The thing is you could implement a real ID system that was still pseudonymous at the user level so that you only prove real personhood at account creation. Kind of like a Twitter blue check but just for human authenticity instead of notoriety. It could even be tied back to the real person account anonymously on the admin side so you could mass ban alts automatically if people started to create bad bots. It should all be doable with current encryption the biggest issue is we don’t have key to real person really setup at any level. Maybe something like keybase combined with the KYC tech used for banks and exchanges could bridge that gap.
One issue with that is that you could approach poor people and get hundreds of thousands of real ids for very little. And because language models are so good, it would take ages to root them all out if it's even possible.
Modern KYC methods has liveness checks built into it so you'd need to get tons of people willing to create and hand over their unique accounts themselves. Same problem in theory exists for Coinbase or other crypto exchanges but they only get a scant number of scammers trying to use it to funnel funds out.
Let's for now keep choosing things we don't already think will lead to dystopian nightmares. I'm pretty sure we still have plenty of options like that.
I don't have time anymore today to get into lots of details about saving communication online but I liked how in Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or, Dodge in Hell," internet identity was basically completely wiped out by the proliferation of bots, and identity had to work off of chains of subtle identity attributes that were cryptographically strong because... scifi magic with lots of Stephenson description, you might be smarter than me in that field so give it a pokearound.
Doctorow in "Walkaway" had some ideas about it that I liked as well.
This doesn't preclude the use of non authenticated account(s) just a possible system of providing provisions for anonymous authentication of humanness. I don't want to slap my real name across every part either but nothing about this requires all sites to adopt it at all.
A toll fee won’t really be a quality incentive for someone of sufficient economic means, while shutting out great contributions from someone who can’t afford it.
It'll shut out anyone that simply doesn't feel like paying for others to read their thoughts. Narcissists with money would probably love it though. The rest of us would simply abandon these forums and go find other things to do with our time and attention.
That's the big problem with pay to post schemes. Even with miniscule payments the friction of including payments at all is a big barrier for the majority of people who fill out forums and communities so it's not just a handful of people clout chasing the void.
