I would love to see a commenting site with strong, pseudonymous identity support, to create a greater barrier to the racist and misogynistic trolls who infest the default sub-reddits currently.

Some options:

1. Register with a phone number (do some basic checks to avoid Google Voice, Twilio, etc.)

2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials.

3. Participation is restricted to desktop and mobile apps employing strong anti-cracking measures and linking accounts to the current device only by way of unique hardware IDs.

I think MetaFilter tries to accomplish this goal, via #2 ($5 signup fee), right?

I don't entirely follow points #1 and #3.

Re #1: There are myriad ways to get a temporary phone number, beyond Google Voice, Twilio, etc. For example, I can just use an anonymous pay-as-you-go phone. What would this accomplish beyond creating some slight inconvenience?

Re #3: I get the need for strong security. You could require multi-factor auth. But what does disallowing participation through a web browser get you that 2FA doesn't?

These are sincere questions. I'm not trying to be snarky, just understand what you're saying, because I agree there's room for improvement in this area.

To answer your first question: MetaFilter does accomplish this goal with a $5 one-time fee (as you thought) required to comment or post in combination with heavy moderation, and it works quite well. The community is largely civil and discussions are often quite thoughtful.

#1. That's true, but it would still be more of a barrier to creating secondary troll accounts than what reddit has now.

#3. The idea is to tie the account a specific device (such as an iPhone), by generating a unique signature in the app. For this to be enforceable, logins outside the app cannot be permitted -- otherwise signatures can be forged.

Fair points.

#1. I still think #2 is a more important barrier, but I don't see a huge downside with this either. You didn't explicitly say this, but I think you're making the point that troll accounts can never be completely eradicated. But you can make it significantly less convenient for them, while minimally inconveniencing most legitimate users.

#3. I get the general idea, but I don't see how it's substantially more secure than requiring 2FA. I mean, GMail, Dropbox, AWS, etc., seem to think 2FA is sufficiently secure for very sensitive data, and they allow interacting through the web browser. Plus, at the end of the day, you'll need some mechanism for adding new devices, which will effectively work like 2FA – I presume.

> 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials.

is that a good idea? If accounts are paid, then "richer" opinions have bigger impact on the site

I applaud your sentiment, but honestly, if you can afford Internet access, you can afford a one-time $1 (or even $5) sign-up fee.

I'm sure people will come up with some scenario where that's not 100% true, but I think it generally is. And you could probably devise alternate solutions for those exceptions. Some ideas off the top of my head:

1) The sign-up fee could be waived for anybody signing up with a .edu address.

2) Integrate with major library systems, and say the sign-up fee can be waived if you authenticate with a local library, enter your library card number, etc.

3) Offer a refund of the sign-up fee after 6 months of non-troll behavior.

I don't know. But I do think the benefits of having some money on the line and some basic identity verification outweigh the risk of drowning out some voices.

Alright, let's say 10¢. Everyone with a personal Internet-enabled device can most certainly afford that. You could even refund them the money later, as the goal is to obtain the payment identity -- not the cash.

Not everyone has a way to pay online, especially if you are accepting credit cards.

You can add funds to a PayPal account without a credit card. You can buy a PayPal card with cash or send funds through MoneyGram. There may be a minimum required amount though. I'm not entirely sure of the specifics, but I know, in general, it's possible.

Someone should make a version of reddit where your upvote/downvote record is what shapes the ordering for you. There should be a global rank and an individual rank that is calculated for each user something like the netflix 5 star system. That way the hateful stuff won't appear unless you upvoted hateful stuff. Liberals and conservatives could both get the content they want going to the same politics forum.

It should be assumed that when the professional executive class gets their hands on the company they will try to arbitrarily censor and ban things. The system has to be decentralized so the parent company is technically unable to do this even if north korea were to purchase it.

What you are essentially describing, also used by Netflix, is a "collaborative filtering" machine learning algorithm [1]. It is a fascinating sparse-matrix problem that could be applied to many situations dependent upon individual preferences.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

For my site, I coded a recommendation engine based on cosine similarity. I initially tried Bayes' Theorem and conditional probabilities but abandoned the effort when I didn't see results that made a lot of sense (probably due to a lack of training data). Instead, I used https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity as a base and then modified. If the results prove effective over time, I'm going to make the algorithm an option for users to select for generating their front page instead of upvotes.

> Liberals and conservatives could both get the content they want going to the same politics forum.

Hey, that's my thought! And I thought I was being original. Also probably not the first to think that either.

The whole "shapes the ordering for you" idea isn't bad; I think maybe even is a good one, largely. But, the one thing I take issue with is customization, or being more mosaic. Movies and TV shows it totally makes sense for; but I think it's a little more nuanced with news sites given the broader scope of topics and such.

