Hacker News Reader

Comment by evandwight | Hacker News Reader

Why can't you verify real identities? Can't you use phone numbers, photos of IDs, charging a credit card, verification of physical addresses, or invites to increase the difficulty if creating fake accounts?

Yes, there is an issue of increasing the difficulty if signing up for real users but once accounts are tied to real identities doesn't that allow crowd moderation?

- person whose fallen into your apparent fallacy

View on HN

Somehow authenticating every user with a "real ID" doesn't help much unless you engage in content moderation.

A system like that would be complex, costly, a major barrier for growth, and would likely still be vulnerable to fraud. You probably wouldn't have much opportunity to take legal action against abusers, even if you could identify them. Plus, safely storing the user info needed to make a system like that work would be a huge liability.

And at the end of the day you still have to moderate the platform to identify abuse and take action against abusers. But if you use "real IDs" that probably wont be a problem because you'll have no users anyways.

I should clarify - crowd sourced moderation, not no moderation. People can still be banned if the community doesn't like them.

I broadly agree but invites aren't complex. See lobste.rs

lobste.rs is tiny enough to be irrelevant, and already virtually unusable because it's unwilling to ban people who are unpleasant without being unambiguous rulebreakers.

That swings to the other side of "you either die an MVP or build content moderation": people are not going to submit real ID for a random project. They've only just started implementing this on Youtube ""age verification"" because they were made to, and Facebook only did it as an arbitrary after-the-fact hammer. It causes all sorts of problems (what do you regard as valid? What about deadnames?).

Twitter and lots of other sites do phone number verification which is less onerous but far easier to spoof.

And of course the biggest, highest profile moderation challenge involves people whose identities are known but nonetheless are toxic to the community. Including the "final boss" of content moderation challenges, Donald Trump.

I agree. You build the MVP then as you need content moderation you start requiring more onerous proof of identity. The only goal is to make ban evasion more difficult.

For everything else, just ask the community what they want. If they don't like Donald Trump in the conversation, then he's gone. Donald can then attempt to find a community (subreddit) that accepts him. That community can be quarantined or banned if people really don't like it.

Thank you for the feedback. I strongly suspect I'm wasting my time :(

Privacy issues? That come up alot here on HN

I agree that you'd need to securely store the personal information but as it's only used during account sign up it could be an entirely separate system.

It's definitely a huge draw back that you'd risk such important information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com