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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't be first-tier friends with people you only know from the internet. You'd be first-tier friends with neighbors and cousins and the other parents at your kids' school. Then when I prove (keybase style) that I, HN user ineptech, am also "ineptech" on this social network, you would know that I really am a 48-year-old guy in Portland and not some other person because I have also friended all my irl friends, and our friends-of-friends-of-friends eventually overlap.

Maybe "friend" is the wrong term. Maybe "vouch". You could still message me, but you wouldn't vouch for me, because you don't know from HN whether I am who I say I am.

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I don't speak to my neighbors.

My blood family consists of violent homophobes that would shoot my house up if they ever learned I'm gay (or where I live).

I have a dedicated online persona (fursona, really) that I keep compartmentalized from people I distruat.

Some of my friends are trans.

Some of my friends have abusive ex-partners and stalkers.

Some of my friends are sex workers who need social media to find customers but don't want their real names leaked.

How would your proposal serve any of these use cases? From where I stand, it'd be more of a hindrance.

This idea may not fulfill every use case.

It's fine if it doesn't fulfill all use cases, but demonstrating any thought to some of them would help flesh out the details of what's being proposed.

Are you building a social network, or a chain of trust?

Are identities fungible, or irrevocably linked to a person's legal name and physicality?

Etc.

Your example just shows the perils of monopoly social networks.

Today you have Facebook and Twitter (and whatever the kids use these days) with not much in between. If you’re not on those you don’t exist as a person.

If there were more options to choose from you could have a place with all your furry friends that is completely separate from the other aspects of your life like coworkers and family. No need to link between the two, nobody needs to know what you get up to on the other places unless you wanted them to.

The whole point of vouching for someone is so they can prove they are who they say they are. If you don't want to do that, then don't do that. Or, if you have two identities, I suppose you'd have two accounts.

Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

> Anyway, things don't have to be for everyone. In the unlikely scenario in which this gets built, there would still be other websites too.

Just so we're clear: Do you realize this is how systemic prejudice gets built?

"Our policies disproportionately exclude [insert minority group] in particular? Well it isn't because we're [insert -ist word here]! We love [group]. We're baffled why they would believe otherwise."

You've misunderstood me, no one is being excluded and there's no real name policy. Use a pseudonym, make two accounts, make ten or a hundred if you like. What you can't do is use the app to prove that you really are John Smith, if you didn't sign up as John Smith. And to the extent that one of the main features of the app is to prove your identity, the app would not be useful to someone who doesn't want to do that.

But why ? Why would you expose your entire real life social circle to the internet?

If you don't want people to know that you're friends with Dave, don't friend Dave, or don't use it at all. This isn't supposed to replace pseudo-anonymous networks like Twitter, this is more like Facebook without all the bullshit. The use case is "I know Dave, and I don't care who knows that I'm friends with Dave, and I'd like to let him know I won't make it to the PTA meeting without involving an enormous advertising corporation".

The fact of the "vouch" could provide the validation without identifying the people from whose circle overlap it was derived.

I think the point is that you wouldn't be. The network, from your perspective, will be quite small.

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