I agree that’s not a great state to be in, but think about it from that locals new org’s point of view: comment spam is a major and hard-to-solve problem, and by tying commenting to the real-world identity and enforcement of bots that Facebook provides, the news organizations get to solve that thorny problem for free. Plus news orgs are already using FB to syndicate/share, so it’s really a no-brained for them.

I wonder what the world would look like with a independent, trustworthy, non-advertising-based company/organization which provided a similar anti-spam service for free, with the option to publicly tie to verified identities as well. (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)

> (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)

Did we not see the same studies?

As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.

I've been writing about and pushing for a decentralized system that doesn't require centralized services or verified identities - because any centralized system will have biases and flaws, and having real identities tied to your online comments has can have serious real world consequence.

https://adecentralizedworld.com/2020/06/a-trust-and-moderati... - With this, a site or users of the site can choose many trusted moderators from the network and as the system grows it gets better over time.

What about to use DISQUS? I rarely see spammed DISQUS comments.

If you want to be authentication for everything then you definitely can't intermingle the authentication part of that (who is this person) with the authorisation part of that (what are they allowed to do). In other words, Facebook deciding I don't have the right to use it's service should have no bearing on whether I have provided evidence that I am who I assert to be, and whether other services should choose to service me.

My sentiment exactly. It’s crazy to think Facebook can simultaneously ban me from their platform and essentially steal whatever $X amount of dollars I spent on the oculus store. What makes it worse is they’re not even letting people who’ve made an oculus account in the past escape from this as they are now forcing ALL accounts to be linked to Facebook in the next couple years.

FB sounds like it's trying to be an multinational version of WeChat by becoming the operating system of life. There are many cultural reasons why this is feasible in China but not in the US (and many other places)

What are these cultural reasons?

I'd guess for starters that an extreme authoritarian centralized state is already normalized in China. USA is creeping that direction but there's still a ways to go

Facebook sounds more like the communist party, where they are requiring your real name, web activity, or get banned and have all your things taken away (Oculus usage, paid apps, can’t message friends, etc).