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>We also need to innovate tools that provide proof of authorship, and whether it was created by a human. It might never actually be possible, but knowing the so

>We also need to innovate tools that provide proof of authorship, and whether it was created by a human. It might never actually be possible, but knowing the source is an ideal we should strive towards. I think requiring some sort of proof of being a real person before being able to post content might be how this shakes out, similar to accounts requiring a valid phone, or services with KYC requirements. There would still be some level of fakery, but when content is tied to a real person moderation is a lot more straightforward. It would definitely be a departure from the internet as it is today, but how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"?

causi 4y ago
how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? Me, for one. I like my real life and my online life being totally separate.
- kipchak 4y ago
  I personally feel the same way, but I would guess we're probably in the minority. People who share information about themselves are generally more valuable customers for social media, and most people don't seem to have much issue with it, at least so far. I think there will always still be some percentage of old internet, but the amount of information the average person is willing to share online has been steadily creeping up.
  - Vox_Leone 4y ago
    You don't need social media for Internet presence. You only need a decent discovery system. A propos, right now, at the end of the social media era, Google comes up with an interesting gesture. Days ago TechChunch reported[0] that Google will be tweaking the parameters of its Pagerank. According to the report, the new "ranking improvements" seek to reduce low-quality or unoriginal content [which currently enjoys a high ranking in search results]. Google says the update will target content created specifically to improve search engine rankings – known as “SEO-first” content. “With this update, you're more likely to read something you've never seen before", Google says. Of course, nothing revolutionary is going to happen, but it must have become clear to the finance department that there will be no way to sell junk links to advertisers if the target audience is disbanded due to the lack of original content. Somehow the executives at Alphabet understood that a good anchoring of content in the results pages is necessary. [0]https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/18/google-will-roll-out-new-updates-to-reduce-low-quality-and-unoriginal-content-in-search-results/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/18/google-will-roll-out-new-u... (*)Edited for clarity
- koheripbal 4y ago
  I wish there was an easier way to establish different email addresses per website.
  - conception 4y ago
    iOS does it automagically if you didn’t know. Fastmail gives you 600 but with your comment now I want a plugin to do it from the browser.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      https://simplelogin.io https://simplelogin.io and https://anonnaddy.com https://anonnaddy.com Do exactly that, both open source and self host able, and support replying from the alias(paid) SL has been acquired by Proton, and is now included in Proton Unlimited for free.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    httpa://simplelogin.io exists. Gives you unique alias for every service, owned by Proton.
  - trs-80 4y ago
    Shared hosting plan with email and a catch-all address (the latter being key to the whole thing). Everyone I give an email address out to gets a unique one in the form: theirname.myname@host.tld. As an added bonus, I have a place for blog, website, and reliable long term picture/file hosting. Well worth the $20-30 per year it costs me (per domain), IMO. I have one domain for my IRL identity (my family surname), and others for pseudonyms.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Honestly its hard to do this. Especially if you work in Tech, you want to have an online presence, that shows the work and the projects you manage. I think people are adopting the separate identity way. One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are.
  - Loughla 4y ago
    >I think people are adopting the separate identity way. One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are. Bingo. And I think it's layered. This is a separate identity from myself, with just enough actual content from my life and knowledge that if someone is interested in contacting me for something professional, they can put together what my specialties might be. But even with all of the posts on here, you'll play hell figuring out who I actually am. Then there are the other online identities who have literally no connection to myself. No clues. No posts. No pictures. Nothing to link them to me. Reddit is a good example. I post there, but nobody would ever be able to put together who is the human doing that. (it helps to have a username that someone else uses on a different site, btw. I stole an HN handle that made me chuckle to use on reddit, and this one is used by another very salty person on reddit). It's all about separation. I think that's the key.
EGreg 4y ago
How are you going to show this? ProofOfHumanity? Worldcoin? The fact is, in a decentralized permissionless system, bots can create sleeper accounts. Are you going to test if they have a phone number? Email? Facebook? Are you going to require they upload a real photo? They can just generate one with AI. Are you going to require them to answer some questions on video? What about if they deepfake one? Your best bet might be this: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive But "mission fucking accomplished" is very close with GPT3. The problem is that the "throw text at the wall and see what sticks" can be gamed by seeing how many upvotes you get. You can get machines to receive upvotes not by actual helpfulness, but by fooling people. By then it's "game fucking over" as more and more capital and social capital online is controlled by bots and people will never even know. The problem is that bot swarms will be able to shift public opinion overnight, as inexplicably a lot of accounts implacably have a point of view and cannot be swayed by any reasoning or logic (because they were given talking points never to be). And in fact "the public" won't matter so much because the bots will matter ... because of their capital and social capital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FPP1MElvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FPP1MElvE
- koheripbal 4y ago
  Captcha?
  - dento 4y ago
    IIRC, you can purchase around 300 solved captchas per dollar
    - throw10920 4y ago
      Yeah, and while 3c per spam would absolutely destroy spam for direct-message systems (email, SMS), it'll do next to nothing for published spam (blogposts, videos, etc). The economics are different.
- kipchak 4y ago
  Government issued ID perhaps?
Larrikin 4y ago
