> I kinda wish there was an imaginary "real person with an honest identity" type system that did exist where we could interact without the land of bots and dishonest users and so forth. But that obviously brings its own issues.

That sounds like it could be done in a way that isnt terrible. As a user, you sign up with an identity provider by submitting personal documents and/or an interview to prove that you’re a real person.

Then, when you sign up to an app/service, you login with the ID provider and come up with a username for that service.

The ID provider does not give the website provider any of your personal information; they just verify that you exist (and you login their their secure portal)

The identity providers could further protect privacy by automatically deleting all of your personal documents from their databases as soon as the verification process is complete. They could also have a policy to not store any logs, such as the list of services you’ve signed up for.

This could still be gamed (ex: a phone scammer tricking someone into getting verified with a provider to get a valid ID), but itd make things much harder and costlier.

Am I missing anything obvious that would make this a terrible idea?

Your idea becomes useless for deterrence from the "automatically deleting" point. The only benefits for having users who are "real person with an honest identity" accrue when people either can't make many accounts (so banning an user actually bans them instead of simply makes them get a new account) or when you can identify them in case of fraud or child sexual abuse material or some such.

So at the very least the "identity provider" absolutely needs to keep a list of all real identities offered to a particular service; otherwise the bad actors will just re-verify some identity as many times as needed.

But if you give up the "hard privacy" requirement, then technically it's possible. It would also mean that the identity provider would sometimes get subpoenas to reveal these identities.

Yeah but making it difficult to create multiple accounts increases the power of a ban. It may not catch a CSAM distributor if the ID provider doesnt keep logs, but it will make it easier to prevent CSAM (and other illegal stuff and spam) on a website/app since its much harder for those people to create multiple accounts.

> So at the very least the "identity provider" absolutely needs to keep a list of all real identities offered to a particular service; otherwise the bad actors will just re-verify some identity as many times as needed.

The website operator is the one independently banning the ID, not the ID provider. Sure, someone could create multiple IDs on multiple ID providers to dodge those bans, but that’s harder to do, and there could also be a fee charged for each verification request.

I could see this also providing ID services for certain niches, like if you want to create a forum for registered nurses only, you could allow registrations only from ID providers that check those credentials. (Or give verified users a special badge, etc). The damn thing could be gamified.

I just worry that, in the real world, this idea will devolve into the dsytopian nightmare that is China’s social credit system no matter how hard anyone tries to prevent it. All it would take is one well placed “think of the children!” argument to justify invasive tracking and data collection/retention.

…but man, if this world didnt suck so bad, a system like that could really help clean up the internet.

Well this sound very similar to PKI and domain registar so the issues with them are pretty same.

But like PKI, if we can have id providers delegated by high authorities, the roots could be governments which could delete to smaller entites and so on. Not to much diff from pasports or liscence

Governor Dao has a better working system for this already. Authenticated anonymous identities. They are currently targeting the NFT space, but this tech could also be applied to online communities. https://authentication.governordao.org/

Without any background info, that looks like a joke (or scam) site. It asks you to record yourself repeating “The best things in life will always be free”, like some demon is going to kill you in 7 days if you dont share this email lmao.

Idk what Governor Dao is, but using blockchain tech for identification sounds interesting. However, the tech is seemingly always associated with scammers and criminals, so idk how successful it would be as the backend for a system based on trust and sharing sensitive data.

The thing I was thinking of when it comes to the ID provider is the potential power an ID provider has... if say you wanted to be validated, but still have some anonymity in some cases ... or just if they decide to invalidate you for any given reason.

Granted all very hypothetical stuff, I'd give it a spin for sure.

I suspect that even if we could we would wind up with a disturbing "reverse Turing test". The dark suggestion that there isn't any difference between us and other malfunctioning machine learning arrangements trained by huge data sets. They may be objectively homo sapiens with honest identities devoted to something which makes them act indistinguishable from a bot.

> they won't like what a completely moderation free site looks like.

So you say, but we've never actually had a chance to see one. We have seen content moderation slippery-slope its way to highly opinionated censorship... every time it's been tried.

