Pseudonymity is important, but cheap disposable identities lead to lots of community-destroying mischief.
What's the best practice for enabling pseudonyms but curtailing throwaway spam/harassment/sockpuppet account-creation?
For my next project I'm considering offering two registration options:
(1) Use Facebook, which is close enough to 'real names' for most purposes – while still having some room, as Boyd notes, for many users of persistent pseudonyms.
(2) Buy a pseudonym with a nonrefundable Bitcoin payment. If you're serious about pseudonymity, why not go all the way? This is a variant on the 'Metafilter $5 one-time fee' model, but as Matt Haughey has noted that still occasionally suffers from chargebacks by dedicated vandals. Bitcoin solves that.
That's an interesting idea, but I'm not familiar with its mechanics/limits. Who would be a representative provider?
Now, for this goal, cumbersome and/or irreversible is somewhat the point, to prevent throwaway accounts. But an occasional SMS-chargeback would be OK, as long as the source phone number can be blacklisted against reuse in the future, forcing mischief-makers to burn one phone number each registration.
The problem with the Bitcoin approach is not so much the money, but the time and knowledge needed to set up a wallet, buy BTCs and then perform the payment. And as long as it costs money it would still hopefully stop trolls.
The only provider I know is Fortumo[1], but I'm sure there are others. It seems pretty easy to integrate with a website[2] and as far as I know there is no way for the client to issue a chargeback.
What's the best practice for enabling pseudonyms but curtailing throwaway spam/harassment/sockpuppet account-creation?
For my next project I'm considering offering two registration options:
(1) Use Facebook, which is close enough to 'real names' for most purposes – while still having some room, as Boyd notes, for many users of persistent pseudonyms.
(2) Buy a pseudonym with a nonrefundable Bitcoin payment. If you're serious about pseudonymity, why not go all the way? This is a variant on the 'Metafilter $5 one-time fee' model, but as Matt Haughey has noted that still occasionally suffers from chargebacks by dedicated vandals. Bitcoin solves that.
Any thoughts?