Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft
19 hours ago
>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity
How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm letting pretend to be me? You can't even demand that I do that, because it's essentially impossible.
Is there even some totalitarian scheme that, if brutal and homicidal enough, could manage to prevent this from happening (even partially)?
I'm limited to a single identity only as a resource constraint. Others more wealthy than I (corporations or ad hoc criminal enterprises) could harvest thousands of real identities and use those. Consensually, through identity theft. The only thing slowing it down at the moment are quickly eroding social norms (and, as you point out, maybe they're not doing that and it's not even slow at the moment).
Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
> The moment someone steals your identity, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
FTFY.
There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.
You claim this, but you've not presented any evidence. Who would be the enforcement agency for that? Where and how would you train them? Can the money be scrounged up to do it properly? As you blacklist people from the internet, you lose their tax revenue (they're locked out of the economy), but you also make it impossible for them to tell people how bad it was... most of the deterrent effect is gone. But the incentives are only ever growing higher, as people surmise that running their own little bot farm is a way to get ahead when hustling. Any you do hunt down and disconnect are now highly radicalized and desperate, but you've just turned off the feeb's ability to monitor them and intervene.
China gets away with this shit because they've been conditioning their population for 60 years... everyone's eased into it. Elsewhere, not even slightly so.