Comment by DrSiemer
1 day ago
I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
1 day ago
I'm not a fan of this option, but it seems to me the only way forward for online interaction is very strong identification on any place where you can post anything.
Back in FidoNet days, some BBSs required identification papers for registering and only allowed real names to be used. Though not known for their level headed discussions, it definitely added a certain level of care in online interactions. I remember the shock seeing the anonymity Internet provided later, both positive and negative. I wouldn't be surprised if we revert to some central authentication mechanism which has some basic level of checks combined with some anonymity guarantees. For example, a government owned ID service, which creates a new user ID per website, so the website doesn't know you, but once they blacklist that one-off ID, you cannot get a new one.
Honestly, having seen how it can be used against you, retroactively, I would never ever engage in a discussion under my real name.
(The fact that someone could correlate posts[0] based on writing style, as previously demonstrated on HN and used to doxx some people, makes things even more convoluted - you should think twice what you write and where.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
id.me?
Not government owned, but even irs.gov uses it
Smaller communities too.
I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.
When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.
I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.
Sounds good!
A German forum I'm on allows members limited invites based on participation. The catch is, you are responsible for the people you invite. If they get in trouble, you will share a part of the punishment.
That can be automated away too.
People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".
I do this every time I find myself typing something I could get written up over or even fired for.
1. I'm usually too emotional to write out why I feel that way instead of saying what I feel.
2. I really don't like the person (or their idea) but I don't want to get fired over it.
Claude is really great at this: "Other person said X, I think it is stupid and they're a moron for suggesting this. Explain to them why this is a terrible idea or tell me I'm being an idiot."
Sometimes it tells me I'm being an idiot, sometimes it gives me nearly copy-pasta text that I can use and agree with.
> People will be more than willing to say, "Claude, impersonate me and act on my behalf".
I'm now imagining a future where actual people's identities are blacklisted just like some IP addresses are dead to email, and a market develops for people to sell their identity to spammers.
That's always been the biggest flaw in the Worldcoin idea in my opinion: if you have a billion+ humans get their eyeball scanned in exchange for some kind of cryptographic identity, you can guarantee that a VERY sizable portion of those billion people will happily sell that cryptographic identity (which they don't understand the value of) to anyone who offers them some money.
As far as I can tell the owner of the original iris can later invalidate an ID that they've sold, but if you buy an ID from someone who isn't strongly technically literate you can probably extract a bunch of value from it anyway.
That's fine, because once someone is banned, the impersonations are also banned.
I mean, that's fine I guess as long as its respectable and respects the forum.
"Claude write a summary of the word doc I wrote about x and post it as a reply comment," is fine. I dont see why it wouldnt be. Its a good faith effort to post.
"Claude, post every 10 seconds to reddit to spam people to believe my politics is correct," isn't but that's not the case. Its not a good faith effort.
The moderation rules for 'human slop' will apply to AI too. Try spamming a well moderated reddit and see how far you get, human or AI.
The problem is speed and quantity. Humans weren't able to fight off the original email spam, it took automated systems. Forums will have to institute much stronger rate limiting and other such measures.