I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#641

Post by specialist » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

hellojesus wrote: post #640

specialist wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet isn't dead. I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory#Claims > Yet we discourse here just fine. True. But what makes HN an outlier?

Probably the lack of pictures. Maybe the moderation. Maybe the slight niche. It could die if it becomes profitable to spamers. Or maybe it's dead now and one or both of us are llms. But as long as the content quality meets my personal utility threshold, it makes sense for me to visit it, regardless of whether it is a victim of DIT. Ultimately it's probably up to webmasters to understand if the traffic on their site i…

No ads. No algorithmic hate machine. Active moderation.

Two other fine examples of thriving online communities are metafilter and ravelry.

I'm sure there's many more on the web. I just don't get out much.

And many, many not on the web. Using discord, telegram, old school BBSes, etc. But, as dead Internet theory notes, they're not publicly visible and therefore not discoverable, not being indexed.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#642

Post by Forgeties79 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #627

gzread wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't break your computer. They still do all the other bad stuff.

It's really not the same magnitude at all. It's much harder to run into those problems now.

Yeah I don’t understand what these other people are saying. There are definitely more barriers to harming your computer online now than there were 20 years ago. Even just email clients preemptively flagging suspicious emails is a huge leap lol

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#643

Post by skeptic_ai » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 10:35 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #128

skeptic_ai wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You lost your account and you still back to Gmail? Impressive

Google didn't do anything wrong, they lost their Yahoo and it was the only way they had of verifying their older Gmail. What do you expect, when you don't have access to your recovery method, and it's a free service so it's not like you can prove ownership of a credit card previously used for billing or something? And especially since that was presumably from before the days when Gmail required a phone number, so you…

Fair enough. Made a mistake to assume anything

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#644

Post by cortesoft » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

citizenpaul wrote: post #626

cortesoft wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even coming down to a couple of hundred votes still means your single vote doesn’t matter. It technically only matters if it comes down to one vote.

ehhh... You are getting really pedantic here. Your argument is basically well voting doesn't matter so we should have a dictatorship instead of democracy. Your vote does matter in the aggregate, its not supposed to be a 1:1 outcome. Its an aggregate process. You don't measure the speed of each tire on a car you just measure the car speed overall. I guess if your position really is votes don't count unless its the one…

I am not just making this up, this a very well studied thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting

> Your argument is basically well voting doesn't matter so we should have a dictatorship instead of democracy

I am actually not saying that at all, which is what makes this a paradox. I think democracy is important and that getting an accurate determination of the will of the people is important... but it still doesn't make sense, from a pure game theory perspective, to vote in an election.

It isn't REALLY a paradox, because both things are true - voting is a good way to get a representative sample, and a single vote isn't going to change that sample very much.

In many ways, this is just basic statistics, and we experience this every single election night - elections are called WELL in advance of every single vote being counted, because we already know with statistics what the result will be. Now, there are a few examples of this going wrong, but those are mostly times where the rush to call an election makes people call it when the statistics say there is still a reasonable chance for a comeback.

Honestly, it if was up to me, elections should be determined by a random sample. Randomly select N citizens from the country to be the voters that year, and use that result. If N is sized correctly, you will get the same result you would with an actual election, and we don't have to have everyone waste their time voting.

This would never happen, of course, and I honestly can kind of understand why; the results aren't the only thing that is important, feeling connected to the process and that your voice matters also is important. It is a bit of a agreed upon delusion, though.

Re: I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

#645

Post by manxiemanx » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 5:03 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #310

1shooner wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame. To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not i…

Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out. I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out. You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, th…

This way of thinking is illogical. You as an individual won't have (much of) an effect, but multiple people together will. The more people who do it, the more of an effect we'll have together