the last source of truth are forums.. but not reddit... if it has a CEO it will rot and enshitify.

I'm talking about forums... the bmw forum for your old car... the motorcycle forum for the enthusiast of the SV650... those places are full of anecdotes, people talking, lending a hand to another person... being humans and care...

Which is what social media is/should/was about, is what internet is about before the enshitification happened... I would vote to have this ID associated to you via check of your local goverment issued id and ONLY UPPON VERIFICATION of you being using that you can log and read and use those websites without tracking you (Yes 10,000 ifs where this is secure, handled in a confidential matter, the whole tech is not to track that you are doing something... but that a human is behind that, no api, no robot, no adds, no nothing... just the old school forum where you can go, talk, submit a photo... where someone who wanted to spend time to write something did it, SO WE CAN ENSURE TWO THINGS, A HUMAN IS THERE, AND NO FVK!NG CEO WILL ENSHITIFY IT, no to track people, but to know that a person is interacting there)

But because "empathy is the weakness" and shareholder value...

> the last source of truth are forums.. but not reddit... if it has a CEO it will rot and enshitify.

Quick gripe-anecdote that occurred (again) just now: I have a technical question, the search-engine says it was discussed in a Reddit thread, so I go to Reddit, giving them my traffic and eyeballs just like they want... but the information is impossible to find because "new" Reddit hides/collapses 90% of the discussion by default and there's no way to tell which branch has what I need without manually clicking them all. (And them some of them will reload the entire page, erasing progress.)

So I have no sympathy for their whining about scraping when they spent already years making it painful for actual live organic humans to find anything.

> Which is what social media is/should/was about

I think our two imperfect approaches here are:

1. Webs of trust, in some way that resists crowds of sockpuppets.

2. Some kind or proof of stake. Proof of anonymous-humanity is hard, proof of unique-humanity is creepy spy stuff, but "proof if you ban me it'll at least hurt a little" might be easier to achieve.