5 ms·

I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, sp

I agree that having a few walled gardens is a problem, but having more smaller walled gardens probably won't change much. Bad actors can still sign up, post, spam, harass, etc. on several small walled gardens. What we need is a way to better identify and handle bad actors. The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content. Smaller sites and discussion boards have been at a disadvantage recently trying to fend off spam, bots, and sock accounts and very often lose out to the big sites. Effectively controlling abuse and doing it a cost-effective way can be very hard. RealPerson.io (https://realperson.io https://realperson.io) was created as a way for websites to verify that a user is a real person, but without disclosing personal details about the user. Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io and then can create separate, randomly-generated codes for each site they use. Websites register on RealPerson.io and then for each user signup on their website they simply asks the user for their RealPerson code for their website. A backend REST call to RealPerson.io with the user code for the site returns "yes" or "no." Sites don't share codes so you can't track across websites. No shared logins or authentication code. Bots would have to pay for a code for each account which would be cost prohibitive to run a bot farm. The first implementation of this approach was done with RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) which uses RealPerson.io to verify that the user is real.

pjc50 8y ago
> Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io That web page doesn't explain how they guarantee uniqueness of users or pay for the required ID checking?
- jasode 8y ago
  >how they guarantee uniqueness of users I was curious too so I clicked on the sign-up button to see how it worked. It immediately takes you to a page to pay $9.00 by credit-card. I guess it guarantees you're a "real person" because bots† don't pay with credit-cards. †(At the large scale required for profitable fraud)
  - realpeopleio 8y ago
    Right. Bots aren't going to pay. But a user might pay $9/year for all websites. Websites don't have to pay for the service either. The more websites that use the service, the more cost effective it is for users (since they pay once for all sites), and for websites (since the likelihood that the user signing up already has a RealPerson account and doesn't need to pay anymore). This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.
    - corobo 8y ago
      > But a user might pay $9/year for all websites Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
      - realpeopleio 8y ago
        At first maybe for most people they won't want to pay the cost. What (hopefully) will happen is that smaller sites who have problems keeping bots and fake accounts at bay will decide it's worth it to them to require all their users to use RealPerson. And then (hopefully) over time users face no additional cost using RealPerson on other sites because they already have an account. Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
- realpeopleio 8y ago
  It doesn't really guarantee uniqueness. It also doesn't verify identity (that this is really "John Smith"). It essentially verifies that the user has paid for an account on RealPerson.io, which is currently $9/year. This was to strike a balance between having to divulge too much personal info to RealPerson.io (like an identity verification service), but at the same time making it highly unlikely that the user is a bot. RealPerson.io doesn't try to drive the percentage to 0 that the user is a bot, but rather make it cost prohibitive for bots, while at the same time making it cost effective for real people, and still protect privacy. Also, a user only gets one RealPerson code per website, so a user can't create multiple codes for a website and hence create multiple accounts on that website. And if that website bans the user, that user would need to get a new code for that website, which would mean creating a second account on RealPerson and paying again and face the scrutiny of RealPerson detecting that the user has two accounts on RealPerson.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
laumars 8y ago
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content. The 90s had fair share of the above as well: * bots: I used to write bots to troll 90s HTML chatrooms (I was young and an idiot). IRC bots have been around since forever at well. * trolls: trolling is older than the web. Platforms like IRC and newsgroups used to be rife with trolls if you wondered into the wrong place or said something stupid to the wrong people. * AI: this isn't really a web problem but more just a natural advancement of technology. I mean we had bots in the 90s so you can bet if AI was as far along then as it is now then we'd have seen AI then as well. * fake this and that: this has always been a problem. Let's not forget that Snopes.com was launched in 1994. * big money: The web definitely attacks big money now, but even in the 90s some businesses were sinking huge quantities of money in the bet that it would pay off big. Probably the most famous example being Amazon, who were founded in 1994. * swaying public opinion: I agree here. This more recent trend of using user identifiable information to target persuasive pieces (eg what Cambridge Analytica were doing) is very worrying too. * gross content: shock sites are nearly as old as the web itself. Goatse, for example, is so old it's now part of the mainstream consciousness. * spam: Spam on forums is less of a problem now than it's ever been thanks to new techniques in user verfication (captcha and similiar, developers more aware to validate users with an activation email, etc). And spam email is an order of magnatude better now that it's been in years. * sock accounts: To be honest I think this is another area where they were more common then than they are now. This time I think it is due to the current trend of using real world identities. In the late 90s it was particularly easy to create sock accounts due to how easy it became to create a multitude of free email accounts (eg Yahoo Mail). * very often lose out to the big sites: this is where I think the biggest shift has happened. People seem less interested to stumble on new content than thye did in the 90s. Of course this might just be age bias on my part; I was in college in the 90s so had both the time and the social crowd to stumble upon random stuff online. Whereas these days I'm older and look for different requirements from the web so for me I look to it more as a tool than a toy. I'm not saying things are better now nor then (actually I do kind of miss the 90s web) but there was definitely still a darker undercurrent present even in the 90s.
vbezhenar 8y ago
I think that the only reliable way to verify that a user is a real person would be to coordinate this work with government. Kazakhstan allows for each citizen to get a signed digital certificate to use it for government websites, but it's possible to use it everywhere, it's a plain X.509 RSA certificate signed by a special certificate authority. I'm aware that there are many countries doing exactly the same thing. So many people already have certificates to verify their identity and they have an incentive to keep those certificates secure. It should be possible to build an analog of "realpeople.io" using those certificates (or directly use certificates for authentication).
- john_minsk 8y ago
  And let government track your each step... I trust google more
  - realpeopleio 8y ago
    This was a motivating factor for us. If a market solution doesn't appear and remedy the problem, then we'll get government regulation.
watwut 8y ago
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. I distinctively remember people giving purposefully bad advice on innocently sounded IRC channels. By bad advice I mean hiding "rm -rf" somewhere in the command that is given out as advice. If the person complained about losing work, more fun to them. This was something I witness firs time I started randomly poking around IRC (I was not target). I also remember how there was whole philosophy around it, how newbies who come are vampires for daring to ask questions. I remember there being a lot of "nerds" bragging about how funny it was to cause harm to that or this person - including putting their personal enemies phones into fake sex ads. Plenty were everything except nice innocent people sharing nerdy things. There were plenty of nice thoughtful people and plenty of normal people who just care about board topic. They were not only ones out there.

