Is Web3 Ready For A Verification Layer ?

[Firstfrost]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

It made me wonder if Web3 needs a better system, something that connects verified users and developers. That rewards real user engagement and make sure there is fair participation and not automation just like KGeN is doing.

But do you think this might be what finally helps onboard real, long-term users into Web3 instead of short-term airdrop hunters ?

[passwordnow]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

It made me wonder if Web3 needs a better system, something that connects verified users and developers. That rewards real user engagement and make sure there is fair participation and not automation just like KGeN is doing.

But do you think this might be what finally helps onboard real, long-term users into Web3 instead of short-term airdrop hunters ?

Airdrops are meant to be just for short term hunters. That's why people that are on it are going to do whatever it leads them to do to have more allocation even it means cheating for them. And that's what the projects and the developers have to find out and deal with it. I think that the rewards for the real users need to be done to have a fair allocation to all participants. If this project you have said can deal with it, that's good but I don't think it will be easy.

[retaur]

Uniswap and Jupiter both did airdrops that rewarded/reward use of the protocol in their native token. I think that was an effective enough system I wouldn't suggest anything further from that?

If you reward users for using your system before it's live or before your rewards token is live then that's the best outcome for everyone. If you can't, the alternative imo is captcha or kyc (some platforms do kyc for airdrops and it's up to users to decide if that's going to be used for malicious or data harvesting purposes and that the platform used to do the verification can be trusted enough for personal data to be uploaded to it).

[markm]

Humans are naturally-occurring bots, so no, silly idea, waste of resources, any sufficiently advanced bot is indistinguishable from human if it chooses to be so, and any sufficiently advanced human is indistinguishable from bot if it chooses to be so, and furthermore ideally humans possibly ought not even want to avoid letting bots do for them anything they whether momentarily or long term prefer not to focus on personally or find inconvenient etcetera.

Indeed if you try to prevent humans being served by agents any claims you might otherwise purport as to having user-friendliness as a goal seem null and void.

Rather, one ought to deliberately design non-partisan non-discriminatory tools and applications, designed and intended to be used by all-and-sundry whether organically or inorganically implemented/embodied, whether macro-mechanically or electronically or by nanotech such as mother nature's creatures including us are implemented in, whether human whale porpoise monkey naked ape hairy ape, atheist or theist, single-gendered or multi-gendered and so on and so forth, basic "sentient rights" as it were...


-MarkM-

"First they came for the bots..."

[Firstfrost]

Humans are naturally-occurring bots, so no, silly idea, waste of resources, any sufficiently advanced bot is indistinguishable from human if it chooses to be so, and any sufficiently advanced human is indistinguishable from bot if it chooses to be so, and furthermore ideally humans possibly ought not even want to avoid letting bots do for them anything they whether momentarily or long term prefer not to focus on personally or find inconvenient etcetera.

Indeed if you try to prevent humans being served by agents any claims you might otherwise purport as to having user-friendliness as a goal seem null and void.

Rather, one ought to deliberately design non-partisan non-discriminatory tools and applications, designed and intended to be used by all-and-sundry whether organically or inorganically implemented/embodied, whether macro-mechanically or electronically or by nanotech such as mother nature's creatures including us are implemented in, whether human whale porpoise monkey naked ape hairy ape, atheist or theist, single-gendered or multi-gendered and so on and so forth, basic "sentient rights" as it were...


-MarkM-

"First they came for the bots..."

Fair point but if every project keeps turning a blind eye to bot activity, then airdrops and community incentives lose their whole purpose. The space ends up rewarding automation not adoption(which is the main goal).

At least now, we’re starting to see ideas that focus on verified engagement instead of just wallet counts. It’s not about policing users or aiming against 'user-friendliness'....it’s about building trust so genuine participation actually means something again.

[hugeblack]

Such a system would be centralized, and the entire concept of Web3 would then be rendered useless. We would have to resort to the traditional banking system to ensure that all accounts are for known users. In the past, airdrops were part of a marketing strategy because there were no other ways to promote the project. But we are no longer in 2016, so it's only natural that the value of airdrops will be close to zero.

