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Comment by magpi3 | Hacker News Reader

I've thought this for a while: a day will come when the anonymous internet becomes a thing of the past. It really feels like we are already there but not everyone realizes it yet. What's the point of conversing with someone on the internet (like right now) if you can't tell the difference between a bot and a real person? And it will only get worse.

But what does an anon-free internet even look like? Is it even possible? Or will all online content eventually be considered untrustable and worthless? You can see a world where newspapers (online or otherwise) make a comeback simply because of the need for a trusted gatekeeper (which is what I imagine made them valuable in the first place). It's wild to think about.

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I’ve come to this same conclusion. Either we accept an internet crawling with bots and astroturf, or we abandon the anonymity and have an internet with only verified humans.

Another option - we keep the wild west unverified web, dotted with islands of verified/vetted spaces.

so back to compuserve and 'gated' knowledge (like on discord)

Or a different sort of Internet appears. free and open internet is polluted with commercialization and greed, eventually cleaner spaces will be created with stronger restrictions like geo, social trust chains, and cost of posting going up so high it’s uneconomical to spam. What good is a single international internet for social media when everyone is bots?

It is a false dichotomy that abandoning anonymity must happen with verifying humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge-proof . The only trick is who holds the infrastructure for the proofs. A single person or small group like, oh, the one(s) behind World Coin? People on ycombinator might know that one. Sufficiently decentralized, FOSS, /true/ non-profit (like Wikipedia), maybe. (Ironic I mention Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' WT.Social never did take off.)

Further, the challenge is not completely autonomous bots that are somehow separate of humans, never has been, all code on Earth has and will have a human imprint even in the wildest AGI fantasies. The first false dichotomy is anonymity and veracity, the second false dichotomy is human and bot. And tho biggest challenge comes from a specific human-bot combination, the Cory Doctorow Reverse Centaur (though Centaurs also complicate things). One human can suddenly impact the "volume" of discourse, like a magic hidden megaphone that somehow no one can detect at a dinner party where the lights are too low to see who is talking. /And/ if there's a door check at the party, it's easy to transport someone who makes pennies a day to show up at the door, look like anyone you want, and then come inside with a magic hidden microphone that you provide them.

I think it's less about proving human, more about proving /reputation associated with an entity/. It's not about whether "awbvious" is human, but whether "awbvious" is committed to acting human. Committed to not use a hidden, magic megaphone. Committed to not using hidden, magic megaphones with others. Which I am.

Why do you think that the anon-free internet will ensure there are no bots?

current bots are run and financed by humans already.

And what makes you think that current newspapers will evolve and regain trust? (as most of them are financed by 'rich' owners and therefore somehow influenced by the 'desire' of the owner).

Yep, in an anon free internet if you can get a bot running it's worth even more than on the anon internet because you know exactly who the data belongs to that your capturing, and you can attempt to directly influence known people.

This and the myriad of poor people that exist will have financial incentives to sell their identity to groups that will run bots behind them.

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