How does a real person share information about illegal or overreaching activity from their government in such a system? Real name policies from Google and Facebook caused real world problems for people in the LGBTQ+ communities for example.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kipchak 4y ago
  I don't this will be a good paradigm, just the direction we're probably unfortunately headed in. The Chinese already have something like this implemented[1], though I'm not sure how it works. From a state's perspective monitoring whistleblowers seems like a feature. [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41081676 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41081676
pjc50 4y ago
> when content is tied to a real person moderation is a lot more straightforward Not really? That lets you defeat sockpuppets without having to use proxy information like IP, but there are plenty of people who will post appalling stuff or extravagant misinformation under their real names. See the ongoing Alex Jones libel trial.
- kipchak 4y ago
  Moderation was probably the wrong word, more in the sense of controlling faked content posted by accounts that are not real people. Managing Alex Jones official account is about the same, but fake accounts/bots become harder.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  The real names solution to abuse is often bandied about here, but it hasn't stopped garbage on facebook and it has a fundamental flaw in the logic behind it: It assumes all people have shame and that can be used to make them behave. Many real people don't, and they are the ones least likely to censor themselves by attaching a picture of their face to what they post. And a normal person is probably not going to want to interact with those people without the distance provided by being pseudonymous.
knorker 4y ago
> how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? Depends what you mean by "never". A middle ground could be that platforms give a green tickbox, but no personal information, to users who are proven to be human.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  How would the platforms know you're a human? You'd have to share personal information to them.
  - knorker 4y ago
    Yes, thats the proposal. Not mine, mind you,
throw10920 4y ago
> I think requiring some sort of proof of being a real person before being able to post content might be how this shakes out, similar to accounts requiring a valid phone, or services with KYC requirements While, on a descriptive level, I believe that your idea of the implementation of this would win, on a normative level, I would argue that such an approach would be privacy-destroying and very dangerous for human freedoms and tyranny-resistance - simply because it's very hard to prove that you are a human without also indicating that you are a particular human. A privacy-preserving alternative might be to build a "web of trust", where the nodes don't actually have to be proven to be owned by a human (or by a particular human), but the reputation associated with the nodes still allows humans to curate meaningful non-spam content. With email/SMS spam, we have tools like Hashcash[1] that imposes a cost on each spam message (which is disproportionately burdensome on spammers), but I don't think that that works with "published" spam (as opposed to "direct" spam). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Proving you're a real person doesn't need to be at odds with the user's privacy concerns. Look at the verification system used by risky subreddits for example, you only have to provide a few pictures of yourself posing with a sign with your username written on it from different angles. Currently hard to replicate by bots or photoshop, and privacy preserving. Short of reaching AGI there will always be tasks that can differentiate humans from machine and won't require the users to post a photo of their passport or phone number.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  How is that verification system not at odds with privacy concerns?
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    Well in that system you don't have to show your face, your identity is not compromised. And you're already planning on showing your body so no additional information is asked by the human-proving system that'd help identify you. But that's just an example, you can think of a 100 even more private implementations that give proof of humanity without giving proof of identity.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      You don't have to show your face? I didn't know that, thanks.
mellavora 4y ago
> how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? user: kipchak created: December 26, 2017 karma: 758 about: normal fella Ok, so at least one person (kipchak) operates under that model. And good for them! Note that kipchak is not promoting KYC for posting, only suggesting that it is a probably outcome.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I think requiring some sort of proof of being a real person before being able to post content might be how this shakes out, similar to accounts requiring a valid phone, or services with KYC requirements. This would make the internet unusable to me. There is exactly zero chance that I'd be willing bring my real-world identity into the internet space.
- visarga 4y ago
  All this talk about "proof of being a real person" makes me believe AI passed the Turing test already.
mavhc 4y ago
Either you create a cross platform pseudo identity, and gain reputation gradually, or you link your pseudo identity to your real identity to start off with 1/8 billionth of reputation. Depends if there's a way to link a pseudo identity to your real identity without giving away your real identity. After all, I don't care who you are, I care about how much reputation you have.
- JanisErdmanis 4y ago
  Though as long as reputation can be quantified, it could be traded for real currency. Thus, making every post pseudonymously authenticated may not have a drastic impact on the current internet landscape.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Depends how you tie it to a real person, if the real person has to give up something to sell an identity, make the cost of selling it high. Problem is also how do you tell the downvotes because their new post is bad from the downvotes because you're in a gang that's attacking someone. Your downvotes have to be scaled with your own reputation, as do your upvotes. And downvotes found to be part of a conspiracy have to be cancelled and affect the conspirator's reputation
ufmace 4y ago
There's nothing stopping somebody from setting up some kind of forum/social service like that tomorrow. I'm skeptical it would be viable though. Trouble is the whole cancel culture thing. If everything is posted under your real name and made public and searchable forever, who can tell when you manage to piss somebody off, and they find something you wrote 10 years ago that's now considered offensive and make you unemployable.
jjcc 4y ago
There's a Godel/Strange loop issue that the AI can fake the proof of authorship so on ans so forth. You need a higher order proof....

