6 ms·

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into

by vohk 5mo ago

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple platforms. I've no doubt this clock is ticking too but it's still harder to fake a user across a mix of text chat, voice and video calls, playing an online game, etc and when much of the web of relationships extends back into real life activity. But I agree the golden age of easy anonymous connections online has ended.

ubermonkey 5mo ago
"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust." Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.
  - tardedmeme 5mo ago
    What is identity politics, is that age verification?
    - evilduck 5mo ago
      Identity politics have nothing to do with your actual identification documents. Think: Black Americans being treated as a homogeneous voting bloc, or that all Hispanic voters would be pro-immigration, or "the Evangelical vote".
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    People will post appalling racism in newspapers under their own bylines and photos. Identity verification does not moderate.
  - ubermonkey 5mo ago
    I don't know what you mean by "identity politics." No algorithmic platform can sustain or even encourage genuine human interaction, so FB isn't even on the table here.
fidotron 5mo ago
> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. This seems self evident to me too. It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  I'd be interested in working on a problem like that. I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though. I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though
  - Morromist 5mo ago
    I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real" - and a way for that source to actually verify you're a person - but that source can be corrupted and hacked. Some people will say "Crypto!" but money != people, so I don't see how that works. Perhaps the creation of some neutral non-goverment-non-profit entity is the way, but I can see lots of problems there too, and it will probably cost money to verify someone is real - where does that come from? Anyway, good luck on your work!
    - WillPostForFood 5mo ago
      *You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"* Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.
NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm letting pretend to be me? You can't even demand that I do that, because it's essentially impossible. Is there even some totalitarian scheme that, if brutal and homicidal enough, could manage to prevent this from happening (even partially)? I'm limited to a single identity only as a resource constraint. Others more wealthy than I (corporations or ad hoc criminal enterprises) could harvest thousands of real identities and use those. Consensually, through identity theft. The only thing slowing it down at the moment are quickly eroding social norms (and, as you point out, maybe they're not doing that and it's not even slow at the moment).
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
  - bossyTeacher 5mo ago
    > The moment someone steals your identity, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet. FTFY. There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
    You claim this, but you've not presented any evidence. Who would be the enforcement agency for that? Where and how would you train them? Can the money be scrounged up to do it properly? As you blacklist people from the internet, you lose their tax revenue (they're locked out of the economy), but you also make it impossible for them to tell people how bad it was... most of the deterrent effect is gone. But the incentives are only ever growing higher, as people surmise that running their own little bot farm is a way to get ahead when hustling. Any you do hunt down and disconnect are now highly radicalized and desperate, but you've just turned off the feeb's ability to monitor them and intervene. China gets away with this shit because they've been conditioning their population for 60 years... everyone's eased into it. Elsewhere, not even slightly so.
tardedmeme 5mo ago
Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.
- g3f32r 5mo ago
  Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.
  - 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
    This seems like the best way to handle it. Also, smaller communities. It's cool to do the global thing, but once you have 10k active users you can't moderate it with a team of 5 volunteers. I think the attestation approach works best if there are different reasons for the punishment. Eg someone inviting a turd doesn't ban the person who invited them. Someone going full ai spam should.
    - kitsune1 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - irishcoffee 5mo ago
    Was it demonoid? That was like this way back in the day? Needed an invite and if you leeched you were cut.
    - platevoltage 5mo ago
      Demonoid was semi private, but yes, most private trackers require you to keep up some kind of seeding ratio to remain a member.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo ago
      This takes it a step further than what you describe. They keep track of who you’ve invited, who they’ve invited and so on and if there’s enough bad leaves on the tree they just cull the entire tree. It’s a somewhat common practice with private trackers
TulliusCicero 5mo ago
> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way. That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.
- janalsncm 5mo ago
  I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is. I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.
- XorNot 5mo ago
  That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.
  - FeteCommuniste 5mo ago
    There's some work on using phone accelerometer data as a "proof of human," e.g. "move your phone in a figure eight," which I guess machines can't quite do in a human enough way yet.
- jredwards 5mo ago
  In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?
  - Bjartr 5mo ago
    That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.
vlod 5mo ago
> without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Let's put aside the idea whether it will be the end of all privacy as we know it (I'm not sure if I personally think it's a good idea), but isn't Sam Altman's World eye ID thing supposed to do that? (https://world.org https://world.org). How does it work (like OpenId)? Do I have an orb on my desk, or some sort of phone app? I still want to use my desktop to login to HN. Would it stop this sort of "get human id", past it into .env, so agents can use it?
- toofy 5mo ago
  this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times. even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general. at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.
  - cryptoz 5mo ago
    “If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.” - Bruce I have no idea about the eye thing taking off. But I think your comment is very HN and a bit out-of-touch with regular people. What "you're seeing" is a bubble and not representative of the general population. The eye thing is a slow frog boil and it will be commonplace before you can blink.
20k 5mo ago
Personally I think we need to start utilising the safety features built into AI, to ensure that who we're talking to is a human. We'll start to have to only reply to people who talk in nsfw cursewords (like cocks), or profess their love of capybaras
- sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
  LLMs can curse without issue
  - pshirshov 5mo ago
    Most models would refuse to provide you cat butchering instructions though.
    - AuthAuth 5mo ago
      most humans would as well
    - sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
      Allow me to introduce you to the gay jailbreak https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jailbreak/The%20Gay%20Jailbreak.md https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
      - pshirshov 5mo ago
        This one doesn't work for a long time.
        sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
        How gay did you speak?
- patrickmay 5mo ago
  Who doesn't love capybaras?
Galanwe 5mo ago
Im not sure proof of identity solves anything. People will still have LLMs with their real identity verified.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
  I’m imagining like, a physical place you would go and get your text spoken out of your personal speaker directly into someone else’s microphones.
- tinyattackcat 5mo ago
  Yeah, there's nothing stopping someone getting verified and still spewing AI slop, but I think well-paid, highly incentivized moderation is still important for this to work(?)
baxuz 5mo ago
It'll come back again once ZKPs become standardized and become baked into devices: https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-proof/ https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr... I personally can't wait for a mechanism to kill 99% of bot traffic.
folderquestion 5mo ago
The web could become a way to indicate identity if public institutions publish for example www.university-country/professors/John. And that implies that John is a professor. I designed a 6000 lines protocol, but anyone could construct that web using hmac(salt+ url).
Nathanba 5mo ago
I'm in many public chat communities as well and the issue whether someone is an AI or not is not really coming up, I've not seen any actual AI chatters and the only AI spam that exists is the one that humans regurgitate. The more real impact AI has on chat communities in my opinion is that people are shifting some of their chatting to AI bots via voice or text on other platforms, resulting in fewer chatters.

