Hacker News Reader

Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's the challenge. My bet is that there are enough people out there with passports to make an interesting social network.

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).

View on HN

Ok, so you get some critical amount of 'humans' to share "a" passport. Now you've built an expensive and high quality lead finder for scammers/spammers. You've increased the value floor for people submitting fake passports. Also, how are you paying for verification of the passports?, VC money to get from the loss phase to the making enough to support itself on ads? How are you dealing with government data requests, especially in the case where said data can be attributed to a real human?.

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.

You could very well be right. I'm willing to give it a shot and see.

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)

I see a lot of value in a network where I can be confident I am talking to real people.

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.

I’ll definitely look into this. But starting with them would limit me to the US only (I’m sure other countries have similar things, integrating each would take a lot of work though). I want to start with passports because they are a true multi national document.

I would stay the hell away from any site that wants a copy of my passport.

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.

There is no such word. Even if there is it would be trivial to create a bot that avoids this.

Passports are the only practical way to ensure that I’m talking to a human. Do you have a better idea?

If I think you're a bot I'd ask you to say the word. The word exists and it works every time. No one is going to train a foundation model just to say the word, it's too expensive.

Prompt injection can be mitigated but not this prompt rejection.

You're so delusional, mate. There is no such word.

That is your loss then.

The idea of uploading my passport in order to talk on a social network is quite delusional.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com