causi 4y ago

how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? Me, for one. I like my real life and my online life being totally separate.

kipchak 4y ago
I personally feel the same way, but I would guess we're probably in the minority. People who share information about themselves are generally more valuable customers for social media, and most people don't seem to have much issue with it, at least so far. I think there will always still be some percentage of old internet, but the amount of information the average person is willing to share online has been steadily creeping up.
- Vox_Leone 4y ago
  You don't need social media for Internet presence. You only need a decent discovery system. A propos, right now, at the end of the social media era, Google comes up with an interesting gesture. Days ago TechChunch reported[0] that Google will be tweaking the parameters of its Pagerank. According to the report, the new "ranking improvements" seek to reduce low-quality or unoriginal content [which currently enjoys a high ranking in search results]. Google says the update will target content created specifically to improve search engine rankings – known as “SEO-first” content. “With this update, you're more likely to read something you've never seen before", Google says. Of course, nothing revolutionary is going to happen, but it must have become clear to the finance department that there will be no way to sell junk links to advertisers if the target audience is disbanded due to the lack of original content. Somehow the executives at Alphabet understood that a good anchoring of content in the results pages is necessary. [0]https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/18/google-will-roll-out-new-updates-to-reduce-low-quality-and-unoriginal-content-in-search-results/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/18/google-will-roll-out-new-u... (*)Edited for clarity
koheripbal 4y ago
I wish there was an easier way to establish different email addresses per website.
- conception 4y ago
  iOS does it automagically if you didn’t know. Fastmail gives you 600 but with your comment now I want a plugin to do it from the browser.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    https://simplelogin.io https://simplelogin.io and https://anonnaddy.com https://anonnaddy.com Do exactly that, both open source and self host able, and support replying from the alias(paid) SL has been acquired by Proton, and is now included in Proton Unlimited for free.
- jacooper 4y ago
  httpa://simplelogin.io exists. Gives you unique alias for every service, owned by Proton.
- trs-80 4y ago
  Shared hosting plan with email and a catch-all address (the latter being key to the whole thing). Everyone I give an email address out to gets a unique one in the form: theirname.myname@host.tld. As an added bonus, I have a place for blog, website, and reliable long term picture/file hosting. Well worth the $20-30 per year it costs me (per domain), IMO. I have one domain for my IRL identity (my family surname), and others for pseudonyms.
jacooper 4y ago
Honestly its hard to do this. Especially if you work in Tech, you want to have an online presence, that shows the work and the projects you manage. I think people are adopting the separate identity way. One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are.
- Loughla 4y ago
  >I think people are adopting the separate identity way. One official identity, and another one which hidden and has no clear connection to who they are. Bingo. And I think it's layered. This is a separate identity from myself, with just enough actual content from my life and knowledge that if someone is interested in contacting me for something professional, they can put together what my specialties might be. But even with all of the posts on here, you'll play hell figuring out who I actually am. Then there are the other online identities who have literally no connection to myself. No clues. No posts. No pictures. Nothing to link them to me. Reddit is a good example. I post there, but nobody would ever be able to put together who is the human doing that. (it helps to have a username that someone else uses on a different site, btw. I stole an HN handle that made me chuckle to use on reddit, and this one is used by another very salty person on reddit). It's all about separation. I think that's the key.

