Even with some defects or imperfections anything is better than what we have now - which is basically nothing. I think the way I'd think about this is to imagi

Even with some defects or imperfections anything is better than what we have now - which is basically nothing. I think the way I'd think about this is to imagine say a small community, such as a town of say 5000 people or so. While you cannot know each person individually, you can know of people by reputation. People do earn rep over time, and they can burn rep. It is true that some people will be unfairly downscored, or unfairly upscored - but I'm not really trying to argue for those fine grained situations. What I'm trying to argue for is simply distinguishing the very bad actors acting out of pure malice from injecting fake news, media and 'yellow journalism' into human conversations. True some real people will be downscored (I prefer to think of this as downscoring bad actors rather than 'blocking'). And true an AI can 'sound very human' - but an AI or a bad actor will struggle to build up a reputation over time. An AI can't shake hands with you, it is harder for it to prove it is human... Other bad actors will presumably burn their reputations if they spit out a series of offensive, misleading, false, inflammatory or toxic posts... Note I am not necessarily advocating for crypto per se as a way to establish social trust graphs (a'la PGP or say Keybase) but I am arguing that there are other options that the OP did not raise. I more want to see a wider discussion around ways to filter malicious media that either "centralized systems" OR "small social clubs". I'm not necessarily saying it has to be a cryptographic solution... but I do think there are more ways to have what we want.