[web-cowboy]

I want this exact same thing (for many of the same reasons), but for gaming.

- Toxic people can finally be identified and penalized - Better matchmaking (less "smurfing", less streamer accounts going from zero to hero)

I haven't looked too closely at Voice's setup, but does "verified" always have to mean non-private, and non-anonymous?

[marcinzm]

And female gamers can be stalked to their home addresses by obsessed people. Anonymity has some advantages for marginalized social groups as it lets them avoid predators better.

edit: Actually I'd assume a lot off harassment of people via other channels would happen including SWATing, emailing employers to get them fired, false reports to get them banned on other sites, contacting spouses with fake evidence of infidelity, etc. Only the victim loses anonymity, the attacker keeps it. Competitive gaming brings out the worst in some people.

[livueta]

I feel like there's a need for a privacy-protecting attestation service/protocol. Fully anonymous discussion boards/social networks are tricky because of obvious sockposting-related problems. Another poster mentioned a Voat mechanism for non-username identification, but it sounds like the old *ch concept where some identifiers are hashed s.t. the same poster gets the same ID across some subset of posts (time, topic, etc). That's an ok way of trying to maintain integrity without publicly deanonymizing participants, but is vulnerable to all kinds of technical workarounds. Anecdotally, dealing with ban-evaders in a forum context got a lot harder when CGNAT'd/v6 mobile IPs started getting common.

So, the next step is attesting your identity directly to the site. But, who's going to give some random forum their government-issued ID? Despite SV firms recently trying to normalize that, hopefully fairly few. Facebook can get away with it, but only because they're already Facebook and benefit from the trust implied by scale. Beyond that, what happens when a user says something impolitic and brings down the mob? Trust the mods to not unmask the user? Meh.

If site operators could ask a question like "is this person a real person, do they already have an account with us, do they leave in geographical region X" and a prospective user was able to obtain an attestation that those qualities are true without that attestation revealing any additional information (as well as being cryptographically secure), you could do some interesting things.

The downside is the attestation service then becomes a point of attack for those interested in unmasking individuals. Is it a private company that must answer subpoenas? What if the government wants the proverbial pen register or the organization gets subverted in some other way? Dunno. The ideal is neither side (attestor or service) knows more than it has to - service doesn't know anything about the user besides the handful of agreed-upon facts; the attestor doesn't know anything about the service. Obligatory buzzword: seems like a potential application of zero-knowledge proofs.

[curuinor]

you have to put in your national ID number to register an account for a MMORPG in Korea. does it help toxicity? surprisingly marginally.

[olah_1]

> Toxic people can finally be identified and penalized

Slavery abolitionists, american revolutionaries, all very toxic people that needed to be penalized according to popular opinion.