Keybase Moves To Stop Onslaught of Spammers on Encrypted Message Platform

'Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby
project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple
username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of
OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in
funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then
things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make
public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from
messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone's
way. But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very
OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy
public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain
lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org,
Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought
a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly
clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts,
messages, and other unpleasantry -- raising a chorus of complaints in
Keybase's open chat channel. It turns out there's a reason spell check
keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled "debase."

Keybase's leadership is promising to do something to fix the spam
problem -- or at least make it easier to report and block abusers. In
a blog post, Krohn and Coynes wrote, "To be clear, the current spam
volume isn't dire, YET. Keybase still works great. But we should act
quickly." But the measures promised by Keybase won't completely
eliminate the issue. And Keybase execs have no interest in getting
involved with additional steps that they see as censorship. "Keybase
is a private company and we do retain our rights to kick people out,"
the co-founders said in the blog post. "That hammer will not be used
because someone is mostly disliked, as long as they're playing nicely
on Keybase."'

-- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/12/06/1610259

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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