Hmm… that’s interesting actually. Having users have to authenticate might help some instances of trolling and abuse, but at the same time there’s the problem of the identification causing trouble for privacy.

A middle ground would be allowing non-verified users to participate, but have them have a lower influence in the relevance of the content, perhaps having caps that limit how much non-verified influence can affect the weighted relevance of a post (so… content promoted by unverified accounts would be of a lower priority, and pushing it with a farm of non-verified bot accounts would not have much of an impact).

Of course there’s likely gonna be some level of bias based on who are the people who would go through the trouble of verifying themselves… but that’s not the same thing as not being transparent. Bias is gonna be a problem that you cannot escape no matter what. If a social network is full of idiots the algorithm isn’t gonna magically make their conversations any less idiotic. So I think the algorithm could still be a good and useful thing to come out of this, even if the social network itself isn’t.