links to social media profile pages.

In effect you get to piggy-back on those sites' abuse mitigation strategies (though of course you're stuck with the lowest common denominator). Your biggest decision at that point is which social media platforms to allow onto your service.

boo-ga-ga• 6 years ago

Thinking about this when working on a social network (yes, I know) as a pet project at spare time, I've got a question: are there any tools for handling improper text/images automatically? I think there are some lists of "bad words", but not sure if they are available for most widely used languages. But are there libs/SDKs/online services that I can feed a picture and they will tag it as potentially improper, for example porn or some swastikas, so I can pre-moderate manually only such images? Looks like it could be a nice and useful service.

bilater• 6 years ago

Firebase has a email verify feature You should use that so spam emails can be blocked from using your service.

codezero• 6 years ago

For most bad actors, a small amount of work is all that's needed to block them from a new platform like this.

1. Use email verification / captchas

2. Block mailinator/throwaway account addresses

3. Use something like Cloudflare/Akamai to protect against egregious bad actors

4. Add some other level of social validation like a major OAuth provider

5. Simple pattern matching - as the author noted, these are rarely sophisticated, and once you put even a small barrier up, they usually trickle down. You can even go further and just limit the features your product has specifically to hurt their use case, or you can actively shadow ban the users yourself, so they don't know their links aren't working.

munificent5• 6 years ago

Paying for bouncers is an understood part of the cost model for a nightclub. If you provide any sort of real or virtual venue that allows unvetted participants, you have to factor in the cost of dealing with bad actors. If you have a virtual venue, you have to factor in the cost of dealing with automated bad actors.

It's just how human nature works. 90% of people are great, but 10% can do a lot of damage.

mrwww• 6 years ago

great analogy

guenthert• 6 years ago

Pics or it didn't happen!

r0rshrk• 6 years ago

No offence to you but this is why I hate PH so much. Any product launched there goes down in <6 months.

sas41• 6 years ago

Ow boy, my first real comment on HN, please be gentle!

Okay, so I have something related to this.

two paragraph back-story was cut...

So I built SASRip[1], an Open Source website with an API that allows you to download audio or video from any web-page that is supported by youtube-dl (I use youtube-dl and ffmpeg to do muxing/transcoding). I also built a browser addon for it called Media Reaper[2] (chromium version available on SASRip's website[3]).

Now, I wanted to build a no BS, no tracking website, so all I have is internal logs, these logs keep incoming requests like so: Time, URL, ID string, success/fail, the ID is just to tell where the request came from, web site, API call or the browser addon, I keep no IP data or anything like that, and boy do people download the nasty stuff, there is all kinds of nasty stuff, taboo stuff, feet stuff and stuff I didn't even know existed.

Now I live in constant fear that someday, looking trough those logs I will find CP and I am not sure what I should do, I know implementing tracking methods goes against both my morals and the philosophy of the service, but at the same time I am not sure if I can keep on going, knowing I could do something about it but I am not.

Ultimately I think it is very likely that I will shut the service down if I find CP on it, with no way of tracking the person down, perhaps leave a message with why I shut down.

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P.S. I make no money on this service, it's purely donation based.

P.P.S I know I can do muxing and transcoding via some really cool JS libraries, but I wanted to sharpen some of other skills with this project.

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[1] https://sasrip.cf/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-reaper/

[3] https://sasrip.cf/Home/MediaReaper

fl0wenol2• 6 years ago

Everyone just want to be horny on main and I think the internet needs to get over / accept this so we can focus and making that profitable and safe.