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Comment by safog | Hacker News Reader

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think a privacy friendly alternative is going to exist. It's going to go the way of show me your drivers license to use my site.

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Why wouldn't criminals like they do now just use stolen identities? If someone verifies they are a person that doesn't mean they're not leaving their PC on with some AI that uses their credentials either.

The point of these systems is not to ban any possibility of fake accounts. The point is to add friction so that creating accounts is harder than banning them, so criminals can’t recreate them at scale. Otherwise bans take seconds to overcome and a single person can run 10000 automated identities.

Invite trees approximately solve this problem. I don't need to know who you are to know that someone in good standing in the community invited you.

And that if you misbehave you get booted out and whoever invited you gets dinged. If they get dinged enough they become a leaf rather than a branch.

No credential will be sufficient, this is basically an unsolvable enforcement problem. That doesn't obviate the utility of rules and norms, but there's no airtight system which will hold back AI generated content.

Verifiable credentials have been an idea for a long time now. It wouldn't be that hard to solve. Sign everything you post with a verifiable credential. Implement support on all social media sites. The question is whether the forum implementers, governing bodies, and social media site owners want to try to build a solution like this or not.

How will a verifiable credential stop people posting AI slop? You can already give the AI agents access to your digital identities to interact with?

Layer on captchas. It won't completely stop slop but it's an incentive against slop flooding. And I mean, nothing is stopping a human from just going into ChatGPT by hand and asking for output and copy/pasting that into an HN post box.

It doesn’t stop people posting AI slop, it stops people from posting AI slop more than once. If you ban somebody for spamming today, they just create a new account and keep on spamming. If you can determine they are the same person you banned before using verifiable credentials, it makes the ban actually effective.

I feel like we need a distributed system/protocol that allows people to have pseudonyms not linked to their real identity, but with a shared reputation/trust score, so if you’re a bad actor using a pseudonym your real identity and all your other sock puppets are penalized too.

I know very little about this but sense that some combination of buzzwords like homomorphic encryption, zk-snarks, and yes, blockchains could be useful.

Of course this would present problems if any of your identities were ever compromised and your reputation destroyed.

Driving everything by reputation-weighted identities just creates echo-chambers you then cannot escape.

The most useful time for the blowhard spout off at me is at the moment it makes me most uncomfortable. Because the blowhard probably has a valid point at some level, he’s just being an ass about it.

When we meet that moment with discipline, are able to identify and respond to the kernels of truth and ignore the chaff belted out, focus on the merits of the argument irrespective of the source of an adversarial viewpoint, we thrive.

I like the blowhards just the way they are, unruly and insolent.

Problem is, if a token is anonymous, then it follows that it can be bought and sold. Which breaks the original use case of the token, right?

That is exactly what will happen. The sad thing is, it needs to happen. I've found myself advocating for this lately, when 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even considered taking that position.

If Web3-like session-signing had taken off enough to become OS or even browser-native, we would have had a fighting chance of remaining mostly anonymous. But that just didn't happen, and isn't going to happen. Mostly because fraud ruined Web3.

>The sad thing is, it needs to happen.

No, it doesn't.

There's literally no other way to combat rampant botting, child abuse, and nation-state originating disinformation campaigns and the intentional creation of public discord.

That's a false dichotomy. There are other possible approaches to address these issues that don't include ID verification. It also isn't the golden solution, verified accounts could still be stolen or bought.

Then provide a better solution to the market. I doubt you can, but you never know.

You're a fool if you believe this. Nation states will still have utter impunity. That's why they build, buy or bully backdoors to secure design. The Epstein class will still get away with murder. All the little poeple will cower in fear of reprisal for speaking their minds.

None of what you said is of any relevance to the point at hand.

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