5 ms·

What are some strategies a platform like this can take against spam or influence bots? Tying real life identities to users would certainly limit that(though ide

• acgourley 8mo ago
  We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.
  • Lerc 8mo ago
    Either I'm not sure what you mean by soul, or you are all-in on dualism.
    • acgourley 8mo ago
      Sorry the term of art is really soulbound identity right now, I use POS but it's less common. Definitions vary but I say a useful system must allow people to endorse statements with evidence they are a) alive b) not able to be represented by more than one identity (id is linked to your entire soul, not a persona or facet of your being) c) a kind of socially recognized person (human in the expected case) and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.
      • Lerc 8mo ago
        Do you believe you are capable of doing that yourself?
        • throwup238 8mo ago
          All you have to do is flip the tortoise back over. > You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
          • Lerc 8mo ago
            The point of the test is to see if the subject has had life experience enough that they could restrain their own empathy. Wanting to flip the tortoise back over was why he failed the test.
        • deleted 8mo ago
          [deleted]
      • protocolture 8mo ago
        How would this work considering that the soul is an entirely fictional concept?
        • deleted 8mo ago
          [deleted]
        • FunHearing3443 8mo ago
          “Empirically unprovable” and “fictional” are not synonymous.
    • matltc 8mo ago
      Meaning you have specified a SOUL.md at user- or project-level
  • worldsayshi 8mo ago
    What about Zero-Knowledge Identity? Use zero knowledge proofs to prove that I have an eID without actually providing my identity.
    • frogperson 8mo ago
      Something like a cert chain, but it would need to be both simple to use and secure. Those two requirements are greatly at odds with each other.
      • acgourley 8mo ago
        Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).
        • fc417fc802 8mo ago
          Check fraud is easy to commit but not easy to get away with while also benefiting financially. It's also illegal to steal things but that happens much more frequently because it's often fairly easy to get away with.
    • acgourley 8mo ago
      Yes that's the idea, once you have the soul-bound eID the ZK part is trivial, but the eID with the guarantees I outlined is not at all trivial.
    • samename 8mo ago
      EFF has a good write-up about zero-knowledge: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-alone-are-not-digital-id-solution-protecting-user-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-... > What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.
  • nerdsniper 8mo ago
    Worldcoin tried to solve that. Any solution for this will be similarly creepy.
  • observationist 8mo ago
    The casual ginger hate is disgusting. smh. It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges. The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures. Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol. At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it. Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on. I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
    • acgourley 8mo ago
      > they need a corresponding level of enforcement Yes 100%, that's why the government needs to offer it, make tampering a serious offense, and dynamically defend its integrity from attackers. > incorruptible AGI Not a lot of alpha in planning for scenarios where we get that
• mmooss 8mo ago
  For many purposes, we need anonymous authentication. I haven't heard about much innovation on that and similar privacy fronts in awhile. Off the top of my head, a possible method is a proxy or two or three, each handling different components of authentication and without knowledge of the other components. They return a token with validity properties (such as duration, level of service). All the vendor (e.g., Polis) would know is the validity of the token. I'm sure others have thought about it more ...
  • worldsayshi 8mo ago
    I mean I can prove with a zero-knowledge-proof that have solved a Sudoku puzzle without actually giving away the solution so this seems possible?
  • ianburrell 8mo ago
    You could do it now with OpenID SSO that only takes passkeys. The downside is that losing the passkey would lose the account. The problem is that OpenID leaks the authenticating sites to authentication site. The problem is that lots of sites need/want email address. So would need system for anonymous email, and that would either need real email to forward, or way to read email.
• gpm 8mo ago
  The invite-tree they discuss is likely an effective measure. It provides a way of tracking back influxes of bots to responsible pre-existing account(s) and banning them too. And if someone is responsible for inviting many of the pre-existing accounts them too... Making the game of whac-a-mole winnable. I'm assuming it's equivalent to lobste.rs implementation: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations https://lobste.rs/about#invitations The cost of this is adding a ton of friction to joining.
• renato_shira 8mo ago
  [dead]
  • kipukun 8mo ago
    I'd like to add to your point that private torrent trackers have had invite tree systems for awhile, and usually if your invitee breaks a rule, you get in trouble as well, so you are encouraged to only invite people you trust. The system has worked well for a long time, and some of these communities still thrive because of the trust that is built.
  • cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
    It might be an unpopular idea, but I think being somewhat liberal with doling out timeouts and bans for inflammatory/reactionary/overemotional posting would do a lot of good, too. It strongly crystalizes community norms and sends a message that this is a space to engage with the higher functioning portions of your brain instead of letting your amygdala and dopamine pathways take the wheel. Edit: Why is parent comment flagged/dead? Doesn’t seem that controversial?
    • em-bee 8mo ago
      the account was taken over by a bot. see the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998432
• INTPenis 8mo ago
  eID is the obvious answer here in Europe. Right now it's kinda scattered with different providers, but I believe EU is working on a more universal protocol. Unfortnately there are rumors it will require official Google/Apple play stores, unrooted devices, and all that it does today already. But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else. I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.
  • longfacehorrace 8mo ago
    So a local ballot box. Host a platform like this at city hall, county building, capitol building, schools. Only a human can access a terminal. Have humans monitor ingress/egress. A more generalized solution that solves the specific problem inherent to all these digital ones.
    • malux85 8mo ago
      If it requires me to leave the house, that increase in friction will mean I will vote maybe on 1/100th what I would otherwise vote on. I suspect pretty much everyone is the same
      • theroncross 8mo ago
        This is true of methods that don't require you to leave the house as well. Internet forums of all types are dominated by frequent users (by definition). People who are doing other things (working, raising families, living with disabilities that make participation difficult) are under-represented. Most of us just want someone with culturally normal values and competency to take care business. Many democratic systems do not select for people with culturally normal values and competency, unfortunately.
        • clcaev 8mo ago
          In my experience, neighborhood and municipal governance often works unreasonably well with life-long public servants who, even if not be the most brilliant of us, diligently work every day like the rest of us. Technology must assist local, bottom-up governance, rather than being supplanted.
• mejutoco 8mo ago
  There are so many things here that can work: - Not having just upvote or downvote, but upvote as funny or insightful (slashdot) - Not allowing to vote or comment until some karma has been reached (new accounts inflame topics and disappear later, having influenced). - Invite only so one can block while chain of accounts. - Not allowing to vote or comment every day or every hour, but randomly (more difficult for bots) - Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors. - Having a way to allow replies only from the account you are answering to (so that bots do not switch places while moving the topic). - Post history public (on reddit it can be made private, so a bot is posting hate in many communities and one cannot cross-check) - Some sort of graph of statistics of accounts that comment together. - Paying a small amount as friction for bots (linked to card, etc.) I guess with AI there would be even more. These are some from the top of my head.
  • rwmj 8mo ago
    Slashdot didn't allow you to vote and comment on the same topic. (If you voted, then commented, your votes on the post were rescinded.)
  • nottorp 8mo ago
    > Automatically downvoting posts with grammatical or low-effort errors. So allow only LLM generated posts?
    • mejutoco 8mo ago
      People are capable of writing correctly. Source: your post. If someone cannot be bothered, why should we bother to read what they have to say? I think it is a good signal. EDIT: plus it is not an allow or not allow. The more errors the more downvoted, so it is a small adjustment.
      • nottorp 8mo ago
        Of course, that excludes 90% of word plays.
• tracker1 8mo ago
  I'm also somewhat curious about how "hateful content" is defined... I mean having a serious discussion on policies around children in schools and sport regarding trans issues has been labelled in some circles as hateful content if it doesn't blindly support the most progressive views. I'm just using this as a specific example. Not saying that there aren't hateful sentiments or people behind comments or positions... only that depending on how such policies are interpreted you can't even debate sensitive issues.
  • thinkingtoilet 8mo ago
    Sigh... you know there's single digits number of trans athletes in the entire NCAA. The fact that this is even discussed at all is absurd given what else is going on in the country. Yes, intelligent people can have a conversation about it but even if you think it's a problem it's problem #43,948 on the list. Let's solve the other 43,947 problems first. It's really hard to believe people when they say it's not about bigotry. And it in every instance I've encountered people talking about it I would easily, and correctly, classify it has "hateful".
    • haramiah 8mo ago
      It's discussed because it's representative of a broader disagreement. People are rejecting the idea that 'woman' is nothing more than an identity that men can choose to appropriate, and are opposed to having this idea imposed upon society in law and policy. It's such an unpopular idea for so many different reasons that this has managed to unify some very different groups of people in opposition: feminists, conservatives, disaffected liberals, and many others.
      • tracker1 8mo ago
        Exactly... And the reaction above is exactly why it's become difficult to even discuss because so many just dismiss the concern.
    • tracker1 8mo ago
      If I identify as a dog, should you be required to acknowledge and endorse that? Now, scratch my belly and pay for my hair and tall implants with your taxes.