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Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I have this personal homepage. Available under a domain name. I trust myself, so I put a PNG of a blue check on it. If you don't trust me, I also have a blue check on my website that is put there by my best friend. Now you have to trust me. I guess I'm verified now, authenticated even.

The web really was better with more pseudonyms. I don't care if you are you, I can read your text, judge it on it's merits (according to my yardstick) and I basically don't care if you or other people consume information that is true or false.

Am I missing something?

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thats why 4chan will always be 100 more honest then all these platforms

One of the use cases of Old Twitter was official announcements from public figures and organizations. It is useful to know if the announcement that “life has been found on mars” from “NASA” is actually from the real National Aeronautics and Space Administration account.

We could always, uhh... go to NASA.gov. Weird, I know.

> Am I missing something?

The ability to put fake blue checks on your website isn't the point.

Bluesky (and the web at large) is slowly becoming filled with spam and AI-generated content. Even if you're OK with more spam (not sure why you would be but you do you), why would you be OK with more content generated by non-humans (the vast majority of which attempts to pass as human)? This just makes it harder to find needles of authentic human content in a haystack of slop.

Various levels of verification make it easier to distinguish what's real from not real, for whatever definition of "real" you prefer. Without any such verification, the web just becomes a bigger wasteland.

Real life people use AI. A good example of this is the lawyers who submit court filings with AI generated legal citations. The get caught because the citations are fake (the case cited does not exist).

> The ability to put fake blue checks on your website isn't the point.

That's my point. ;)

>Various levels of verification make it easier to distinguish what's real from not real, for whatever definition of "real" you prefer.

Exactly! ;) Bullshit is still bullshit, whether it's under a real name or a pseudonym. Additionally, blue checks don't stop "real/verified" people from copy/pasting AI-generated content.

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