Author Topic: Robot avatars changed, why is that?  (Read 4928 times)

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Offline cass

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Offline xeroc

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My robot just switched back to "normal" ..

Offline arhag

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Then you have porn and questionable images.

We can already have questionable BTS account names (like racial slurs) why not questionable images too? The point is that if you want to self-censor to protect yourself from things you would rather not see, you should subscribe to a moderator/curator that marks certain content with appropriate flags so that your client can optionally hide/censor it and give you a simple/vague reason for why (unless you want to override it in specific cases).


Images are readily unintentionally consumed.  Like I can have a wallet running on my desktop and if someone has some racial slur as an account and it pops up in the client it is not readily not seen unless someone reads all the text.  Images are different.  Basically trolling with pictures of big black dicks or whatever will be far worse than writing out "mrbigblackdick".

There is no need for a moderator, we just don't need to make what is a very minor problem into a possibly large one. Personally I've seen free speech forums pushed to the point of breaking and it was rarely because of the text causing problems.  It was because joe who is browsing at work or has an uptight wife that couldn't stand having horribly nasty pictures show up randomly.

So thats the difference...  I'm not sure why you'd even suggest an avatar moderator on accounts as I assume we both think self-selected avatars are a bad idea.

Yeah, I get there is a difference. And, I don't think it is a good idea for the client to show the avatars by default when browsing through a list of accounts in the client (or in bitsharesblocks.com). However, I think if you click on an account's page you should be able to click on an empty square to reveal the image that is linked to by that account. You should also be able to pin visibility of the avatar for that specific account if you want so that it does show up when casually browsing through your address book or other account lists or delegate lists in the client. That way you can see an up-to-date image of your contacts in your favorites / address book like you can with social networks.

Offline gamey

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Then you have porn and questionable images.

We can already have questionable BTS account names (like racial slurs) why not questionable images too? The point is that if you want to self-censor to protect yourself from things you would rather not see, you should subscribe to a moderator/curator that marks certain content with appropriate flags so that your client can optionally hide/censor it and give you a simple/vague reason for why (unless you want to override it in specific cases).


Images are readily unintentionally consumed.  Like I can have a wallet running on my desktop and if someone has some racial slur as an account and it pops up in the client it is not readily not seen unless someone reads all the text.  Images are different.  Basically trolling with pictures of big black dicks or whatever will be far worse than writing out "mrbigblackdick".

There is no need for a moderator, we just don't need to make what is a very minor problem into a possibly large one. Personally I've seen free speech forums pushed to the point of breaking and it was rarely because of the text causing problems.  It was because joe who is browsing at work or has an uptight wife that couldn't stand having horribly nasty pictures show up randomly.

So thats the difference...  I'm not sure why you'd even suggest an avatar moderator on accounts as I assume we both think self-selected avatars are a bad idea.
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Offline arhag

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Then you have porn and questionable images.

We can already have questionable BTS account names (like racial slurs) why not questionable images too? The point is that if you want to self-censor to protect yourself from things you would rather not see, you should subscribe to a moderator/curator that marks certain content with appropriate flags so that your client can optionally hide/censor it and give you a simple/vague reason for why (unless you want to override it in specific cases).

And you have just helped people with scamming since they can just duplicate the images of others.

Yup, but I always thought robohash / Safebots were a stupid and ineffective idea to begin with. I have already described the alternative we should be using to protect against scams.

Offline gamey

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Storing the avatar on the blockchain is out of the question.
Perhaps storing an URL of the avatar could be done ONLY if a significant fee in BTS is burned.

To avoid scams we can use a fast name visual similarity check. It should verify that each new account name is not similar to previously registered one.
If newly registered account name is similar to previously registered one => the new account cannot publish avatar unless that right is bought from the old account.

This is way over-engineered.  We need a simpler product, not going down rabbitholes like this. 

Any publishing of pictures is bad.  So you put a URL of the logo of a competitor and don't even try to have a similar name.  People can not be allowed to put in images, it just opens up more social based attack vectors. The feature isn't needed if it requires extra features to counter-act the damage it does.

