Focus on preventing abusive usage patterns, not sockpuppets or robots.
Sometimes I do want a sockpuppet to help me access information and reformat or deliver it to me in an alternative form that is better accessible to me.
First, we can say “let’s not verify identities, anyone can be as many people as they want”. We have that today. It’s killed a lot of businesses and has deeply harmed society. Swell. we can of course redouble our efforts and refuse to take other steps, which is certainly a popular choice.
Or we could discuss the pragmatic path: verifying identity. Phone numbers are popular. Email is a tire fire. SMS is simple to hack. So, what’s next to try? What should this startup be using instead of phone number verification? What platforms exist to build revenue with clearly-identified customers on the internet?
The folks refusing to consider the question here seem to only care about the former, but I’d like to see pragmatic verified-identity solutions that address the firestorm of hate that anonymity has brought down upon us, and I’d like to see someone make a billion dollars from it.
I’m here for a pragmatic discussion, not for another retread of the same boring “everything must tolerate sock puppets” that we’ve been living with for the past two decades, and I’m not going to waste productive time and energy in idealistic debates that have failed to deliver what they promised at ETcon’03. We owe society better. We owe ourselves better. At least this startup is trying.
These would have the property that when a person joins a platform, the platform can check what other users on it is controlled by the same person, without revealing the meatspace identity of the person in question; and without revealing the usernames to the trusted entity. (Well, ideally the platform would only get to know the number of users, not who they are; but I don't think that can be done.)
Then a platform could just put a hard limit on how many users any given person can have, while still retaining the users' pseudonymity. Or it could place a soft limit, for that matter: every subsequent user receives an automatic penalty (e.g. 10 downvotes on every new message).
It wouldn't stop state actors, and it'd be horrible in places where the government isn't held accountable, but otherwise seems to solve most of the problems of anonymity.
Perhaps you could replace the trusted entity with something peer-to-peer, but it would have to be very carefully designed.
I disagree with many (most?) of your underlying assumptions about social dynamics, but this one in particular stood out to me. Have you not seen the vile things that people post to Facebook under their legal name, typically to groups consisting almost entirely of people from the local community?
It isn't anonymity that's the problem. It's the intent behind and incentives provided by the social interaction in question. There are deep systemic issues (IMO) with the interaction models of most social media today.
Why is this necessary in the first place?
