To feed alt accounts, like some people do?
Perhaps there could be some criteria, like a Voight-Kampff test for the accounts to try and mitigate the sock-puppet "problem"?
Not a "captcha" or a "10 posts + 10 comments" or anything that crude.
Perhaps there's already some "good steemian citizen" list somewhere?
Click to watch 3 minutes,
Perhaps they can give fingerprints and government issued ID?
Yeah, no. Even those can be purchased in bulk and would not be a good metric for "real-live-person".
I'm thinking something more like a conversation.
I see a lot of accounts that never post, or only post and never respond to comments, or others who only downvote, or only upvote.
It seems like some high-ranking accounts could "tag" accounts as "probably-a-real-person" or "probably-not-a-real-person".
Kinda like steemitboard's achievements?
the achievements on steemitboard aren't sensitive enough. What is needed is a web of trust system, but that hasn't been developed yet. I have spoken before about the trusted people being able to tag accounts, but unfortunately, some of the high-ranking accounts like that dick Kingscrown are shady as fuck and have many "secret" alts themselves.
I do trust some people here though as I have met many of them and chatted with them off Steem also. I have people I have given money to when they have needed, people who my wife will contact if I die to help her with my account and hundreds of people from Steemfests that are known and, I have had people come to my house, gone to dinner with them, visited them on my work travels. The thing is though, many of the people who are doing relatively well have already proven themselves as humans to enough people that matter that they get voted. The reason noobs should engage is to build relationships, to become human - not just another faceless, nameless stranger - regardless of the content.
I agree.
Perhaps you could delegate 0.001 steem to all the accounts you personally vouch for?
And if we got this idea to catch on, we could track the "web of trust" without needing any additional code changes?
You trust them, they trust others, and so on. I would consider you a trust-worthy starting-point.
The problem is that it is too shaky that way. While I trust my judgements and potentially the judgement of those I can trust, soon it gets too loose. Ther are potentially ways to tokenize it however and maybe get NFT "trust tokens" that are tied to the person who first issues it for accountability. If someone is found out as gaming the system, all of their trust tokens are tracked and brought into question, and if no one else is willing to hand them one of their own, they become an untrusted node again, until someone vouches.
If you changed your mind about trusting someone, you could just undelegate, or send a friendly note to one of your buds, "hey, this account you trusted looks like they might be doing some shady stuff, if you don't remove them, I might have to untrust (undelegate) you".
I like your trust-token idea, but how would you implement it? Could you add AND remove people?
With NFTs you could potentially make a single one invalid. For example, person1 could have #455 token, I no longer trust that person, I mark it dead. it would require an interface and a fair amount of setup to do it properly. But I think that it could be used for example, people who have met IRL to begin with. Getting SteemFest people would be relativly easy, and then they are often meeting others at meetups. For example, I have met a lot of the Finnish users and could give each a token on their main accounts - alts still cause a problem if people decide to grant them.