EGreg 4y ago

How are you going to show this? ProofOfHumanity? Worldcoin? The fact is, in a decentralized permissionless system, bots can create sleeper accounts. Are you going to test if they have a phone number? Email? Facebook? Are you going to require they upload a real photo? They can just generate one with AI. Are you going to require them to answer some questions on video? What about if they deepfake one? Your best bet might be this: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/810:_Constructive But "mission fucking accomplished" is very close with GPT3. The problem is that the "throw text at the wall and see what sticks" can be gamed by seeing how many upvotes you get. You can get machines to receive upvotes not by actual helpfulness, but by fooling people. By then it's "game fucking over" as more and more capital and social capital online is controlled by bots and people will never even know. The problem is that bot swarms will be able to shift public opinion overnight, as inexplicably a lot of accounts implacably have a point of view and cannot be swayed by any reasoning or logic (because they were given talking points never to be). And in fact "the public" won't matter so much because the bots will matter ... because of their capital and social capital. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FPP1MElvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FPP1MElvE

koheripbal 4y ago
Captcha?
- dento 4y ago
  IIRC, you can purchase around 300 solved captchas per dollar
  - throw10920 4y ago
    Yeah, and while 3c per spam would absolutely destroy spam for direct-message systems (email, SMS), it'll do next to nothing for published spam (blogposts, videos, etc). The economics are different.
kipchak 4y ago
Government issued ID perhaps?

Larrikin 4y ago

How does a real person share information about illegal or overreaching activity from their government in such a system? Real name policies from Google and Facebook caused real world problems for people in the LGBTQ+ communities for example.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kipchak 4y ago
I don't this will be a good paradigm, just the direction we're probably unfortunately headed in. The Chinese already have something like this implemented[1], though I'm not sure how it works. From a state's perspective monitoring whistleblowers seems like a feature. [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41081676 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41081676

pjc50 4y ago

> when content is tied to a real person moderation is a lot more straightforward Not really? That lets you defeat sockpuppets without having to use proxy information like IP, but there are plenty of people who will post appalling stuff or extravagant misinformation under their real names. See the ongoing Alex Jones libel trial.

kipchak 4y ago
Moderation was probably the wrong word, more in the sense of controlling faked content posted by accounts that are not real people. Managing Alex Jones official account is about the same, but fake accounts/bots become harder.
ridgered4 4y ago
The real names solution to abuse is often bandied about here, but it hasn't stopped garbage on facebook and it has a fundamental flaw in the logic behind it: It assumes all people have shame and that can be used to make them behave. Many real people don't, and they are the ones least likely to censor themselves by attaching a picture of their face to what they post. And a normal person is probably not going to want to interact with those people without the distance provided by being pseudonymous.

knorker 4y ago

> how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? Depends what you mean by "never". A middle ground could be that platforms give a green tickbox, but no personal information, to users who are proven to be human.

