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Afaict, the missing piece that undermines this is a mechanism to uniquely identify users. I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (i

Afaict, the missing piece that undermines this is a mechanism to uniquely identify users. I don't mean that more than one entity needs to know a user's name (in fact, you could probably create a system where nobody can realistically retrieve a user's name), or personal information. If you don't know whether you've seen an account before, though, how can you effectively deter bad actors? Not much of a ban if someone can create a second account and resume the same unwanted behavior.

jancsika 6y ago
> missing piece But it's not a missing technical piece. It's just that FOSS is terrible at paying experts to do the work necessary to design a service usable by non-technical folks. In other words, I think people look at the problem you've described and assume that it must be open research because no unpaid dev has posted a hobby project to Github to solve it. But that wouldn't be an accurate conclusion-- in fact everyone has used Google's annoying hairball of sophisticated, hidden techniques which solves pretty much this problem (and probably other problems as well). You wouldn't need anything as sophisticated as that. But you do need to pay experts the going rate to design, implement, test, and tweak such a service. If any FOSS orgs had the foresight and funding to do this, I believe it would reveal that all commercial social media networks including Reddit haven't "solved" this problem simply because it isn't in their financial interest to do so.