Comment by pbronez

Isn’t the solution high-quality identity verification? There are piles of digital identity companies out there. They make money selling to banks for KYC compliance. Heck, there are background check as a service companies designed to add trust to gig economy platforms.

I used to think that a small payment could accomplish the same thing, but X selling blue check marks proved that doesn’t help much. Well, at least it’s a much weaker signal than the previous curated version.

The challenge is any barrier to entry high enough to discourage motivated spammers is also high enough to discourage casual users. That disrupts the network effects you’ve traditionally needed to bootstrap a social website.

If I was trying to get a new social site off the ground right now, I would try:

1) secure a good brand from the pre-AI era. Twitter, Digg, Friendster, MySpace. Something that motivates a first look.

2) Require third party identity verification on sign up, configured so the social site is never the custodian of PII, though require enough demographics to support high-value advertising later. Verification is free to the user, ideally provide multiple verification options- one US and one EU at minimum.

3) Target a few core communities and invest. Find the people who moderate historically great subreddits, were active in twitter communities during the good years, etc. get them in your platform. Maybe even pay them.

That should be enough to tell you if it’s going to work or not.