Comment Re: Slashdot method (Score 1) 39
If you charge a small fee for account creation, you can get almost all the benefits of having someone's social security number and picture ID, for almost none of the cost of having to deal with such a toxic "asset". You can even offer degrees of anonymity when taking payment.
Now obviously, someone will decide to spend 5000 dollars on bots to advertise or delegitimize voting, but that would happen even if you had the picture ID thing going on. None of this gets around having to police your platform to remove comment bots, vote bots, etc. You still have to do that. But charging 5 bucks to 25 bucks to make an account creates a massive barrier to the unlimited influx of captcha solving AI chatbots, because bad actors simply can't afford to pay the amount required to flood your database will advertisements and propaganda.