alt Hacker NewsWhy would identity verification solve this? The spammer can just verify himself, or if he doesn't want to or it's at a bigger scale than individual, then there will be services where you can get identity verifications on the cheap and they'll work either by paying people in a poor country to verify themselves all day, or, even more cheaply, sketchy age verification services on sketchy porn sites will be actually proxying or replaying people's verifications to another service of your choice
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It did solve the spam/russian bot problem on https://www.lide.cz/ . You have to verify yourself using a national ID and you discuss under your citizen name. The conversation is since somehow way more thoughtful and civic than say on FB.
Not that I am happy with it, it would be ideal to have my old internet back.
We're probably close to the point for social networks where authenticity/transparency is more valuable than network effect.
You could probably have a workable social network just with the following properties:
1. Use combination of digital friend-of-a-friend invite chains as well as sign-ups at physical 3rd spaces to build out the social network
2. If a user's account is found to be abusing the network, kick the user that invited that account plus everyone in that branch of the invite tree
3. To re-enable an account from a kicked branch, each user has to visit one of your 3rd spaces (and temporarily lose their invite privileges after re-enabling).
4. Security engineers do what they normally do at social media companies, except you now incentivize them to publicize efforts to reveal attackers so that you generate foot traffic at the 3rd spaces.
Now instead of hiding a report that grandma is friends with a Russian bot, your giddy security team does a publicity stunt to kick 100,000 users on Thursday.
And that will generate record drink sales at your 3rd spaces on Friday. (Senior citizen's discount applies.)