If there was open-sourced data with images + textual names they could be pulled into one big picture with something like imagemagic and then just extracted using canvas features in javascript.  It gives an image that #1 doesn't look like it is trying to be a person/have a personality (whatever it is that people see as 'unprofessional'.  It also works better than the robots as far as being able to remember them.
« Last Edit: January 29, 2015, 10:37:59 pm by gamey »
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Offline emski

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Storing the avatar on the blockchain is out of the question.
Perhaps storing an URL of the avatar could be done ONLY if a significant fee in BTS is burned.

To avoid scams we can use a fast name visual similarity check. It should verify that each new account name is not similar to previously registered one.
If newly registered account name is similar to previously registered one => the new account cannot publish avatar unless that right is bought from the old account.

Offline wackou

What's the point of robot avatar anyway, the account name is already unique enough. Also this avatar apparently haven't stopped people from sending money to scam accounts such as "bter". I think it makes the client look childish and amateur tbh. It doesn't fit the overall theme of the client as a serious professional exchange.

This gave me an idea: it would be nice if the accounts could publish their own avatars on the blockchain, as part of the public info for the account (using wallet_account_update_registration). The client could then show this instead of the robohash. This wouldn't prevent scams, but at least it would allow people to choose their own avatar.

Then you have porn and questionable images.

And you have just helped people with scamming since they can just duplicate the images of others.

Then what we probably need to solve this is a reputation system as what was envisioned by Keyhotee originally :)
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Offline gamey

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What's the point of robot avatar anyway, the account name is already unique enough. Also this avatar apparently haven't stopped people from sending money to scam accounts such as "bter". I think it makes the client look childish and amateur tbh. It doesn't fit the overall theme of the client as a serious professional exchange.

This gave me an idea: it would be nice if the accounts could publish their own avatars on the blockchain, as part of the public info for the account (using wallet_account_update_registration). The client could then show this instead of the robohash. This wouldn't prevent scams, but at least it would allow people to choose their own avatar.

Then you have porn and questionable images.

And you have just helped people with scamming since they can just duplicate the images of others.
I speak for myself and only myself.

Offline gamey

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What's the point of robot avatar anyway, the account name is already unique enough. Also this avatar apparently haven't stopped people from sending money to scam accounts such as "bter". I think it makes the client look childish and amateur tbh. It doesn't fit the overall theme of the client as a serious professional exchange.

Few things would stop every scam.  Most people who complain about the robots just simply don't understand the point of them.

A lot of it is simply resources but robot hashes are a particularly bad implementation.  They have no cognitive relevance.  There really is nothing that a brain can short cut into a script to store.  I barely remember what my robothash looks like.  I'm brown and have a grill .. or did.  I know bm's was a red robot, but I couldn't tell it apart from any other red robot in a lineup.

I've heard multiple people say the robots are amatureish.  I don't think they understand it is a security thing in general and just see it as giving people faces etc. So perhaps it would be worth considering the removal.  You'd literally be better off taking 1000 images and combining 2 of them into a picture for a hash.  So you have a walnut and a red sports car, or a frog and a rabbit side by side.  More likely to remember something like that than minute differences in robohash.  Not only that, people would be more familar with this type of thing from banking websites where they use a unique picture concept to try and mitigate phishing attacks which is related to what robohashes try to avoid.  Instead people see it as some cutesy character.
« Last Edit: January 29, 2015, 08:54:39 pm by gamey »
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Offline wackou

What's the point of robot avatar anyway, the account name is already unique enough. Also this avatar apparently haven't stopped people from sending money to scam accounts such as "bter". I think it makes the client look childish and amateur tbh. It doesn't fit the overall theme of the client as a serious professional exchange.

This gave me an idea: it would be nice if the accounts could publish their own avatars on the blockchain, as part of the public info for the account (using wallet_account_update_registration). The client could then show this instead of the robohash. This wouldn't prevent scams, but at least it would allow people to choose their own avatar.
Please vote for witness wackou! More info at http://digitalgaia.io

Offline kokojie

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What's the point of robot avatar anyway, the account name is already unique enough. Also this avatar apparently haven't stopped people from sending money to scam accounts such as "bter". I think it makes the client look childish and amateur tbh. It doesn't fit the overall theme of the client as a serious professional exchange.

Offline jamesc

We could just host the robohash script.  I think that's the easiest thing to do provided there's already a good server to use.

Offline CLains

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I like mine better now. +5%