[jasonshaev]

How do you verify someone's IRL identity without a government issued ID card in a scalable way?

I don't mean some idea that could work at some arbitrary point in the future (decentralized whatever...). If a social media platform were to do this, right now, how would they do it without verifying a government issued ID?

[mrtksn]

Identity doesn't come into existence with the registration with a government, it's something you build over time as you interact with the world around you.

Nicknames are an identity and it's pretty much common these days to have nicknamed account on all over the internet. The problem with these is that one can have multiple of those and a behaviour in one place doesn't transfer into other places.

So maybe we can have across-the-internet identities. You are jasonshaev but who you are on twitter? on reddit? on other places? Once you become the person who is known around everywhere the same way, you have the identity that you would like to protect. You can't troll one place when bored then be known as a nice person somewhere else. I think that's good enough identity. The implementation can be around crypto, single sign in, face recognition etc.

[jasonshaev]

The thread started with "real name." The only way to verify that is government identity.

If you want to verify some other, "online" identity, that's fine, but I don't see how that would meaningfully affect anyones behavior. To be clear, I don't think verifying someone's real name will meaningfully improve online behavior either -- plenty of other threads explain why. In which case, what's the point of either?