Amusingly, once upon a time, this was reddit's goal. Everyone had a "Recommended" tab, and it never ever worked. They killed it years ago.

Sounds a little bit similar to this one idea I read about, but am having trouble finding right now (fakeedit before submit: it was https://github.com/neyer/respect ), which was meant to be a system for determining respect and reputation in large groups.

The idea was that each person would select some number of people to state that they trust/respect (fakeedit: this should say respect most of the times I say trust, but I don't feel like replacing all of them atm. mentally substitute the word 'trust' with 'respect') them to some degree (between 0 and 1, or between -1 and 1, but the negative ones were counted as zero until the last step). These would together form a (square) matrix of how much each person has granted 'initial' trust to who. Also each person's statement of who they trust is a vector, and it is normalized to have magnitude 1 (before being used as part of the matrix. This is to defend against attacks from people making extra identities that all trust each other, or things like that)

The idea would then be that people tend to trust people that people they trust, trust, so it would be useful to determine what trust levels there are when including 'indirect' trust. To do this, one adds the matrix to the matrix raised to the second power, plus the matrix raised to the third power, for some number of levels (I think they recommended 3 levels). For each of these, on the last level, one can include the negative values in order to include /distrust/. (But one does not want to include it in earlier levels, otherwise one would end up trusting people that people you distrust, distrust, which probably isn't what you want).

Then to find someone's indirect trust vector you look at the appropriate, uh, I think row, of the resulting matrix.

In addition, there is a measure of how much your 'initial' trust vector aligns with your 'indirect' trust vector, by taking the dot product of the two, (and I think also dividing by the magnitudes of the two vectors). This is sort of a measure of how similar your trust is to that of the people you trust.

....

oh, I think I originally saw it as a blog post, but it looks like it was by neyer and is at https://github.com/neyer/respect

...

So, a roughly analogue thing for using upvotes as the input would I guess be, uh...

To determine the ranking that a given person would see, consider the list of all of a person's upvotes/downvotes (or all in the last 6 months or w/e?) as a vector, and for each person who upvoted or downvoted anything in the thread one is looking at, take the dot product of their voting record vector with one's own voting record, and weigh their votes in the given thread based on that dot product (perhaps adjusted for the magnitude of the voting record vectors in question).

So, if someone is someone who you vote similarly to, their upvotes increase the score you see of posts, and if you tend to vote the opposite way from them, their upvotes would decrease the score you see on posts (the opposite would be the case with downvotes).

However, this seems like it might be computationally expensive? For each thread one looks at, getting each person who voted a single time in that thread, and then get every time they voted in the last <x> time ( or at least all the times that they voted, where you also voted), and compare all of your (recent) votes with theirs.

Another concern that I think people would have would be that it might produce some echo-chamber-ish effects, but I don't know if that would really be a problem.

It might be that if one votes for what makes good arguments for their position, and not just the opinions that one agrees with, then one will vote similarly to other people who do that, and that one will as a result see the posts that people who do that upvoted. But if there is a group who does not do that, and is large, and many of them vote for a post which the people who vote for good reasoning, that they might have an unfortunate influence on how the people who are voting for careful arguments see.

However, it seems like this would be solved by simply downvoting the arguments that do not contribute.

So, depending on how one defines "echo chamber", it seems like the system might only give one an "echo chamber" if one votes in a way that would align with that.

However, for another seemingly reasonable definition of "echo chamber" , I guess it would lead to one (with that being essentially the purpose), but the fact that it does so might not be all that bad (with the people who are "open minded" ending up in an "echo chamber" of other "open minded" people).

It also seems like it could be combined with github:neyer/respect in potentially nice ways. for example, the dot products of similarity of voting seem to be possibly of the same "type" as the respect value in github:neyer/respect , and it seems like maybe they could be added together.

So, one could maybe do something like add the indirect respect value to the similarity of voting value, when weighing how much to consider the different votes, or perhaps one could use the dot products of the voting records as contributing to the initial trust vectors. (In either case, this could be potentially weighted to make one have more weight than the other).

This might make it so that one has more people in the vector of who one initially has respect information about, which could be useful. But I don't know if similarity in voting record is a good thing for that.

And there's still the problem of whether it is too computationally expensive to do for every thread view for every person. Maybe if there was some caching, and some of the stuff didn't get updated all the time? But that seems like it would require a lot of memory.

_____

another potential problem is, if it is to be decentralized, it would I think be difficult to use the above system without making lists of who upvoted/downvoted who entirely public (unless one used something like the recent MIT Enigma thing, but that would make this all even more computationally and memory expensive. /Mayyyybe/ not prohibitively so though? I'm not sure. Practicality isn't my strong suit.)

_____

It is a very interesting problem!