pjc50 8y ago

> Each person can create a single account on RealPerson.io That web page doesn't explain how they guarantee uniqueness of users or pay for the required ID checking?

jasode 8y ago
>how they guarantee uniqueness of users I was curious too so I clicked on the sign-up button to see how it worked. It immediately takes you to a page to pay $9.00 by credit-card. I guess it guarantees you're a "real person" because bots† don't pay with credit-cards. †(At the large scale required for profitable fraud)
- realpeopleio 8y ago
  Right. Bots aren't going to pay. But a user might pay $9/year for all websites. Websites don't have to pay for the service either. The more websites that use the service, the more cost effective it is for users (since they pay once for all sites), and for websites (since the likelihood that the user signing up already has a RealPerson account and doesn't need to pay anymore). This is the primary way to prevent bots, but there still are secondary means like IP address, credit card, behavior pattern than can be used to detect bots. But with estimated millions of bots operating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere, the bot operators are not going to spend millions of dollars on RealPerson accounts.
  - corobo 8y ago
    > But a user might pay $9/year for all websites Nope. Not going to happen. A HN user might, but regular user? No way in hell. Honestly I'd be surprised if you managed to win them over with $1/year or whatever the card minimum TX cost is. Even I was blindsided by it with a "wooah, whats this about" and I'm happy paying up for apps etc just to test them once. I thought I'd accidentally signed up to the website side of it It's hard enough for Netflix to get customers to pay (account sharing) never mind a site that - from the user's point of view - does nothing On the thought of the website side - Why would I as a website owner have my users pay your service when I could set up my own paywall and also enjoy the monetary rewards? I really feel like I've missed something here Side note, there's also no way to delete my account
    - realpeopleio 8y ago
      At first maybe for most people they won't want to pay the cost. What (hopefully) will happen is that smaller sites who have problems keeping bots and fake accounts at bay will decide it's worth it to them to require all their users to use RealPerson. And then (hopefully) over time users face no additional cost using RealPerson on other sites because they already have an account. Incidentally, this is how RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io) is able to have no ads because the revenue from RealPerson.io subsidizes it since they're owned by the same company.
realpeopleio 8y ago
It doesn't really guarantee uniqueness. It also doesn't verify identity (that this is really "John Smith"). It essentially verifies that the user has paid for an account on RealPerson.io, which is currently $9/year. This was to strike a balance between having to divulge too much personal info to RealPerson.io (like an identity verification service), but at the same time making it highly unlikely that the user is a bot. RealPerson.io doesn't try to drive the percentage to 0 that the user is a bot, but rather make it cost prohibitive for bots, while at the same time making it cost effective for real people, and still protect privacy. Also, a user only gets one RealPerson code per website, so a user can't create multiple codes for a website and hence create multiple accounts on that website. And if that website bans the user, that user would need to get a new code for that website, which would mean creating a second account on RealPerson and paying again and face the scrutiny of RealPerson detecting that the user has two accounts on RealPerson.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

