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MeanwhileOnReddit - - (+8|-0)
Reddit is weighing identity verification methods to combat its bot problem - The platform's CEO mentioned Face ID and Touch ID as ways to verify if a human is using Reddit.(www.engadget.com)
5 commentsbyNeol
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[-]goat4(+4|0)

If they do that, Reddit's rank as one of the most visited websites will drop, because the percentage of bot visitors is between 20% and 50%. They populate /r/popular with reposts of images in various subs while upvoting them to the thousands to build accounts.

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[-]Neol2(+2|0)

Well, I also won't use reddit if they would do that even though I'm not a bot :)

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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)

It would in fact be good if we could get rid of bots. I sometimes wonder if it's possible to hash people's combination of name and birth place, and then put all those hashes for existing persons in a database. If only the hashes are stored, it should preserve people's privacy, right? Good math can make it impossible to reverse the hashing afaik. And then people can verify simply by providing their hash.

But then there's a remaining problem: this sort of thing allows administrators to ban individual hashes and then they cannot bypass the ban. This allows for terrible abuse and unfortunately, admins and moderators abuse their power across Reddit, Discord, IRC... Almost everything. There is no culture of fair moderation.

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[-]x0x70(0|0)

That's basically what verification is. You would have to put in your name and birth place every time to authenticate. Having a hash doesn't solve that because you would need to provide the source of the hash to compare against every time. You'd also need a third factor because anyone can guess a name and birthplace and bots specifically can scrape and use it. A way to avoid putting in those exact details into every site would be to use a third party.

So a username and password to sign into a third party that has your name and birthplace. You've just argued for exactly the system everyone is trying to avoid.

I didn't know Keir Starmer was computer literate enough to hop on here.

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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)

Obviously that's not what I'm arguing for, you misunderstood my post. Perhaps I'm articulating it wrong, perhaps key is a better word here. The point is to derive keys from something unique that validates your humanity, and only have pubkeys leave your device, never the unique information itself. And the combination of your name and birth place or name and birthday is already unique in the far majority of cases, so there's no need to gather biometrics.

The pubkeys are checked against a database that contains only people's pubkeys, not the identities behind them.

What if 10 unique pubkeys could be derived from your name + birth place combination? That gives everyone ten chances with each website / service. There's still the risk of blacklists arising which would make it so people have 10 chances at the aggregate of websites using said blacklist, that'd be abusive, but at least some balance is reached here.

And the point is moreso to show that humanity can be checked conveniently in a way that maintains privacy, to be used as a counterargument against globalists. Don't call me Keir Starmer please.

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