At some point this concern becomes invalid in my book: Take democratic elections — hiding the rules of how elections work, because you are afraid someone might game them would be absurd. Because the point of democratic elections is to get results that most people can accept and for this transparency and simplicity is crucial. If it would turn out someone is gaming the system it would be time to change the rules and/or how they are enforced.
Now you can't really equate Reddit with an democratic election, but places like those are the closest we have come to an public square in the online world and hiding the mechanisms which decide who gets how much visibility is not without effect (on the trust within the system).
The cost of actually administering fairness in elections (maintaining voter rosters, verifying identities, preventing double-voting and providing public auditability while ensuring voter anonymity, prosecuting fraudsters...) is quite high compared with what an ad-supported global platform can afford. Just look at how tough it's been for Twitter to kick out inauthentic actors, eg Russian troll farms or spam bots. Spending more resources on botfighting is difficult from Twitter's standpoint since it doesn't by itself drive revenue or engagement, and they are fighting determined permanent attackers, some even state-funded.
Speaking of, the primary revenue feed for Twitter is advertising, which directly competes with fairness and transparency goals: ad business is predicated on the idea that more $ = more speech, regardless of the intrinsic value of the speech; and since there is no practical way to know where the $ came from, it does an end run around transparency goals.
I know they will never do it. However I cannot help think having a twitter with only non anonymous verified identity would be nice. Personally I don't have special interest speaking with people that want to be anonymous when I use Twitter.
I also don't like anonymity, but some people might need to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Those living under repressive political regimes, for example. They'd need anonymity to get their message across.
There's no way for social platforms to tell apart which anonymous users are "good" or "bad"...
KYC wouldn't help against state actors, which are the offenders with potential to cause most damage. They're the issuers of their national IDs in the first place, it's useless to verify their ID.
you can easily verify who this account belongs to, you cannot verify easily that this is the only account I have.
which is the problem.
further complicated by irrational attitudes to official identity such as you see in america. have a fraud resistant national ID system? fuck no! we want to use an unsafe mechanism never built for this purpose and impossible to safe guard!
I think you have buried the lede, which is that these platforms are no longer about an acceptable good. Votes or in twitters case, engagement metrics, are just one part of the magic mixture that drives more engagement. It's not about fair outcomes, or social good, and it is hard to hide your engagement optimisations when everyone can see how you are tweaking the system to generate more ad revenue. A cynical take I know, but we are taking about billion dollar corporations, not cheeky startups.
Now you can't really equate Reddit with an democratic election, but places like those are the closest we have come to an public square in the online world and hiding the mechanisms which decide who gets how much visibility is not without effect (on the trust within the system).