alt Hacker NewsI’ve come to this same conclusion. Either we accept an internet crawling with bots and astroturf, or we abandon the anonymity and have an internet with only verified humans.
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bavell • today at 1:14 PM
Another option - we keep the wild west unverified web, dotted with islands of verified/vetted spaces.
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taurath • today at 5:37 PM
Or a different sort of Internet appears. free and open internet is polluted with commercialization and greed, eventually cleaner spaces will be created with stronger restrictions like geo, social trust chains, and cost of posting going up so high it’s uneconomical to spam. What good is a single international internet for social media when everyone is bots?
It is a false dichotomy that abandoning anonymity must happen with verifying humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge-proof . The only trick is who holds the infrastructure for the proofs. A single person or small group like, oh, the one(s) behind World Coin? People on ycombinator might know that one. Sufficiently decentralized, FOSS, /true/ non-profit (like Wikipedia), maybe. (Ironic I mention Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales' WT.Social never did take off.)
Further, the challenge is not completely autonomous bots that are somehow separate of humans, never has been, all code on Earth has and will have a human imprint even in the wildest AGI fantasies. The first false dichotomy is anonymity and veracity, the second false dichotomy is human and bot. And tho biggest challenge comes from a specific human-bot combination, the Cory Doctorow Reverse Centaur (though Centaurs also complicate things). One human can suddenly impact the "volume" of discourse, like a magic hidden megaphone that somehow no one can detect at a dinner party where the lights are too low to see who is talking. /And/ if there's a door check at the party, it's easy to transport someone who makes pennies a day to show up at the door, look like anyone you want, and then come inside with a magic hidden microphone that you provide them.
I think it's less about proving human, more about proving /reputation associated with an entity/. It's not about whether "awbvious" is human, but whether "awbvious" is committed to acting human. Committed to not use a hidden, magic megaphone. Committed to not using hidden, magic megaphones with others. Which I am.