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Comment by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | Hacker News Reader

identity verified, approved opinions only, and dead on arrival.

most humans abhor sterile environments.

I agree with what you are saying here, but social media is pretty sterile. It's heavily censored as it is. YouTube comments is awful for it, with hiding comments and all the rest.*

I find it next to useless. Faecebook has told me about birthdays and people's bereavements weeks after they've happened. It looks awful if I reply to those late.

* I'm often confused by why. YouTube hid a thread in which someone pointed out the A Team had reused a Blues Brother joke.

If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it.

That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. In my experience, the best kind of online interactions are those where people don't have to be limited by what their offline ID is.

Why would anyone want any kind of non-politician-approved interaction? Are you a traitor or a paedophile? In fact give me all your chat history and let's go through it, because I have no idea what we'd even approve.

(dixit every European government)

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Oh and all your private photos too. Think of the children! (and let's NOT discuss that when it comes to child abuse in Europe BY FAR the biggest culprits are European government employees. School teachers, and people in youth services. That's >90% of all child abusers in the EU. The youth services part of that would be the EXACT individuals screaming about thinking of the children. Don't worry. They've put rules in the Chat Control legislation protecting themselves from ... well the law)

Reputation system and elected or at least transparent moderation is what's needed to curb any bad actors. In fact, identity verification would make it easier for spammers, just buy stolen identities in bulk in darknet for a few dollars and fire away. Facebook supposedly leans very hard into real identities and the end result is a dead wasteland of bots talking to bots. And on the other hand, there are plenty of regular forums with not a sign of bad actors, because they were collectively exterminated and the newcomers are vetted.

"If identity verification is what it takes to curb russian trolls, then be it."

It's far from being just Russian. China (wumao/50 centers) and the west have armies of them. The latter was out in force during the Covid business making sure everyone agreed.

In all three cases, we are talking about government agents (human or otherwise) who are the least likely to be affected by identity verification. They can come in by the back door.

Well current social media has been unusable for a couple of years surely?

> most humans abhor sterile environments.

i abhor short sterile attitudes like this!

> approved opinions only

i fully expect most users of eurosky will not experience any censorship. this is just such a ridiculous over-dramatization, that is so preposterously lopsided.

please man. this sounds like the tin foil hat wearing nutcase shit that is ruining the US and the world right now. there's ways to debate & talk about these things, but this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug. you are 100% on one side, totally polarized into spot, and it's clear nothing is going to budge you: that's not a very hackerly spirit, and being so closed to possibility should be disqualifying.

> this isn't starting conversation, it's just being smug

How you could imagine someone calmly setting out their stall of ideas isn't starting conversation, but you making up their emotions as a counter is?

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