Ask Lemmy

For starters we need someone to set what is a good or a bad actor, what is misinformation and what is Truth.

There is one way, but we don't want that.

It's the nature of social networks. People mostly upvote (or whatever term) content they like/agree with, without vetting it. Contradictions or discomfort are voted down.

Some of what we call misinformation is just ignorance, some is people who lack context and some is on purpose but for a "good" cause. Similarly, one person's bad actor is another's reasonable critic. (In debate, you often examine something through someone else's lens/given framework, which necessitates examining from a position with which you do not agree. Which is often called bad faith acting.)

Trolls are the silliest and I don't get it but again, any community large enough will attract a weird subset who want to mess with it or, legit don't have the social skills. (I think of a sad account that saw a star trek or wars joke and wandered in to tell people they didn't like the series because it was for kids and then seemed to relish in the backlash. But looking over their comment history, they seemed an otherwise normal person.)

So, unless we really fundamentally change the nature of social media, I don't see those as solvable problems.

And if we could solve those issues, would people even want it? Would folks want to constantly see things that implied they might not be good people or that their politics or beliefs might be wrong? I think back to a post, somewhere on the fediverse about a vegan criticizing carnivores re: climate change. Even in the Leftist fediverse, it was downvoted to oblivion. But had it been about say cars, ai etc making the same point...

first you have to stop the bots. you do this by requiring a phone number to MFA to. by doing this, you also stop people from making multiple accounts. you also stop (most) extremely young children from interacting.

second, you send out random validations to the phone number between 2-4 weeks. they have 24 hours to verify they are active. if they fail to activate more than twice in a row, their account is disabled and the phone number is greylisted.

if your phone number becomes greylisted, you can whitelist it after further validations, maybe calling into an automated hotline to validate post history, etc.

if you are banned for some reason, your phone number is blacklisted for as long as the ban is in effect.

at no point do we track a users identity outside of a unique number that is never shared or sold. the phone number is simply held as collateral to ensure the social contract is maintained by the user.