JohnFen 4y ago
How would the platforms know you're a human? You'd have to share personal information to them.
- knorker 4y ago
  Yes, thats the proposal. Not mine, mind you,

throw10920 4y ago

> I think requiring some sort of proof of being a real person before being able to post content might be how this shakes out, similar to accounts requiring a valid phone, or services with KYC requirements While, on a descriptive level, I believe that your idea of the implementation of this would win, on a normative level, I would argue that such an approach would be privacy-destroying and very dangerous for human freedoms and tyranny-resistance - simply because it's very hard to prove that you are a human without also indicating that you are a particular human. A privacy-preserving alternative might be to build a "web of trust", where the nodes don't actually have to be proven to be owned by a human (or by a particular human), but the reputation associated with the nodes still allows humans to curate meaningful non-spam content. With email/SMS spam, we have tools like Hashcash[1] that imposes a cost on each spam message (which is disproportionately burdensome on spammers), but I don't think that that works with "published" spam (as opposed to "direct" spam). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

Proving you're a real person doesn't need to be at odds with the user's privacy concerns. Look at the verification system used by risky subreddits for example, you only have to provide a few pictures of yourself posing with a sign with your username written on it from different angles. Currently hard to replicate by bots or photoshop, and privacy preserving. Short of reaching AGI there will always be tasks that can differentiate humans from machine and won't require the users to post a photo of their passport or phone number.

JohnFen 4y ago
How is that verification system not at odds with privacy concerns?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Well in that system you don't have to show your face, your identity is not compromised. And you're already planning on showing your body so no additional information is asked by the human-proving system that'd help identify you. But that's just an example, you can think of a 100 even more private implementations that give proof of humanity without giving proof of identity.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    You don't have to show your face? I didn't know that, thanks.

mellavora 4y ago

> how many are still operating in the old model of "never share personal information online"? user: kipchak created: December 26, 2017 karma: 758 about: normal fella Ok, so at least one person (kipchak) operates under that model. And good for them! Note that kipchak is not promoting KYC for posting, only suggesting that it is a probably outcome.

JohnFen 4y ago

> I think requiring some sort of proof of being a real person before being able to post content might be how this shakes out, similar to accounts requiring a valid phone, or services with KYC requirements. This would make the internet unusable to me. There is exactly zero chance that I'd be willing bring my real-world identity into the internet space.

visarga 4y ago
All this talk about "proof of being a real person" makes me believe AI passed the Turing test already.

mavhc 4y ago

Either you create a cross platform pseudo identity, and gain reputation gradually, or you link your pseudo identity to your real identity to start off with 1/8 billionth of reputation. Depends if there's a way to link a pseudo identity to your real identity without giving away your real identity. After all, I don't care who you are, I care about how much reputation you have.

JanisErdmanis 4y ago
Though as long as reputation can be quantified, it could be traded for real currency. Thus, making every post pseudonymously authenticated may not have a drastic impact on the current internet landscape.
- mavhc 4y ago
  Depends how you tie it to a real person, if the real person has to give up something to sell an identity, make the cost of selling it high. Problem is also how do you tell the downvotes because their new post is bad from the downvotes because you're in a gang that's attacking someone. Your downvotes have to be scaled with your own reputation, as do your upvotes. And downvotes found to be part of a conspiracy have to be cancelled and affect the conspirator's reputation

ufmace 4y ago

There's nothing stopping somebody from setting up some kind of forum/social service like that tomorrow. I'm skeptical it would be viable though. Trouble is the whole cancel culture thing. If everything is posted under your real name and made public and searchable forever, who can tell when you manage to piss somebody off, and they find something you wrote 10 years ago that's now considered offensive and make you unemployable.

jjcc 4y ago

There's a Godel/Strange loop issue that the AI can fake the proof of authorship so on ans so forth. You need a higher order proof....