Gm distrikters, hope you are all enjoying your weekend!
As you may know we’ve recently made some updates to our platform and added some cool new features to enhance the user experience. We’re pleased to see that many of you are taking advantage of these new features.
However, we’ve also identified some bugs and are working to resolve them in upcoming releases. If you come across any bugs, please utilize the in-app feedback feature to inform us!
But for now let’s take a moment and talk about profile verification and the process behind it in preparation for our twitter space that’s starting in a couple of hours — set a reminder!
Profile verification and its importance
We have been providing verification for distrikt users for some time now, and we are getting ready to evolve the verification process into a community-led effort. For now, the process of verifying active users and prominent ICP profiles is not as efficient as we would like, as it is done manually and we have limited resourced.
distrikt places great importance on user sovereignty and users can create accounts using Internet Identity, the Internet Computer Protocol’s version of a zero-gas hot wallet that is secured by the hardware security modules (HSMs) built into the user’s device.
However, this also presents a challenge in terms of sybil resistance. The reverse-gas nature of the Internet Identity makes it relatively easy for users to create multiple identities. This makes it harder to asses distrikt’s actual growth and negatively impacts user experience. So we need additional measures to ensure that the platform remains secure and prioritizes legitimate and real users. But in order for this to happen we first need to asses accounts and identity these genuine users.
distrikt’s need for a verification process
We recognized the need for a robust profile verification process immediately after launching the platform. With an influx of claims for usernames associated with brands, companies, and public figures, we were concerned about the consequences of impersonators trying to scam users.
To combat this, we implemented a verification process that aimed to offer the verified badge to brands, companies, and public figures only.
While the qualifications for these categories were broad, we carefully evaluated each case to determine if an impersonator could use the original entity’s influence to attempt a malicious action against our community.
Eventually, we realized that this approach had its limitations, and distrikt users were constantly asking to be included in our verification efforts so we’ve adapted the process to include normal users that are active and act and post in a genuine fashion.
We have been continuously working to improve and refine the verification process to ensure that our platform remains secure for all users.
distrikt’s profile verification and its evolution.
We initially made the very naive decision to add a “Verify Me” button on the distrikt user profile. This turned into a spammy nightmare as users abused this feature. After looking at thousands of requests, we decided to remove the verify button and approach the problem with a simpler and direct solution.
The second step was to encourage the projects to just contact us directly via our Telegram, Discord or Twitter. We did have direct requests and had to intervene in a couple of cases of clear impersonation. But the community was now asking for us to verify regular accounts. It signaled a bigger need of the IC ecosystem, which is a proof-of-personhood, or a proof-of-humanity service. So we decided to offer that to the best of our ability.
The third evolution of the profile verification process was to develop a simple algorithm that would rank organic usage, so we have a better understanding if an account acts like a normal user or is a bot. This meant not accounting only for the obvious, and easy to fake metrics such as comments, likes or followers, but focus on identifying actions that a user would do as a normal person using a social media network: login, check notifications, load more posts on the news feed or check out the discovery feed. But this “user heartbeat” is not bullet-proof or reliable enough to automatically give user verification badges.
This leads us to the 4th iteration of the distrikt profile verification process, that takes into account the user heartbeat plus a dedicated human moderator that manually verifies the account and makes sure that it meets all the criteria.
What qualifies an account to receive the verified badge?
Verification criteria:
- Accounts must be at least 2 months old and not flagged as fake or as part of a multiple accounts pattern.
- Accounts must have posted in the last 2 weeks. We need to make sure that the account is active and the owner of the account hasn’t lost access to it.
- Accounts must have genuine content and not populate the platform with spam. The language used doesn’t matter as long as the content is organic.
- Accounts must have relevant, reinforcing connections (e.g. interactions with other accounts, ideally verified as well).
Moderators are looking at the content posted itself, just to check that it’s not automated gibberish, or how we like to call it “fortune cookie content” and if the account has any relevant, reinforcing connections.
