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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

I suspect one day we will need human identifiers (eg.: like digital passports) to meaningfully participate on the internet.

I'm not saying I like it or that I want it. But I'm not seeing how else to fix the problem.

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Maybe, but I'm not sure how you solve a few problems:

1. Allowing multiple identities & pseudonyms - maybe I don't want my identity as @furry_mpreg_artist in one discord to be directly linked to @database_expert on StackOverflow or to @local_bicycle_repairperson on my local facebook group?

2. People obtaining these digital passports, and immediately giving/selling/losing them to some bot who can juggle those bits as easily as a human can.

3. What happens if you lose access to your passport? A toddler spills cranberry juice into your desktop, an adversary hacks your computer, you have a psychotic break and overwrite your hard drive platters with magnets & hammers?

The crowd which screams that everyone is a nazi wants to put barcodes on all of us.

And if you are unwilling to abide by the rules, they don't want your participation.

Which is totally fair.

As history has shown, the set of rules will grow to exclude more people over time. Perhaps even including you.

That's putting a lot of words in a lot of people's mouths.

I don't see any actual problems in your list.

1. This is not a problem but a feature request that initially is not covered by the proposal (ie no pseudonyms)

2. This is not a relevant problem (red herring) because stealing an identity is already illegal

3. The same password or identity recovering steps as usual (see: FSAID)

1. I think that it's sufficiently important to be in version 1.0; this isn't like that truck that doesn't come with paint or an entertainment system.

2. I disagree. If the point of the proposed solution is to prevent bots from impersonating humans, it's gotta have some mechanism to actually solve that problem - and if a human can hand over the keys to their identity to a bot, then the solution absolutely does not solve the problem. (And identity theft was only one of the ways a bot could get a human's identity.)

You don't need a digital passport to do this. You just need to engage in communities where people actually know each other. As the article says, if you don't know someone they may as well be an NPC, and there's no point in treating an NPC with respect. Whether or not they're actually an LLM chatbot is irrelevant.

The contrast between large, mostly-anonymous communities like Reddit, HN, Bluesky, etc. and smaller group chats, forums and Discords where people actually know each other is stark. When a person you've played games and chatted with for years expresses a political opinion you disagree with, your reaction is very different from when some X/Bluesky user you've never seen before says that same political opinion in a reply to your (tw/sk)eet.

Remote attestation, with cryptographically-sealed boot chains to verify to the server that you're a human sitting in front of a computer, is coming whether people like it or not. Techies will wail and gnash teeth, but there's probably no other way to have online communities survive.

I think that's only true of large communities, no? Why would I need that for a relatively small and local D&D discord?

It will have to be up to the communities in question. For some, it won't really matter; for other communities, it will be absolutely necessary. For those people, it will be necessary to have some sort of provable means of identity.

It will also be necessary to enforce sanctions on people who violate the trust of a community. The stick needs to be equal to the task of driving people toward the carrot.

I've been saying this for over a decade. This will eventually become an absolute necessity.

sama has just the solution

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/s...

I have a sibling comment to yours pointing out some issues with that.

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