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Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

I was nodding my head as a member of the choir until

> The only future of the internet is, sadly, proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public network interaction

Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making. I've got to show ID to post something online to kick that can down the road?

The way I see it this is a self resolving problem. Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam, people get tired of it and use methods of finding content that don't show that garbage, these guys, along with their multinational trillion dollar benefactor, go out of business. Problem solved.

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> Yeah, go away. The problem is that Google has monopolized web aggregation. Without it these sites wouldn't be worth making.

So how will you find things?

> Ad driven search engines rank ad driven blog spam

We don't have actual concrete proof that Google (or others) rank content with ads higher because of the ads.

As a contrary corollary, generally as society grows, we've seen an increase in "proof-of-person and proof-of-residence on every public X". Want welfare checks or charity, prove yourself. Want to buy cough syrup or booze, prove yourself. Want to drive, want to shoot a gun, want to XXXX.... get an ID.

In early America, men used to vote by everyone going into a big room and shouting for a while (some minor exaggeration). Now you have to register in advance and show ID, and they maintain registries of everyone and their affiliated party.

Showing identity comes with a lack of trust, and volume + anonymity decreases trust as it's slowly abused.

Look, there's a difference between showing ID to vote or get a free paycheck from someone and showing ID to shout my ideas from a rooftop. I don't need your trust to say things on the internet. If you don't trust me, don't read what I have to say. You can continue trusting Google though, I won't, this is a bait and switch and they're the source of the problem, not your lack of my identifying documents. We have no proof that they're doing it in purpose, I don't care about the intent, I care about the results.

How do I find things. I'm already living life without much google in it. There are a lot of ways to find things. Aggregators like this one have a better signal to noise ratio than google or most places that publish a lot of information. There are search engines that actively blacklist anything with SEO in it. There are community groups that focus on topics of interest. I find that I only use big search engines nowadays to find a git repo for something or find out what time some place closes, that's all they're good for nowadays. I trust people more than faceless services, and I don't care anything about who any of those people are in real life.

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