And how exactly do you do that? At the end of the day there is no such thing as a comment/vote from a real human, it's all mediated by digital devices. At the point the signal is digitized a bot can take over the process.
In this hypothetical, let's say we'd tackle the dark web passport market issue when we get there.
There is also another issue: people can have more than one passport if they're dual citizens. But you know what... I think that's fine.
I sure don't.
> why not social media?
privacy?
In my case, right now it's very easy for you to figure out my real name by just googling my nickname. Registering on a website like the one I am implementing won't sacrifice much more of my privacy.
Of course, getting someone to share their passport will be another filter. But I hope that I can convince people that the benefits are worth it (and that I will be able to keep their data safe, by only storing hashes of everything).
Maybe I'm wrong, but just a social network of 'real people' doesn't seem like enough in itself. What is going to bring people there with the restrictions and potential risks you're creating.
All I can say is that I personally see huge value in a social network for real people. Personally I am sick of arguing with what are likely legions of duplicate accounts/bots/russian trolls online. I want some reassurance that I'm not wasting my time and am actually reaching real humans in my interactions online.
Success to me is 1000 MAU. There are companies out there that do passport verification for a reasonable fee with a fair amount of free verifications to start with (which will handle 1000 MAU just fine). If the number of users wishing to take part is significantly higher then I will explore either ads or charging a small fee during registration.
I'm still very far from needing to cross that bridge though. Same for some of the other questions you've raised. I'd have to do a lot more research to come to a solid stance of what to do when government data requests come in. But I would guess that there isn't much choice but to abide by the request. If you want true anonymity from the government then this place will not be for you (but then I'd say not many social networks are for you in that case)
As a user I can't do anything related to the passport stuff and I know many people who likewise wouldn't be interested in doing that, because we live in the states. A more "normal" approach here would be to use one of the government ID verification systems for your state ID. Most of us are willing to expose that information, since it's what you show when you go to the store to prove your age/identity.
As for a new turing test there is a magic word that bots are not allowed to use that guarantees you're talking to a human.
Passports are the only practical way to ensure that I’m talking to a human. Do you have a better idea?
Prompt injection can be mitigated but not this prompt rejection.
I would say LLMs have told me more interesting things than any human has in the past year and it is not even close.
I suspect at some point, a new structure will be figured out that it doesn't matter if you are talking to a human or LLM. If that doesn't happen, at some point I will probably just stop trying to talk to humans online and just talk to Claude or whatever the strongest model is of the moment.
I think there is actually a use case for blockchain (don't pile on!) for this. I have a vague idea of a unique token that goes on every camera and can be verified from the blockchain. If a picture has the token you know it's real... like i said, it's vague idea but i think it's coming
The problem with this is that it's still easy to forge.
I'll certainly consider playing with ways to identify human uniqueness that don't require passports. But passports are the most obvious route to doing so.
So even if the DB leaks no one (except the government) will be able to tie your real life identity to the account.
It would seem a lot better to just partner with an existing company that takes care of that part of identity verification. Your job is still to compose all of these signals and metrics and distill them into a simple "everyone is human" network, but the actual job of being a passport jockey can be avoided IMO.