Comment by usefulcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usefulcat | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm also not sure how much The_Donald was as a community. The sheer volume of users at its height seemed to involve a huge amount of brand new accounts you never saw again / never posted again (except when they show up as a group again), and etc. Or those without brand new accounts show up and post strange dishonest lead in type posts that sort of try to lead folks down a bigoted path ... that you can blatantly see in their post history.

This is very much a side note, but I do wonder what sorts of things would be enabled with more visibility into this kind of information. For example, average and median ages of all accounts in a thread or subthread. Per-user visualizations of posting histories (time of day, subreddit, etc). Information that would enable automated correlation (by time or subject) of posts from different accounts. Stuff like that. I'm sure they must have something internally that does at least some of the above.

For general web forums, I would personally like to see personal SSL certificates required to create an account. That would at least weed out people creating multiple accounts. As for cases where anonymity is required, there could be other information that balances out missing info on the certificate. For example one field would be how much they paid for the cert (assuming the CA has variable pricing). So someone could for example pay $20 for an anonymous certificate (just a certificate number and pseudonym, possibly an anonymous email), yet it would be cost prohibitive to get unlimited number of certs to create fake accounts.

Also, along with personal SSL certs, it would be nice to have a system to keep track of a person's reputation score across multiple forums.

As soon as those metrics are exposed though, people will start hacking them by purchasing older accounts, etc.

A less common, but I'm seeing more frequent tacit are user accounts where they delete their posts after X time so the account looks like it has been around, but you've no idea where / what was posted.

Those users almost always head down the rabbit hole after a few posts....

You can try something pushshift.io

..which seems like it would make it more expensive to achieve the same level of credibility via such 'fake' accounts. Seems like an improvement to me.

It should be difficult to get in or at least have some reputation system built-in like StackOverflow. Proof that you behave and have valuable opinions. It is quite bad if thousands of bots can be made easily and post spam, fakenews and manipulations.

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