A good example would be an account with photography content that receives interactions from other verified accounts or a normal account that has engagement from other verified accounts. Given that we have crossed over 1600 verified accounts that shouldn’t be a very challenging requirement.
Please note that requests from users are not a factor in this current verification process. Profile verification does not happen by request of the user, but we do add your request to the moderator’s task list and they are getting evaluated. But verification is not guaranteed just because a profile has requested it. We are very rigurous in our assesment and try to maintain a high standard for verification.
Also very important to mention is the fact that badges can and have been removed. The verification check marks can be removed under certain conditions like: prolonged lack of activity, spam content or T&C violations.
We consider the checkmark a badge of authenticity & participation so we periodically review the list of verified accounts to make sure that the account is still active and more importantly is not using the increased legitimacy of the badge for malicious purposes.
distrikt now has over 1600 verified accounts and we will be allocating more badges soon
Is this a perfect process? Obviously not, but it’s better than our previous attempts and we’re constantly improving it.
The challenges we have with the way we verify profiles right now:
- Not scalable
- Not objective enough (cultural differences)
- Not accurate enough
- Not fast enough
What we do like about the current process is that it’s privacy-preserving and does not infringe on the user in any way.
We have refused to transform what is essentially a distrikt-level problem into a user-problem. This means taking accountability and doing the work ourselves for as long as we can, while refusing to request users to kyc or collect any personal data about them. We believe that this is also one of the biggest challenges of web3 social media platforms: proof of personhood (not of humanity) without having to collect sensitive information about the person owning the account.
How do we see profile verification improve?
- Improve the “heartbeat” algorithm. It’s currently in a basic form and not accurate enough. We can do better and it will help our current and future moderators tremendously. Having a reliable way of filtering through tens of thousands of profiles and extracting the ones that clearly qualify will help make this process more scalable as the distrikt community grows.
- Improve our moderation dashboard and open it up to community moderators. distrikt has developed and maintain an internal moderation dashboard that we want to open up for moderators from within the community.
- Decentralize and increase the number of moderators. Moderation will be a big part of distrikt as we grow and a “job” for its own community members to perform. This last improvement is tightly linked with the overall decentralization and tokenization of the distrikt ecosystem, but we don’t need tokenization to make the first steps towards it and empower a select number of users to take on this challenge and pave the way.
- Reintroduce the verify-me button but only for moderators. This way distrikt moderators can send profiles to the “verification que” and signal them for the attention of other moderators. This feature should only be available only to profiles that are old enough to qualify.
Profile verification, reputation and moderation is a very big challenge not just for distrikt but for all decentralized social media networks. We are excited to see different approaches to this issue and we’re eager to learn from our peers.
Whatever the method, the results need to be good enough to cultivate a space where communities feel confident in the connections they form, and where people feel reassured that they are interacting with a human being on the other end.
Oh and let’s not forget about everyone’s favorite web3 word: airdrop. In the context of Airdrops, a reputation system that works and is reliable is even more important. We have been notoriously careful in distributing the POD collection and we took our time to gradually airdrop the NFT collection to eligible accounts. As a consequence the PODs are one of the best distributed NFT collections and have been well received by our community and the $ICP community at large.
That is not to say that only verified users receive the POD airdrop, because that is not true. A lot of unverified accounts have received the airdrop but not the checkmark. That is because we are more rigurous in asigning verification as we should when it comes to asigning a badge that indicated increased credibility.
That being said, once the profile verification process scales with the help of community moderators and distrikt gets a proper amount of traction, we can be more confident in relying on it when we need to organize a fair airdrop.
About distrikt
Distrikt is a decentralized social network built 100% on the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain.
distrikt is fully self-funded and supported by the Open Internet Foundation.
distrikt users will not be the product and will not pay with their data to use the platform. Instead, distrikt users will own their data and identity and have a say regarding the governance of the platform and its future development.
distrikt is to become a strong user-centric alternative to the status quo and it will become a fully decentralized and user-owned social media network soon. Each iteration of distrikt will lead us closer to this goal!
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