Very soon, the domain of bullshit will extend to actual text. We'll be able to buy HN comments by the thousand -- expertly wordsmithed, lucid AI comments -- and you can get them to say "this GitHub repo is the best", or "this startup is the real deal". Won't that be fun?
The obvious problem is we don’t have any great alternatives. We have captcha, and we can look at behavior and source data (IP), and of course everyone’s favorite fingerprinting. To make matters worse: abuse, spam and fraud prevention lives in the same security-by-obscurity paradigm that cyber security lived in for decades before “we” collectively gave up on it, and decided that openness is better. People would laugh at you to suggest abuse tech should be open (“you’d just help the spammers”).
I tried to find whether academia has taken a stab at these problems but came up pretty much empty handed. Hopefully I’m just bad at searching. I truly don’t get why people aren’t looking at these issues seriously and systematically.
In the medium term, I’m worried that we’ll not address the systemic threats, and continue to throw ID checks, heuristics and ML at the wall, enjoying the short lived successes when some classifier works for a month before it’s defeated. The reason this is concerning is that we will be neck deep in crap (think SEO blogspam and recipe sites but for everything) which will be disorienting for long enough to erode a lot of trust that we could really use right now.
I can see lots of reaosns people might oppose the idea but I am not sure why it's not a widely discussed option?
(asking honestly and openly - please don't shout!)
I think there are cases for anonymous/pseudonymous speech, but I think that's going to have to shift away from disposable identities. Newspapers, for example, have been providing selective anonymity for hundreds of years, so I think there's a model to follow: trusted people/organizations who validate the quality of a non-public identity.
So a place like HN, for example, could promise that each pseudonymous account is connected to a unique human via some sort of government ID with challenge/response capability. Or you could end up with third-party ID providers that provide a similar service that goes beyond mere identity, like the Twitter Verified program scaled up.
Disposable identities have always been a struggle. E.g., look at Reddit's very popular Am I the Asshole, where people widely believe a lot of the content is creative writing exercises. But keeping up a fake identity over the long term was a lot of work. Not anymore, though!