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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine a situation where someone creates a walled garden that people will willingly pay to be part of. Costs money, involves actual proof of identity (but you could still be broadly anonymous within the garden), with the value proposition being an elimination of all advertising. Web ads, spam, all of it.

There is probably some critical mass where this would work. Some people would pay to be able to just not have to do combat with the whole world simply to enjoy the Internet.

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I would like to see this done using domain validated identities. It might not work for everything, but, if I can prove I own a domain, it's a globally unique handle that can be used to build online reputation and trust.

It would also make is possible for larger companies to attest to purchases made and / or the quality of participation within their community. Imagine a scenario where I donate $50 to an open source project using GitHub Sponsors with my domain as the identity and GitHub attests to me spending that $50.

Over time, it would be possible to demonstrate a significant "investment" in your domain validated identity and it would be done by spending money online like you normally would without any additional cost. The attestation that you spent the money is simply a side effect of something you're already doing, but it's a really good indicator (over time) that you're a normal participant.

At the very least, I think having a domain as a globally usable handle would help to reduce impersonation which is a serious, difficult to solve problem right now.

Domains can be lost - this idea would exacerbate that problem.

In fact, it would give yet another reason to hijack a domain.

Well, the monetary system itself ticks most of those boxes, it's just very limited in what you can communicate. And it is not perfect either I suppose.

In fact there might be significant overlap between something that can support a monetary system and something that supports trustworthy communication. The best you could hope for by solely focussing on communication is that it doesn't collapse under the pressure of having to keep financial transactions secure. Except any secure form of communication is probably going to be used for transactions of some kind at some point.

The way Keybase handles identity was a good way forward, in my opinion, that could be extended upon but since they were bought up I’m unsure about its future and no one else is building off of it or copying it, that I know of.

I can imagine using levels of its trust model to handle the levels of email I receive e.g. this domain has X validations and my friends haven’t blocked it.

That almost exists with facebook except your idea is more strict with identity verification for all accounts and instead of anonymity facebook instead lets you use your real name or a pseudonym.

Figure out how to keep sites hosted off the platform available without advertising, say by a monetary agreement with either them or their ad platform, and I'll be the first in line.

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