alt Hacker NewsI agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade.
I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids.
The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real" - and a way for that source to actually verify you're a person - but that source can be corrupted and hacked. Some people will say "Crypto!" but money != people, so I don't see how that works. Perhaps the creation of some neutral non-goverment-non-profit entity is the way, but I can see lots of problems there too, and it will probably cost money to verify someone is real - where does that come from?
Anyway, good luck on your work!
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Crypto could be a part of it. Like you need to sign with an adress that has held some non-trivial amount for some minimum amount of time. As a component of such a system it could cut down on mass or low-effort impersonation.
Money is great at thwarting spam/Sybil attacks. You don't have to raise the price very much to make them fail.
Honestly I think "this person is real" is the wrong goal. You'll never accomplish it without a centralized state or some biometric monstrosity like that thing Sam Altman created.
Just settle for stopping spam.
it can also be "rented" btw, rented by llms? interesting
*You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"*
Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.