[markm]

Fair point but if every project keeps turning a blind eye to bot activity, then airdrops and community incentives lose their whole purpose. The space ends up rewarding automation not adoption(which is the main goal).

At least now, we’re starting to see ideas that focus on verified engagement instead of just wallet counts. It’s not about policing users or aiming against 'user-friendliness'....it’s about building trust so genuine participation actually means something again.

Oh so now bots can't be trusted?!?!

Well, true of humans so true of some other implementations of bot too doubtless!

Me I'd aim for billions of rich successful bots over a few million or milliard unwashed masses of humans any day!

Who better to trust-ably and predictably engage than insufficiently-advanced bots that have no need to hide or pretend who they are?

The almost-only actors / stakeholders who actually care are precisely the ones best themselves un-served, yes that is anti-bigot bigotry!

Even the mass-advertisers though ought not actually care whether target demographics are organic or inorganic, human or cetacean,
ferengi or shai-hulud or spaghetti-monster but, rather, how much of the propaganda promulgated they are going to buy!

Consider, too, that regardless of whether a given bot "needs to eat too", the characters they play in online games still either do or do not regardless of who or what plays them!

Isn't it better to have patient, trustworthy, helpful bots play your civilisation's user-support characters than scheming untrustworthy Hoomans or five-eyed little sticky-fingers who are only out to scam as much as they can as fast as they can from your well-to-do users?

Bigot!


-MarkM-

[JeffBrad12]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

It made me wonder if Web3 needs a better system, something that connects verified users and developers. That rewards real user engagement and make sure there is fair participation and not automation just like KGeN is doing.

But do you think this might be what finally helps onboard real, long-term users into Web3 instead of short-term airdrop hunters ?

If a project want airdrop that can't get botted, they can always require engagement that can hardly be botted such as staking where people have no incentives to game the airdrop.
It's just matter of incentivizing the right thing, this so called verification layer sounds like another problem to solve a problem that isn't really problem.

[Bournesparks]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

It made me wonder if Web3 needs a better system, something that connects verified users and developers. That rewards real user engagement and make sure there is fair participation and not automation just like KGeN is doing.

But do you think this might be what finally helps onboard real, long-term users into Web3 instead of short-term airdrop hunters ?

Kgen automation was to checkmate sybill and bots.. it's also to enable participation that are genuine that's why most of those that got the airdrop had a decent amount.. did you get it??.  If you do, you can also consider farming it on Bitget Poolx though.. current apr is around 66%

[MArsland]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

Human Passport, there is also something called verification on Billions Network, and another one that I know of is Humanity Protocol. These three detectors are specifically designed for each project to verify genuine users, so now hunters are starting to feel overwhelmed by the Sybil defense system for web3. Actually, there are many other services that I haven't mentioned, where the point is that Human verification is able to minimize hunters with account farming.

[Akbarkoe]

During the phase when I was consistently farming airdrops, one major complaint I heard from developers was the challenge of differentiating real users from bots. Despite complex verification steps increasing often, it was still difficult to fish out the odd ones out.

Human Passport, there is also something called verification on Billions Network, and another one that I know of is Humanity Protocol. These three detectors are specifically designed for each project to verify genuine users, so now hunters are starting to feel overwhelmed by the Sybil defense system for web3. Actually, there are many other services that I haven't mentioned, where the point is that Human verification is able to minimize hunters with account farming.

Many services can be used by developers to verify real (human) users for their communities. Some services, like Anda, also offer a solution for community verification. Bots are indeed a concern for developers who want to build a real, bot-free community, or, more accurately, minimize the use of alt accounts in airdrop projects.

However, on the other hand, Web 3, with its anonymity and freedom, may be slowly diminishing. Users must be prepared to provide their data to protocols to obtain a certificate of verification that they are human.