laumars 8y ago

> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content. The 90s had fair share of the above as well: * bots: I used to write bots to troll 90s HTML chatrooms (I was young and an idiot). IRC bots have been around since forever at well. * trolls: trolling is older than the web. Platforms like IRC and newsgroups used to be rife with trolls if you wondered into the wrong place or said something stupid to the wrong people. * AI: this isn't really a web problem but more just a natural advancement of technology. I mean we had bots in the 90s so you can bet if AI was as far along then as it is now then we'd have seen AI then as well. * fake this and that: this has always been a problem. Let's not forget that Snopes.com was launched in 1994. * big money: The web definitely attacks big money now, but even in the 90s some businesses were sinking huge quantities of money in the bet that it would pay off big. Probably the most famous example being Amazon, who were founded in 1994. * swaying public opinion: I agree here. This more recent trend of using user identifiable information to target persuasive pieces (eg what Cambridge Analytica were doing) is very worrying too. * gross content: shock sites are nearly as old as the web itself. Goatse, for example, is so old it's now part of the mainstream consciousness. * spam: Spam on forums is less of a problem now than it's ever been thanks to new techniques in user verfication (captcha and similiar, developers more aware to validate users with an activation email, etc). And spam email is an order of magnatude better now that it's been in years. * sock accounts: To be honest I think this is another area where they were more common then than they are now. This time I think it is due to the current trend of using real world identities. In the late 90s it was particularly easy to create sock accounts due to how easy it became to create a multitude of free email accounts (eg Yahoo Mail). * very often lose out to the big sites: this is where I think the biggest shift has happened. People seem less interested to stumble on new content than thye did in the 90s. Of course this might just be age bias on my part; I was in college in the 90s so had both the time and the social crowd to stumble upon random stuff online. Whereas these days I'm older and look for different requirements from the web so for me I look to it more as a tool than a toy. I'm not saying things are better now nor then (actually I do kind of miss the 90s web) but there was definitely still a darker undercurrent present even in the 90s.

vbezhenar 8y ago

I think that the only reliable way to verify that a user is a real person would be to coordinate this work with government. Kazakhstan allows for each citizen to get a signed digital certificate to use it for government websites, but it's possible to use it everywhere, it's a plain X.509 RSA certificate signed by a special certificate authority. I'm aware that there are many countries doing exactly the same thing. So many people already have certificates to verify their identity and they have an incentive to keep those certificates secure. It should be possible to build an analog of "realpeople.io" using those certificates (or directly use certificates for authentication).

john_minsk 8y ago
And let government track your each step... I trust google more
- realpeopleio 8y ago
  This was a motivating factor for us. If a market solution doesn't appear and remedy the problem, then we'll get government regulation.

watwut 8y ago

> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. I distinctively remember people giving purposefully bad advice on innocently sounded IRC channels. By bad advice I mean hiding "rm -rf" somewhere in the command that is given out as advice. If the person complained about losing work, more fun to them. This was something I witness firs time I started randomly poking around IRC (I was not target). I also remember how there was whole philosophy around it, how newbies who come are vampires for daring to ask questions. I remember there being a lot of "nerds" bragging about how funny it was to cause harm to that or this person - including putting their personal enemies phones into fake sex ads. Plenty were everything except nice innocent people sharing nerdy things. There were plenty of nice thoughtful people and plenty of normal people who just care about board topic. They were not only ones out there.