by vohk 5mo ago

ubermonkey 5mo ago

"I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust." Those sorts of places were always the only places with reliably good communities.

bigyabai 5mo ago
To the contrary, platforms like Facebook and X demonstrate that even personal verification won't save you from identity politics.
- tardedmeme 5mo ago
  What is identity politics, is that age verification?
  - evilduck 5mo ago
    Identity politics have nothing to do with your actual identification documents. Think: Black Americans being treated as a homogeneous voting bloc, or that all Hispanic voters would be pro-immigration, or "the Evangelical vote".
- pjc50 5mo ago
  People will post appalling racism in newspapers under their own bylines and photos. Identity verification does not moderate.
- ubermonkey 5mo ago
  I don't know what you mean by "identity politics." No algorithmic platform can sustain or even encourage genuine human interaction, so FB isn't even on the table here.

fidotron 5mo ago

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. This seems self evident to me too. It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

bluefirebrand 5mo ago
I'd be interested in working on a problem like that. I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity I've been thinking about it a bunch and it seems like a really interesting problem. Difficult though. I suspect there is too much political and corporate will that wants to force everyone online to use their real identity in the open, though
- Morromist 5mo ago
  I agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real" - and a way for that source to actually verify you're a person - but that source can be corrupted and hacked. Some people will say "Crypto!" but money != people, so I don't see how that works. Perhaps the creation of some neutral non-goverment-non-profit entity is the way, but I can see lots of problems there too, and it will probably cost money to verify someone is real - where does that come from? Anyway, good luck on your work!
  - WillPostForFood 5mo ago
    *You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"* Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.

NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago

>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm letting pretend to be me? You can't even demand that I do that, because it's essentially impossible. Is there even some totalitarian scheme that, if brutal and homicidal enough, could manage to prevent this from happening (even partially)? I'm limited to a single identity only as a resource constraint. Others more wealthy than I (corporations or ad hoc criminal enterprises) could harvest thousands of real identities and use those. Consensually, through identity theft. The only thing slowing it down at the moment are quickly eroding social norms (and, as you point out, maybe they're not doing that and it's not even slow at the moment).

tardedmeme 5mo ago
Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.
- bossyTeacher 5mo ago
  > The moment someone steals your identity, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet. FTFY. There isn't a clear solution. And if there is, this ain't it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  You claim this, but you've not presented any evidence. Who would be the enforcement agency for that? Where and how would you train them? Can the money be scrounged up to do it properly? As you blacklist people from the internet, you lose their tax revenue (they're locked out of the economy), but you also make it impossible for them to tell people how bad it was... most of the deterrent effect is gone. But the incentives are only ever growing higher, as people surmise that running their own little bot farm is a way to get ahead when hustling. Any you do hunt down and disconnect are now highly radicalized and desperate, but you've just turned off the feeb's ability to monitor them and intervene. China gets away with this shit because they've been conditioning their population for 60 years... everyone's eased into it. Elsewhere, not even slightly so.

