Ask HN: Why not we fight bots by verifying identity?

- UX: verification is often an onboarding step that makes getting going with whatever app or service you're trying to use that much harder. And what happens for false negatives? Now you're locked out with a potentially lengthy and unfruitful support case process

- Regulatory: To verify identity you usually need to capture a lot of personally identifiable information. With increasing legislation around how to store, control and use such data safely, it's just too risky for many businesses to try to capture this

- Cost: where a business MUST capture this info, they will either use a third-party service built for purpose or invest heavily in their own infra to do it - both are cost-prohibitive for general adoption + support costs for handling issues with false negatives etc

- Privacy: not everyone wants to be identified online. If you could detach verification from identification then you'd be onto something but that would take some serious coordination between an identity management provider, a verification service, your app AND the end user - that's a lot of points of failure and headache compared to customer<->app

Many government currently try to outlaw hate speech. This is technically bad and dangerous legislation that will hit innocent people, so not being identifiable is desirable.

Whistleblower get imprisoned even in countries that call themselves democracy.

Some annoying bots are the smaller problem by some extend. I get that public figures might want their identity verified. But that is an edge case.