Seems like it would be an important public service to game as much online discussion as possible, persistently. Right now, the vulnerability of these discussion media is not detrimental to those running them. Make gameability of discussion media something that is actually visible, and the vulnerabilities will be patched.
If you take away sock puppets you take away anonymity as well. Even if you make everyone use their name and face and display pic and ip address and location, there is no guarantee that a group of people will stop censoring another group with or without sock puppets.
If you care to count there are at-least 5 controls on HN or any forum since 1990.
1. What gets on homepage ( Stickies )
2. Admin control
3. Firewall
4. Voting
5. Moderators
If you take social groups into consideration then on HN you have at least
1. Programmers
2. Startup People
3. Technical People
4. Geeks
5. Hackers
6. Security Hackers
7. College Students
8. Academic People
9. Trend followers
10. Trolls ( my people )
These 10 groups fight amongst each other with the help of 5 controls above. Every forum is always like this, since its inception-middle-death.
No one really wins but the constant bickering about forces each group to outdo each other. Whether it is progress or going about in circles only time will tell.
Just because you can patch the fucking software doesn't mean people will change. You will probably add one more control level to make into a total of 6 and then nothing. Some other egghead will write about censorship 3.0