[markm]

If you want to "airdrop" to people who have no interest in receiving or accepting what you are trying to drop on them, you can do as one sees so often on Stellar, which actually provides two approaches to doing so.

Basically you first pick your target demographic in terms of account/address activity, the idea that an account or address that never does anything or does nothing for some span of time or does a particular thing such as trade or trust a certain asset, or trade certain specific assets and so on might not have an active enough user to bother with. Though possibly if there is a high balance of something one is interested in long inactivity might not be as much of a deterrent given that if you do manage to get their attention the scale of their holdings could make it worthwhile.

Then you either send them some of the platform's native asset (XLM in the case of Stellar) or some other asset they already "trust", with an attached message/comment spamming them about whatever you want to spam about that can fit in the comment field; or you create a claimable for them, which is maybe an ability Stellar provides that not all token platforms provide. The claimables thing is basically a work-around for the fact that in Stellar you cannot send an account an asset it does not explicitly "trust"; it lets you send them some conditionally that they need to first create a "trust line" trusting the asset before they can "claim" it, with options for limiting the timespan within it can be claimed so the offer can optionally expire and the sent assets can be returned to sender.

So unless there are swarms of bots out there making their accounts look active enough to attract airdrops and programmed to accept the conditional (claimable) ones by creating a trust line to do so, mechanisms exist for getting a new asset out to active accounts that are sufficiently interested to actually bother claiming.

I have read many threads here about airdrops, and a frequent complaint I have seen is that airdrops seem mostly to attract undesirable users, which is to say, users not actually interested in whatever "utility" or "governance" a utility token or governance token supposedly provides but simply how much they can (often as fast as possible) "dump" it for, not necessarily because their design or intent is to destroy the value of all new assets they can as fast and effectively as they can by consuming its buy-side, its buy-offers (which often do not add up to enough offers to buy the entire number airdropped let alone the entire number minted).

Stellar's ability to offer claimable assets seems to address that problem quite well, in that users get spammed by plenty of "airdrop" offers but only those users interested enough to actually open a "trust line" for the asset being offered (or who already trust that asset) and to claim it get some. The problem of their claiming only in order to "dump" it seems usually to be solved precisely by not having enough buy-offers in place to cause the users looking only to profit by dumping to see what they could sell it for at that moment to be worth the trouble of claiming it.

Claimables can be left open for extended periods of time, they can even remain until claimed, even a start timestamp can be in place causing them not to be claimable for some time in the future.

AQUA on Stellar used that in fact, to set up monthly claimables years into the future, each claim-able only for three months.

So there are a lot of useful criteria one can already use for choosing accounts to airdrop to and as artificial intelligence evolves it should matter less and less whether a given account happens to currently be burning some human's time and energies directly by their still at least from time to time manually stroking keys about it or jumping through hoops to discover what it is and has been up to while their attention was elsewhere or is just one of potentially many accounts their staff, employees, agents, bots etc etc etc manage on their behalf.

Unless, of course, the real object of your spamming is basically to obtain, possibly at less cost than it is or ought to be actually "worth", personal information about private individuals.

I suspect part of the problem of using third party verification services is that you thereby in effect send your potential users - your "traffic" - to those third parties; marketing teaches that you should at least not do that until you first have "captured" that "traffic" so that even after sending it to someone else for something you still have its email address or whatever, a means to contact it in case it never comes back of its own accord.

Basically each third party verification service is a service you thereby are promoting, which leads to the obvious question how much commission do you get for thus promoting them?


-MarkM-

[BattleDog]

A "verification layer" might sound great in theory, however, Web3 keeps running into the same paradox: verification comes at the expense of decentralization and privacy.
Projects like Proof of Humanity, Worldcoin, and even KGeN are all trying to balance that trade-off.

Maybe the real answer isn't another KYC-style gate, but behavior-based reputation: wallets that build trust over time through consistent on-chain actions.

It's slower, but it keeps the spirit of Web3 intact.