Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

"clean" / "sanitized" is not the terms I really want. I think a web (living under a democratic legal system) that uses sane forms of digital identity verification will help reduce the ridiculous levels of online fraud we are seeing. (yes citation needed)

To me that's (again under legal / democratic protections) using some centralised public private key (probably) and a curated env and this is (sort of being very generous) a first step towards that world.

View on HN

I guess I just don't see this "insane level of fraud"(?) By this I mean that it doesn't really affect my experience on the web, even if I were to entertain the idea that it does, in fact, exist. When I think about my annoyances with the web, they aren't about how I am drowning in link farms or whatever -- ironically my true consumer annoyances are quite the opposite: all the big players have stopped providing me value. Google shows me entire pages of ads before any relevant organic search results. Reddit killed my preferred third party client. Meanwhile Twitter, well, you know. Nothing proposed here does anything for that, and I get that it's not trying to solve that, but my point is that none of my "top 10 problems with the web" are being solved by this humongous change. My problems just have nothing to do with sock puppet accounts or whatever. Perhaps that's a top 10 problem that advertisers have with the web, but that's not really super compelling to me (the same way my problems don't seem to be compelling to them). If anything, as stated in various places, these hyper centralized ID systems increase the likelihood that my problems will never be solved. If it becomes even harder than it already is to make a new browser or a new search engine, then I guess I'm just flat out of luck. The era of "reasonable search results" will be solidified as a temporary blip on the timeline of the web.

I do fraud prevention as my job. The "ridiculous levels of online fraud" isn't happening. There's been a mild uptick in fraud which you would expect from an event that impoverishes millions (covid), but all those people on your favorite website that are so crazy they must be bots spreading misinformation? Nope, those are almost entirely real people. Millions of people are just that awful, hateful, spiteful, dumb, whatever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com