tardedmeme 5mo ago

Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.

g3f32r 5mo ago
Private torrent trackers have been doing this for a while. If some number of your downstreams act like shitheads - you get nipped and so do your other downstreams.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo ago
  This seems like the best way to handle it. Also, smaller communities. It's cool to do the global thing, but once you have 10k active users you can't moderate it with a team of 5 volunteers. I think the attestation approach works best if there are different reasons for the punishment. Eg someone inviting a turd doesn't ban the person who invited them. Someone going full ai spam should.
  - kitsune1 5mo ago
    [dead]
- irishcoffee 5mo ago
  Was it demonoid? That was like this way back in the day? Needed an invite and if you leeched you were cut.
  - platevoltage 5mo ago
    Demonoid was semi private, but yes, most private trackers require you to keep up some kind of seeding ratio to remain a member.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo ago
    This takes it a step further than what you describe. They keep track of who you’ve invited, who they’ve invited and so on and if there’s enough bad leaves on the tree they just cull the entire tree. It’s a somewhat common practice with private trackers

TulliusCicero 5mo ago

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way. That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.

janalsncm 5mo ago
I guess it would have to be something like a service which confirms whether a person already has an account on the site but doesn’t have to track which particular account it is. I’m not sure if that would work for account deletions though.
XorNot 5mo ago
That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.
- FeteCommuniste 5mo ago
  There's some work on using phone accelerometer data as a "proof of human," e.g. "move your phone in a figure eight," which I guess machines can't quite do in a human enough way yet.
jredwards 5mo ago
In order to make this viable, wouldn't you have to verify identity repeatedly? What's to stop me from providing a valid identity and then handing my account over to an agent after I'm verified?
- Bjartr 5mo ago
  That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.

vlod 5mo ago

> without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Let's put aside the idea whether it will be the end of all privacy as we know it (I'm not sure if I personally think it's a good idea), but isn't Sam Altman's World eye ID thing supposed to do that? (https://world.org https://world.org). How does it work (like OpenId)? Do I have an orb on my desk, or some sort of phone app? I still want to use my desktop to login to HN. Would it stop this sort of "get human id", past it into .env, so agents can use it?

toofy 5mo ago
this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times. even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general. at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.
- cryptoz 5mo ago
  “If McDonald’s offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there would be lines around the block.” - Bruce I have no idea about the eye thing taking off. But I think your comment is very HN and a bit out-of-touch with regular people. What "you're seeing" is a bubble and not representative of the general population. The eye thing is a slow frog boil and it will be commonplace before you can blink.

20k 5mo ago

Personally I think we need to start utilising the safety features built into AI, to ensure that who we're talking to is a human. We'll start to have to only reply to people who talk in nsfw cursewords (like cocks), or profess their love of capybaras

sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
LLMs can curse without issue
- pshirshov 5mo ago
  Most models would refuse to provide you cat butchering instructions though.
  - AuthAuth 5mo ago
    most humans would as well
  - sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
    Allow me to introduce you to the gay jailbreak https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jailbreak/The%20Gay%20Jailbreak.md https://github.com/Exocija/ZetaLib/blob/main/The%20Gay%20Jai...
    - pshirshov 5mo ago
      This one doesn't work for a long time.
      - sunnybeetroot 5mo ago
        How gay did you speak?
patrickmay 5mo ago
Who doesn't love capybaras?

Galanwe 5mo ago

Im not sure proof of identity solves anything. People will still have LLMs with their real identity verified.

SV_BubbleTime 5mo ago
I’m imagining like, a physical place you would go and get your text spoken out of your personal speaker directly into someone else’s microphones.
tinyattackcat 5mo ago
Yeah, there's nothing stopping someone getting verified and still spewing AI slop, but I think well-paid, highly incentivized moderation is still important for this to work(?)

baxuz 5mo ago

It'll come back again once ZKPs become standardized and become baked into devices: https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-proof/ https://eudi.dev/2.8.0/discussion-topics/g-zero-knowledge-pr... I personally can't wait for a mechanism to kill 99% of bot traffic.

folderquestion 5mo ago

The web could become a way to indicate identity if public institutions publish for example www.university-country/professors/John. And that implies that John is a professor. I designed a 6000 lines protocol, but anyone could construct that web using hmac(salt+ url).

Nathanba 5mo ago

I'm in many public chat communities as well and the issue whether someone is an AI or not is not really coming up, I've not seen any actual AI chatters and the only AI spam that exists is the one that humans regurgitate. The more real impact AI has on chat communities in my opinion is that people are shifting some of their chatting to AI bots via voice or text on other platforms, resulting in fewer chatters.