[goda90]

What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though identity theft and account selling could still happen), but that adds friction to joining, poses security risks, and many people might feel less comfortable putting their opinions openly online where backlash could impact real life.

[INTPenis]

eID is the obvious answer here in Europe. Right now it's kinda scattered with different providers, but I believe EU is working on a more universal protocol. Unfortnately there are rumors it will require official Google/Apple play stores, unrooted devices, and all that it does today already.

But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else.

I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.

[econ]

I really want this to be as simple as forwarding the user through a gov website and receiving a hash on a webhook. All I really want to know is that it is a citizen and the same hash as last time

[longfacehorrace]

So a local ballot box.

Host a platform like this at city hall, county building, capitol building, schools.

Only a human can access a terminal. Have humans monitor ingress/egress.

A more generalized solution that solves the specific problem inherent to all these digital ones.

[acgourley]

We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.

[worldsayshi]

What about Zero-Knowledge Identity? Use zero knowledge proofs to prove that I have an eID without actually providing my identity.

[Lerc]

Either I'm not sure what you mean by soul, or you are all-in on dualism.

[nerdsniper]

Worldcoin tried to solve that. Any solution for this will be similarly creepy.

[observationist]

The casual ginger hate is disgusting. smh.

It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.

The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.

Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.

At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.

Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.

I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.

[gpm]

The invite-tree they discuss is likely an effective measure. It provides a way of tracking back influxes of bots to responsible pre-existing account(s) and banning them too. And if someone is responsible for inviting many of the pre-existing accounts them too... Making the game of whac-a-mole winnable.

I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.

[tracker1]

I'm also somewhat curious about how "hateful content" is defined... I mean having a serious discussion on policies around children in schools and sport regarding trans issues has been labelled in some circles as hateful content if it doesn't blindly support the most progressive views.

I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.

[thinkingtoilet]

Sigh... you know there's single digits number of trans athletes in the entire NCAA. The fact that this is even discussed at all is absurd given what else is going on in the country. Yes, intelligent people can have a conversation about it but even if you think it's a problem it's problem #43,948 on the list. Let's solve the other 43,947 problems first. It's really hard to believe people when they say it's not about bigotry. And it in every instance I've encountered people talking about it I would easily, and correctly, classify it has "hateful".

[mmooss]

For many purposes, we need anonymous authentication. I haven't heard about much innovation on that and similar privacy fronts in awhile.

Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token.

I'm sure others have thought about it more ...

[ianburrell]

You could do it now with OpenID SSO that only takes passkeys. The downside is that losing the passkey would lose the account. The problem is that OpenID leaks the authenticating sites to authentication site.

The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.

[worldsayshi]

I mean I can prove with a zero-knowledge-proof that have solved a Sudoku puzzle without actually giving away the solution so this seems possible?

[mejutoco]

There are so many things here that can work:

- Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot)

- Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced).

- Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts.

- Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots)

- Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.

- Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic).

- Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check)

- Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together.

- Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.)

I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.

[rwmj]

Slashdot didn't allow you to vote and comment on the same topic. (If you voted, then commented, your votes on the post were rescinded.)

[nottorp]

> Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors.

So allow only LLM generated posts?

[kipukun]

I'd like to add to your point that private torrent trackers have had invite tree systems for awhile, and usually if your invitee breaks a rule, you get in trouble as well, so you are encouraged to only invite people you trust. The system has worked well for a long time, and some of these communities still thrive because of the trust that is built.

[cosmic_cheese]

It might be an unpopular idea, but I think being somewhat liberal with doling out timeouts and bans for inflammatory/reactionary/overemotional posting would do a lot of good, too. It strongly crystalizes community norms and sends a message that this is a space to engage with the higher functioning portions of your brain instead of letting your amygdala and dopamine pathways take the wheel.

Edit: Why is parent comment flagged/dead? Doesn’t seem that controversial?