There used to be a fair chance that you'd stumble on CSAM on 4chan. Without filtering and aggressive moderation, that's what ends up happening (yes 4chan did have moderation to delete the stuff back then and dish out IP bans, but it wasn't fast enough to save people from seeing those things)

One alternative to moderation is to make people pay to post. If you set the price high enough, you'll disuade most spammers and some other species of asshole. Unfortunately, people who hate moderation also tend to hate paying for online services.

True, this keeps the community small and those work really well without moderation.

The moment it becomes a bit more popular, shit hits the fan. I am still for a light approach. Banning spammers, trolls, and illegal porn posters is a separate issue for me, but many platforms began to delete unpopular opinions.

The most heavy handed moderated places are very often the most toxic ones, I think they are far worse than free for all examples. Given, that might not work for the masses.

>but we've never actually had a chance to see one

Have we not had site after site that does this eventually start moderating for reasons every time? And we have darkweb sites...

What are we missing?

This is false. 4chan, some early reddit, voat, and a number of other sites.

Moreover, that's the point: it's as i.possible to have a healthy anonymous forum available to the world as it is to have a large society with no laws or government, that isn't dystopian.

> early reddit

Reddit is the best example of why heavy moderation is worse than lack of moderation.

It's a difficult problem.

No moderation = porn, gore and nazi discussion. Period.

"Light" moderation often = bad-faith trolls taking advantage of your moderation.

HN does a good job of moderating for civility and effort of the post, rather than ideology.

Here's the thing: Talking about controversial topics, or debating with people who think differently than you, takes a lot of effort online, because there are so many trolls and others baiting you into defending a position without putting any effort to explain their own.

So yeah, heavy moderation is an unfortunate necessity in some forums.

I don't see it as an unfortunate thing for private spaces. It's very natural, and realistically the span of opinions where you can get productive dialogue going between people is not infinite. You're never going to get any useful discussion from, say, anarchists and neo-nazis talking to each other.

That's only because the most powerful reddit moderators are basically corrupt dictators.

It's not just reddit, though - if you're going to start moderating, you have a meta-problem to address which is what to do about opinionated moderators.

It also puts the moderator under pressure. User will start ushering demands what you should ban. In worst case law enforcement too.

I don't really understand why people waste so much time getting something removed instead of just reading something else, but there are whole communities that live for banning others by now.

In a larger legal scope platforms are under heavy scrutiny by moral busybodies right now.

All mods are opinionated. They're either humans, or bots programmed by humans. I don't see why you're trying to deny humanity to moderators.

All judges are opinionated. They're humans. I don't see why you're trying to deny humanity to judges.

Read the above and reconsider if your argument makes sense. It stands to reason that if you have any position of "power," even if it's just "random internet moderator," you should at least try to be fair, consistent, and reasonable.

The problem is where the line is drawn. Arguments against explicitly illegal content (like CSAM) or unhelpful content (like spam) are used to justify content moderation that goes far beyond. Moderation on the biggest social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.) includes more than just basic moderation to make the platform viable. They include a number of elements that are more like censorship or propaganda. These platforms ultimately bias their audience towards one set of values/ideologies based on the moderation policies they implement. And given that most of these companies are based in highly-progressive areas and/or have employee bases that are highly-progressive, it is pretty clear what their biases are. This present reality is unacceptable for any society that values free and open discourse.

Propaganda and bias are ultimately subjective notions. Suggest that kings are no different from the rest of us today aside from what their parents did to seize power and it would be slammed as wicked propaganda denying their divine right. Heck just suggest that disfavored groups are people!

I think the issue is more that these are for-profit corporations who care almost exclusively about advertising revenue. Now, if 10% of your 'product' (*your users) is driving away the other 90% of your product, and you can no longer sell them to your advertisers, well? I'm guessing it's more a business decision, they've decided that eliminating 'fringe views' is best for business.

It's kind of like an advertising dystopian situation, where you want this homogenized audience (preferably rather dumbed down) who will eagerly buy whatever is advertised. And, you don't want to scare any of them away.

Notice this view is not partisan or ideological, it's just pure capitalism, how can we wring the most value out of this setup for the shareholders, that's all that matters. The end result is the current mess we now have, in which nobody but the advertiser is all that happy.