Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

This looks cool, I like the collaborative planning stuff, but all I really want is a reddit-like forum where you need a cryptographic key to post. Make it so that you need a real physical ID to get one, like maybe you need to go see a Justice of the Peace to get one. Maybe each person could vouch for 2 others (who cannot themselves vouch for anyone, until they are certified.) Anonymous posts could still be possible, but you still require that key, so you're basically masking your identity. I would also suggest limiting posts to 10/day or similar so loud individuals cant simply drown out everyone else.

Merely knowing that everyone else on the platform is a real person from the same state/country as you would be a massive improvement in the calibre of online debate. No more claims of bots or troll farms! Polls taken on such a site would be a pretty close reflection to what a community actually thinks. Allow people to engage directly with their representatives (their profiles are highlighted), in a sub-reddit/forum you KNOW can only be debated by people who really live there (or perhaps filtered by, if you still want to allow external participants.

It could be even easier. You know these prize contests where they give you a flyer with a covered code like in a lottery ticket? Just send these directly to households or give them to people who show you their id.

Only when you enter that key you are from then on allowed to post on certain subforums.

This way you'd get anonymity and a fair certainty that the people taking part at least lived there at some moment in time (which IMO also entitles them to speak about local topics).

This could also be a good way to refresh keys periodically. And with the scratch-off lotto ticket idea, you could anonymously assign keys using QR codes, which would greatly improve the UX, AND mean you dont need to store any details of the person. Nice idea.

Polls aren't going to be a pretty close reflection of what a community thinks except in the exceptional circumstances that people that have jumped through hoops to register for a politics website are broadly representative of the type of people who actually lived there. (Make a "vouch for" system and you pretty much guarantee an echo chamber dominated by the best organised local political faction). And small, local websites don't need farms to attract trolls and see trolls drive out the non-trolls.

Polls aren't certainly the best possible reflection of what a community thinks if there is no perfectly representative a sample of participants. But it can be a good aproximation. Electing representatives is a kind of poll, so is HN itself. Participants vote here and there, factions balance out, you get some unstable equilibria that does the job of reflection part of what a community thinks and it often helps a community take better decisions than what a few (interested and absolutely politically factioned) politicians usually do.

Here's a Reddit like fourm: https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) with a Single Sign-On API, so ... I suppose it'd be possible to connect it with a login system that checks one's crypto identity?

... Like Reddit and HN, with improvements: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... (sorry for promoting my own thing ... I don't know any other seemingly okay open source Reddit alternative though)

Interesting, that there's "lots of" discussion software, but not yet any single login system like the one you describe. (?)

> need a real physical ID to get [a crypto key]

How can that work :-) People would submit their national ID number or full name, and get back a crypto key, and there could only be one key per national ID? How can one know that the one that submits the ID number, is the person him/herself? Maybe by looking up the person in the country's telephone directory, and sending a snail mail or making a phone call to verify?

What if there was an open-source verified-real-life-identity + crypto key login system, which could be connected to all different discussion software with a Single Sign-On API?

> I suppose it'd be possible to connect it with a login system that checks one's crypto identity?

https://telegram.org/blog/passport, for example.

> People would submit their national ID number or full name, and get back a crypto key, and there could only be one key per national ID?

Usually, with a KYC service, people submit photos of their identity documents, and sometimes also video of themselves vouching for the document (as if you were having an asynchronous conversation with a notary public.)

Later, if someone else comes along and tries to register the same credentials and also presents the same level of evidence, you get a human arbitrator involved and ask each party to present more evidence, e.g. another primary identity document, or an actually-notarized letter of identity claim, etc. The same sort of things you give the police in an identity-theft case.

Thanks for explaining

Nextdoor does postcard based verification so you know people are in your neighborhood. There is still some name calling, but no bots or pure trolls.

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