Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomlin | Hacker News Reader

Oh? So you don't see any benefit in an account having to prove its identity, or purchase a blue check with identity? How about bots? You will have to do cartwheels and backflips to convince anyone that someone will be willing to micromanage millions of bots, and their identity and payment profiles.

View on HN

I have a feeling facebook's real name policy is because it's somehow better for ad profiling

It's not, your real name is one of the less useful pieces of data used in ad targeting.

It's because Facebook is for old people, who remember phonebooks and letters to the editor and are impressed when they see a real name and think it's authentic.

Of course, in practice they're just as vicious to each other under their real names.

Facebook has had an official real name policy for a decade and was the primary source of online misinformation in the 2016 US Presidential election. How do you think Twitter will pull this off and actually improve?

That's not really a 1:1 comparison. You don't go through any identify verification process, other than "First name Last name." Go on Facebook Marketplace, there are dozens upon dozens of dup accounts solely for the purposes of evading a bad review, or to scam people outright.

vs.

An application process, with identification verification. While optional, would allow any one who cares about their feed to completely turn off anyone who could be a scammer or bot. I don't remember that option in Facebook. I would definitely have it turned on.

Not sure how these are even remotely comparable.

how many applications could this hypothetical process handle in a day? 100? 1000?

twitter has 213 million active users. imagine if 20% of them want to get verified. it would take decades

I dunno, but coinbase is doing it pretty effectively. So it is objectively not impossible, unless you want it to be.

> Coinbase has more than 89 million registered and verified users

https://earthweb.com/coinbase-statistics/#:~:text=4.1)%20Rel....

There are approximately fifteen billion companies in the KYC space that provide means for automating ID verification. Very common in the financial compliance / trust & safety area of companies.

Authenticate the security features on the ID? There's a company for that.

Match the name / DOB on the ID against public record? Yep.

Check the ID against a list of known fakes? Ezpz.

Verify the format of the barcode on the back of an ID? There's another company that offers that.

You get the jist.

You are underestimating the complexity of bringing KYC to an international product which, eg, supports business accounts. If it were easy, App Store wouldn’t be inundated with fraudulent apps.

Look at Amazon. Fake accounts are hard, so hard to make that they sell in the $1000s. Then it's still incredibly hard to actually use that fake account because so many actions will get them suspended. That's not to say Amazon isn't rampant with scams because the profit incentives from a single account are so great. You can sell a couple hundred 2TB Thumb drives for $30 per day and it will take a month or longer to accumulate enough bad reviews to have the account shutdown.

I don't think the profit motivations on Twitter will be similar enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com